We dropped anchor, broke out the the premade floats that would be the bottoms of the riverboats, and started lowering them down to the water level. We soon had assembly crews working under the wings on both sides of the ship.
The floats were the same size as our standard containers so they could fit into the ship's storage conveyors. Each float had a removable top, and most of them already contained the cargo that the riverboats would be carrying. They bolted together easily.
The steam engines were another matter, since they were heavy, and had to be mounted mostly behind and on top of the floats. Assembling them was not as simple as the designers had hoped, what with the motion of the boats, the ship, and the water. We encountered several bothersome manufacturing defects, and as always, we were up against the innate perversity of inanimate objects.
Persevering, it was almost sunset when we had one boat assembled, another close to done, and a third boat started. An amazing thing was sighted then.
A lookout up in the crow's nest was the first to spot it, but I was taking a break on the rear deck at the time, so I saw the whole terrible affair.
There was a white line to the east, on the ocean horizon, going from shore to shore. I soon noticed that it was getting bigger, and thicker, somehow, but I had no idea what it was. Neither did any of the ship's officers to whom I shouted.
Still, when strange things happen, it is best to act cautiously and get the men out of danger, even if it might slow down the job at hand.
I ran to the port side of the ship, under the wing, and shouted at the men working down there to get back up into the ship, and to do it quickly. Then I ran to the starboard side and repeated my message.
When I got back to the rear railing, the strange phenomenon had grown to the point where it was obviously coming at us, and at a pretty fair speed. I ran around in a triangle again and told everybody to hurry up, no shit, this was serious. Some fool made a joke about how a dragon was coming, and if I hadn't been worrying about saving his life, I would have shot him!
Some of the men that I'd trained myself, the men from myown platoon, scrambled up the netting we had hung over both sides, and those men lived. The ones who were waiting for the lift to come back down to get them got into trouble.
It was moving so fast that by the time the men below saw the huge wave, it was almost too late to do anything about it.
It was just one, single huge wave, with no big waves in front of it, or behind, either. But it was more than ten yards high, and it stretched from bank to rocky bank across the river!
It hit the stern of the ship, and she bucked up so fast that I was knocked down flat to the deck, on my stomach. I went down so hard that the wind was knocked out of me and I could neither move nor breathe.
Then a vast sheet of greenish-white water came down on top of me, flattening me even more. The fact that I couldn't breathe became unimportant, since I was underwater, anyway. Worse, I saw that I was about to be washed off the deck and into the river. To this day, I don't know how I managed to grab one of the stanchions that supported the railing.
I think it must have been the work of my guardian angel.
At that, I was hard-pressed to hold on, at first because of the thousands of tons of water streaming by me, and then because the ship was still vigorously bouncing up and down. Even so, I was one of the first men on my feet. I staggered forward to try to assess the damage and see where I could be of help.
There were dozens and dozens of men lying about, many of them badly injured, from skinned knees to broken legs, and even one broken neck. Blood ran from the wet deck, out the scuppers and into the water. It hurt to pass by my friends without helping, but in spite of their obvious wounds, if those men were still alive, they were likely to stay alive a few more minutes.
That might not be true of the men down on the water. When I got under the wing of the bridge, I leaned over the railing and looked down. Of the two boats that had been in the water on that side, the completed one was gone without a trace. Only the half-finished boat, where they hadn't started mounting the engine, was still afloat, and it was severely damaged.
Men were down in the water, and the current was sweeping them away! Ignoring the broken and bleeding men around me, I threw every life ring I could find overboard, and helped a few uninjured men get three of the ship's barges into the water.
We cut two of the barges free, and hoped that the men overboard would be able to help each other into them. We kept the third boat tethered, and a seaman slid down to it to see what he could do down there to help.
I ran to the port side of the ship, only to find Lezek doing the same job there that I had just done on the starboard. Here, too, the nearly finished boat was simply gone.
Kiejstut came up from below and shouted that the boilers were out, flooded with water. We could not get the engines going to pick up our lost men. Together, we made it to the ship's steam launches, only to find them both smashed.
He looked at me desperately.
"The anchor," he said.
Without another word, we both ran to the bow.
I would have expected that the wave that did so much damage would have pulled loose our anchor, or broken the cable, but no, it was still holding us in one place while the fast current was taking our men farther away every minute.
The release mechanism was jammed, but a few vigorous swings with an axe freed it up, permanently. As the cable was whirling away, Kiejstut took a life ring with a long rope tied to it, passed the rope around the fast-moving cable, and made a slipknot at the end of it. Just before the last of the cable was gone, he had the end of it tied to a float.
I complimented his good thinking.
"I thought we might need the anchor again, and now we should be able to find it," he said. "Anyway, it looked expensive, and the baron might have made us pay for it!"
I looked about. With the ship now drifting with the river, it was at least getting no farther away from the men in the water. There didn't seem to be anything more that we could do for those men, so we went aft to help with the wounded.
Our captain and the baron both had miraculous recoveries when the disaster occurred, as was only to be expected, and after a few moments of confusion, the two of them cooperated remarkably well in getting things back together.
Within the hour we had a current list of the dead, the wounded, and the missing. There were over ten dozen men somewhere in the dark, fast-moving water. Zbigniew, Taurus, and Fritz were among them.
The mechanics were six long army hours getting the engine room pumped out, the boilers repaired and refired, and the ship under way. By then it was dawn, and we went in search of our missing men.
Out of the ship's crew of ninety-one, six men were dead, eighteen were too seriously injured to work, and fourteen were still missing.
Of the two hundred sixty-two explorers, nine were dead, thirty-three were severely injured, and eighty-five were still missing. Most of the men doing the riverboat assembly work were explorers.
During the night, twenty-six men had managed to swim back to the ship and were taken aboard. That wouldn't have happened if Kiejstut and I hadn't let loose the anchor. The baron noticed this, too, and made a note of it in our records. He also noted that if a storm had come up during the night, without engines or anchor, the ship could possibly have gone down to the bottom. He told us this verbally, and quite forcefully, but did not put it down in our records. A decent man, the baron.
One of the men who swam back that night was Fritz.