Hansen handed him a big flashlight. “Someone has tampered with the emergency lights in here,” he said. “All right, folks, step smartly now,” he shouted to the passengers. “You remember your abandon ship drill. Tonight it’ll be the starboard boats.” He gave McGarvey a last glance. “Good luck, sir.”
“I’ll be right behind you,” McGarvey said.
The deck was down by the bow so steeply that many of the older passengers had to be helped, lest they lose their balance and fall. Third Officer Hansen had his remaining crew people well organized so that the evacuation out of the crew’s mess, across the corridor, and up the stairs to the starboard deck proceeded rapidly. No one protested, and best of all there was very little panic, even when water spilled out of the stairwell and began to cover the deck ankle deep.
A big crash somewhere aft was followed immediately by the loss of their electricity. All the lights went out, plunging them into total darkness.
A woman screamed in abject terror, and several people clutched at McGarvey until he got his flashlight on. There were emergency lights in the stairwell leading up, and two of the crewmen with flashlights were out in the corridor directing the passengers through what had rapidly become knee-deep water.
“Calm down!” McGarvey shouted sternly. “There’s plenty of time to get to the lifeboats. Just keep moving.”
He remained by the doors, herding the people out of the crew’s mess and into the waiting hands of the crewmen in the corridor, who handed them off in turn to men on the stairs, like a bucket brigade, only with humans instead of water.
The ship seemed to come back upright on her keel as the downward angle on her bow increased. There hadn’t been time to manually close the watertight doors throughout the ship, and apparently the terrorists had sabotaged the automatic controls. In addition to kidnapping Shaw, they’d wanted to kill all the passengers because they could have acted as witnesses. The simplest, most economical way to do that was to lock them belowdecks and sink the ship.
Not this time, McGarvey told himself. This was not going to be another 9/11.
The water was chest deep by the time McGarvey handed the last passenger, a man in his early fifties, out to the waiting crewmen; they immediately hustled him upstairs.
A tremendous crash from somewhere aft, probably in the engine room, shook the entire ship as if she were ready to come apart at the seams.
The angle on the bow increased even faster.
“Come on!” the last crewman on the stairs called back, desperately. “She’s going.”
“Right behind you!” McGarvey shouted. He stopped long enough to sweep the beam of his flashlight around the almost completely submerged crew’s mess for any sign of life.
There was no one. He turned and started for the stairs when he heard a faint cry from behind, which was immediately cut off when the level of the water reached the top of the door frame, leaving less than two feet of airspace below the ceiling.
He had to fight his way back, duck under the water, and come up inside the crew’s mess.
“Who’s here?” he shouted, swinging the beam of his flashlight across the surface of the water, which was choked with floating debris.
“Help me,” an old woman cried off to the right.
McGarvey found her in the beam of his flashlight, clinging to a lifejacket, her white hair plastered to her head, her eyes wide with fright. He reached her in a couple of strokes, grabbed her roughly by the back of her dress, and hauled her back to the doorway as the last of the airspace above their heads disappeared.
There was no time to be kind or considerate. The ship was going down right now, and either she would survive the short swim across the corridor and up the stairs to the surface of the water or McGarvey figured he would probably drown with her.
He’d lost his flashlight, and the corridor was in total darkness until he started up the stairwell, when he saw several lights above.
He redoubled his efforts, and seconds later a pair of waiting crewmen dragged him and the old woman out on the starboard main deck, now awash.
They were helped across to the last lifeboat, which immediately backed away from the rapidly sinking cruise ship. Six men manning the oars pulled hard to get them away from the side of the ship that was threatening to roll.
Someone put a blanket over McGarvey’s shoulders, and Katy suddenly was there in his arms. “That’s twice tonight I thought I’d lost you.”
“Not a chance,” McGarvey said.
The old woman he’d pulled out of the crew’s mess at the last reached over, patted his hand, then gave Katy a weak smile. “Hold on to him, sweetie; otherwise I’ll grab him.”
Everyone within earshot chuckled.
“It’s a deal,” Kathleen said.
“She’s going,” someone said in awe.
Everyone watched in silence as the Spirit of ’98 slipped beneath the black surface of the water — everyone except McGarvey, whose gray-green eyes were turned toward the south, the direction in which the small fishing boat had disappeared into the night.
THE MISSION
Muhamed Abdallah’s first view of the wall of mountains rising up behind Denver came that night at sunset, and he pressed the fingers of his right hand against the window glass as if he could reach out and touch the snow-capped peaks that seemed so near and yet so distant.
His bus approached from the east on 1-70 after crossing the otherworldly, barren rolling hills of Kansas in the hot afternoon. He had dozed fitfully, waking often in a cold sweat, seeing the Israeli tank that killed his uncle Rafiq, seeing the blood erupting from his body as the heavy-caliber machine-gun bullets tore into his flesh.
On that day the fourteen-year-old Muhamed became a man in the family. Although he did not abandon his studies as his mother feared he would, he did leave her side. The tank attack had sealed his future with more finality than had his inability to secure a student visa to study abroad.
As a young man fighting the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Muhamed had dreamed of the mountains of Afghanistan where the mujahideen — the real soldiers of God — were trained by Osama bin Laden himself. He never got there. But seeing the American Rockies was almost as inspiring. In some ways they were even more inspiring than the Hindu Kush, because it was here that he would martyr himself for the greater glory of Allah.
It was a weekday and late, but traffic on the interstate was busy, especially the closer they got into the city, so it was midnight by the time they pulled into the large, modern Greyhound Bus depot on Nineteenth Street within blocks of the state capitol building.
Denver was different than Oklahoma City; the streets were narrower here, the air cooler and drier and the ever-present Front Range loomed like a wall on the horizon.
Muhamed carried only a small packsack with a change of socks and underwear, a clean shirt, and his toothbrush and tooth powder, plus the manila envelope with his papers and money. When he got off the bus, he did exactly as he had been instructed. He walked directly through the brightly lit terminal and out onto the street, where he turned left. One block later a dark blue Toyota SUV with tinted windows pulled up to the curb and the back door opened.
It was as if he were drifting through a dreamscape, not the nightmare of his uncle, but rather a waking dream in which the entire world seemed to be in soft focus. All the colors were pastels; all the sounds, even the bass thump of a stereo system in a passing car, were like sweet music; the air was perfume, the breeze a zephyr, the clouds streaming off the mountaintops like the flowing hair of angels.
Muhamed was a happy boy. He was a soldier of God, one among the truly blessed, and soon his would be the kingdom of Paradise. His father would be proud of him, and his mother would weep tears of joy for his passing.