By the time Harry returned from the head, the Englander Rose had started to list to port at an angle that deepened remarkably fast. They were separated from the dry dock by a quarter mile of choppy water and the Korvald was almost free from the enclosure. With the load of water filling her bilge and starting to swamp her lower cargo decks, the Rose became more sluggish. Her speed fell away to the point that Harry didn’t think they were going to make it. He eased back on the throttles.
“Okay, folks, this is what I want to do,” he said. “If we go, we’re going to roll to port. She won’t flip completely because the water here isn’t deep enough. She’ll just settle in the mud on her side. All of you go out on the starboard wing bridge and wait for it to happen.”
“What about you?” Foch asked.
“I’ve got to hold her on course as long as I can.”
“Someone find some rope,” Lauren ordered. “We can tie a loop around your waist and haul you up when the ship capsizes.”
Gathering the weapons, the group moved outside while Mercer jury-rigged a climber’s harness out of some rope and secured Harry to the wing-bridge railing. “How’s that?”
“Feels like a damned straitjacket,” Harry complained.
“You’d know.”
Mercer stayed at his friend’s side as the ship moved closer to its target and slid closer to overturning. By the inclinometer screwed into a bulkhead, her angle was twenty-two degrees. The measuring device had a mark stating she could recover from a forty-degree dip, but not with her holds flooded and probably only when wave action would help to right her. Harry leaned into his harness while Mercer was forced to hold the console.
They could see the Korvald clearly. She was newer than the Rose; larger too. Her cargo wasn’t heavy enough to hide the bright line of antifouling paint along her waterline. Men stood at the fantail, and others were visible on her wing bridge. Three were in dark naval-like uniforms while two others wore suits. Both civilians were shorter than average, although one had a thick build. Something nagged at Mercer about the thinner of the pair. He groped for the binoculars, swinging them up one-handed, and spreading his feet farther as the ship’s list deepened past thirty degrees.
He dialed in the focus, zeroing in on the men guiding the refrigerator ship from under a tarp protecting the exposed bridge from the rain. Facial features became clear. All were staring at the tired tramp steamer limping toward them. Mercer recognized none of the crew, nor the heavy-set civilian, but he knew the frail figure.
His hand tightened on the binoculars and began to tremble. “Sun’s on that ship.”
“Who? The torturer?”
“Yes.”
“Well, goddamn.”
“Harry, we can’t let them get away.”
“I’m working on it, pal, I’m working on it.”
Although she was barely moving under her own power, the current rushing down the canal was enough to keep the Rose charging at the Korvald. The range dropped to a hundred yards, then eighty. Armed men suddenly appeared at the rail of the Chinese ship. They opened fire, sporadically at first, and then more sustained and concentrated. For the third time, bullets ricocheted around the bridge. Harry and Mercer dropped to the deck to find cover.
“Shit!”
“What is it?” Mercer asked over the din, fearing Harry had been hit.
“I need to see which way the Korvald’s going to turn. She could back around and head straight for open water or she could cut inside us and circle the harbor to get out behind us.”
“How can you tell which way she’ll go?” A round blew the stuffing out of the chair Lauren had been using.
“I need to see the wash from her bow thruster and how her rudder’s cocked.”
Lauren shouted from the protection of the offside wing. “Get out here, you two. You’re going to get yourselves killed.”
“It isn’t worth it,” Foch added.
Mercer ignored them and tried his radio. “Heaven, come in. This is Angel Two. Where’s that chopper?”
No sooner had he asked than the beating rotors of an SH- 60 Seahawk filled the bridge with noise as it thundered twenty feet over their heads. The downblast whipped a brutal wind through the shattered windows. The chopper had come in low, using the drifting hulk of the Englander Rose as cover, popping into view at the last moment. It pirouetted to get an angle for a door gunner to rake the missile ship with his M-60.
Hitting only two of the Chinese soldiers, he still managed to clear the railing as the others dove for cover.
Mercer helped Harry to his feet. There was a frothing patch of water near the Korvald’s bow. Using the powerful athwartship thruster she was beginning her turn, hoping to beat the Rose by swinging herself to shoot directly down the canal.
Harry spotted it immediately. “We’ve got them.” He cranked the wheel toward the big reefer ship.
Maneuvering her bow so that it was perpendicular to the dry dock but still pointed toward shore, Captain Wong had hoped to beat the derelict by dancing inside her. Had he known what Harry White knew, he would have spun out the other way and easily outflanked the sinking ship.
With twenty yards separating the ships, and both directed more or less downstream, Harry cranked the throttles one last time. Ever so slightly she built up headway, forcing more water into her holds. She started to capsize.
Mercer scrambled up the deck to the safety of the flying bridge and helped the others draw Harry up to them. They pressed themselves to the deck, holding fast against the bulkhead that would soon become the floor.
The dynamic angle of the keel and rudder shot the ship toward the Korvald. With water pouring over her rail, the Englander Rose nosed into the refrigerator ship just hard enough to tear a large gash in her hull. With her momentum expended, the Rose settled over even more, fountains of air and water exploding from ventilators and leaky hatch covers as her interior spaces were drowned.
When her bow struck the bottom her keel bent in an agonized scream of wrenching metal. She settled deeper, rolling ever so slowly. Her forward cranes were smashed like matchsticks when they slammed the Korvald’s deck. The upper edge of the superstructure crashed into the other ship’s wheelhouse in an explosion of broken glass and men too slow to get out of the way. The funnel snapped off when it struck, and rolled like an enormous pipe onto the deck. It caught two gunmen and crushed them flat.
Wave action from the collision separated the two vessels for a moment before they struck again, harder, opening another hole in the Korvald’s hull. As the Rose continued to settle on the shallow bottom, torn plates, tangles of rope and other debris locked the two vessels together. The Chinese ship was pulled downward by the Rose’s dead weight. She ended up with a ten-degree list when at last the tramp freighter stopped sinking. But with water rushing through her torn hull, the Korvald also began to go down.
The Rose lay as though dead, with more than half of her bulk underwater and waves lapping just five feet below where her crew huddled.
Rabidoux was the first to recover. “I think they are going to come after us for what Harry did to their ship.”
Lauren disentangled her legs from under Foch, struggling to find her orientation on this world turned sideways. Looking down through the bridge door she saw nothing but water. She grabbed her weapon. “He’s right. We can’t stay here. They’re going to cut us down.”