“You’re a moron.” The captain’s meaty paws wrenched the gun out of Trine’s hands. “Next time, it’ll work better if you turn off the safety.” The captain flipped the safety off and leveled it at Trine’s forehead. “You, I don’t have time for. Put the cuffs on yourself and I won’t have to shoot you.”
Trine miserably obeyed orders. Well, he gave it a good try. Would it be enough to earn him a ship of his own?
Now the captain was calling Honolulu again. He was calling in a may day and asking for air evacuation.
“No cutters—aren’t you listening?” the captain demanded. “We’re caught in some sort of strong current. We’re fighting it with everything we’ve got and we’re still losing knots under the keel. You send a Coast Guard ship out here and they’ll get sucked in just like us. We need an airlift ASAP.”
The Coast Guard operator called in his commanding officer.
“Are you sure it isn’t your instruments, Captain Moran?”
Coast Guard Captain Brotz jerked the telephone receiver away from his ear at Moran’s thundering response, then handed it back to the operator and went over to the traffic control board.
“They are moving south-southeast at about six knots and accelerating,” said the traffic controller.
“Could he have the ship in reverse and not even know it?” the Coast Guard CO asked.
The traffic controller shrugged. “Not unless he’s got a screw loose. I’d say he’s trying to pull one over on us.”
“Why would he want to do that?” the CO asked.
“It’s just a little more likely than not knowing he was in reverse. I didn’t say it made sense.”
None of it made sense. The information on Captain Moran’s license showed he had thirty years’ experience on the sea, in the U.S. Navy and then the merchant marine, without a blemish.
‘I’m not taking a chance that Moran has a screw lose,” Brotz decided aloud. He barked out orders for rescue choppers to get into the air. “Alert Captain Moran.”
‘I think I’ve lost him, sir. He doesn’t respond. The Wahine’s blinked out.”
Blinked out was their inexcusably blasé piece of jargon to say a ship had disappeared from all monitors suddenly and inexplicably. It implied the ship had gone below the waves. The room buzzed with sudden activity as the Coast Guard personnel launched into rescue-mission activities.
“We’re on our way,” radioed the captain of the long-range Coast Guard cutter Reliant.
“Thank God,” said the operator. “Reliant is in the vicinity.”
“Where?” Captain Brotz demanded.
“About ten miles south-southeast. Hold on, sir, and I’ll give you better coordinates.”
Brotz snatched the receiver that enabled him to join the operator’s radio link. “Reliant commander?”
“This is Captain Burness.”
“Gil, get out of there. Turn on a north-northwest heading and come on home as fast as you can.”
“Norton, you crazy? We’re on a rescue mission.”
“We have rescue choppers en route. Let them handle it.”
“Choppers out of Oahu? It will take them an hour just to reach the Wahine’s last position. It’s a stroke of luck we’re in the vicinity.”
“Moran claimed there was an aberrant current overpowering his engines, Gil. I don’t want you caught up in it, too.”
“It’s open water. No surge is going to surface enough to affect the Reliant,” Captain Burness replied. “We could have a tsunami under our keel and hardly feel it.”
“Not a surge—a current.”
“There’s no such thing, short of typhoon or an undersea volcano. Sun’s shining, so I don’t think it’s the weather. Are there new volcanoes birthing around these parts?”
Captain Brotz hadn’t even thought of that. He knew a volcanic eruption on the ocean floor could create tidal waves, but in the open sea could it create an ocean current capable of pulling in a powerful new freighter like the Wahine? Come to think of it, what else besides seismic activity could create such a phenomenon?
“Hold on, Reliant,” Brotz barked, then shouted at his meteorology data operator. “I want a report from the Navy seismology lab.”
“On the line now, sir.”
“What?” Brotz tromped to the desk and snatched another receiver. “Seismic? This is Brotz. You guys have activity anywhere in the vicinity?”
“Sir, we have activity everywhere in the vicinity.”
“Well, what the hell is it? A volcano?”
“Maybe thirty volcanoes could create this kind of a seismic signature. We’ve never seen anything like it.”
“You don’t know. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Correct. But we’re working on it.”
“Goddamn Navy!” Brotz slammed down one receiver and barked into the second one, “Reliant, you were on the money. Something geologic is happening and it’s so big the seismic lab can’t even ID it. Now get the hell out of there.”
Brotz glanced at the traffic screen and the stricken face of the operator.
“Reliant? Talk to me.”
Reliant was gone.
“Who’s that?” Brotz demanded, jabbing at a new icon on the traffic screen.
“USS Harding. Navy spy ship on exercises. They intercepted the mayday from the Wahine.”
Brotz felt as if he were witnessing a chain reaction on a California expressway, standing there helplessly as one car after another slammed into the growing pile of wreckage. Were the Wahine and the Reliant really gone? Even on the unpredictable Pacific Ocean, catastrophe simply did not strike that fast. Ships took minutes or hours to sink …
He called for a connection to the Navy cruiser.
“Captain, your own Navy people report a major seismological disturbance throughout your vicinity. Two ships might be lost already. Don’t risk the Harding.”
“You Coast Guard boys have sure lost your balls,” replied the captain of the Harding. “Don’t tell me you want to abandon the survivors? Those are your own people in there.”
“Air rescue is on the way.”
“Not fast enough. We’re going in. Besides, this isn’t a merchant ship and it’s not a Coast Guard dinghy. It’s a Navy cruiser. We can handle a little strong water.”
Captain Brotz felt ill, and the command center was eerily silent as he and his crew monitored the Navy radio chatter. Harding reported a strong current.
“Twenty-eight knots!” Brotz said under his breath.
Harding vanished. The icon on the traffic screen simply went away. No more radio communication came in from the ship, and the Navy radio chatter became frantic.
As the two Coast Guard rescue helicopters closed in on the last known location of the Navy cruiser, Navy command radioed Brotz and belligerently demanded surrender of command of the rescue choppers. Brotz declined. “You’re welcome to listen in if you like.”
Somewhere, Navy top brass was sputtering. Brotz didn’t care.
“Sea is empty,” reported the leader of the rescue team aboard the choppers.
“No wreckage? No oil?”
“Nothing. But the water is moving like you wouldn’t believe. It’s like a river down there.”
“Pilot, what’s your status?”
“Unaffected. We’re fine up here, Base,” the pilot reported. “Dropping a tracking buoy. Jesus!”
“What happened?” Brotz demanded.
“The tracking buoy, sir. It hit the water and started moving like a bat from hell. I’m pacing it at an airspeed of sixty-three knots.”