“Goddamn it,” Linc said aloud, then strode from the bridge.
Gone were the days of men scampering down cargo netting into boats bobbing on the surface of the sea. Ocean Freight and Cargo had spared no expense in outfitting their flagship with every modern safety device.
One lifeboat was already full of men and up on the davits. The winchman waited for a curt nod from Linc before lowering the boat to the sea below.
The warm night breeze blew smoke from Linc’s cigarette into his eyes as he climbed into the second lifeboat. The other men in the boat with him were subdued, ashen. They didn’t talk or look each other in the eye as Linc nodded to the winchman.
The winchman threw a toggle switch and the pulleys that lowered the lifeboat began to whine. The boat hit the calm surface with a white-frothed splash. Instantly two men stood up to detach the cables that secured them to the sinking ore carrier.
Captain Linc took charge of the lifeboat, grasping the tiller in his right hand while applying power to the idling engine. The boat motored away from the Grandam Phoenix, the crew craning their necks to watch their sinking ship. The klaxon echoed emptily across the waves.
It took fifteen minutes for the ship’s list to become noticeable, but after that, she went quickly. The stern lifted from the water; her two ferro-bronze propellers gleaming in the low light. The watching men heard her boilers let go of their mounts and slam through the engine room bulkheads. The screeching hiss that followed was the sound of thousands of tons of gravel pouring across the vessel’s gunwales into the ocean.
Linc refused to watch his ship die. He kept his eyes trained ahead, steering toward the dim lights of the distant rendezvous ship. Yet every time he heard a new sound from the Grandam Phoenix’s death throes, he cringed.
The rendezvous ship was not large, a ninety-foot general cargo freighter, the type referred to as a “stick ship” by seamen because her decks were studded with a forest of cranes and derricks. Her boxy superstructure stood amidships, her straight funnel atop it. As the two lifeboats approached, Linc could make out about a dozen men on her port rail. He guided his boat toward them.
“Captain Linc, I presume?” a voice called down cheerily.
“I’m Linc.”
The reply was the rapid fire of ten Soviet-made PPSH submachine guns. The snail drums of the weapons could hold fifty rounds and the gunmen emptied them all into the lifeboats. The cacophony of shouts and screams, shots and ricochets, was deafening. Blood pooled on the floorboards of the boats, its sweet smell mingling with the cloud of cordite smoke.
Linc looked up at the ship, bloodied and dazed, astounded that he was still alive. Anger, fear, and pain boiled in his mind but the emotions and sensations were being driven back by darkness.
The gunmen lowered their weapons one by one as the bolts slammed into empty chambers. The lifeboat was a charnel scene of blood and mutilation, the water pouring in through the holed floor sloshed in a pink froth. In moments, both lifeboats capsized, spilling corpses into the ocean. Packs of sharks circled eagerly.
The lone unarmed man on deck had watched the massacre with flat appraising eyes. Though not yet thirty, he carried an air of authority held by only a few even twice his age. When the lifeboats capsized, he nodded to the commander of the gunmen and went into the freighter’s superstructure.
Minutes later, he ducked into the ship’s hold. The lights of the computing and sonar equipment packed into the cramped hold gave his skin an alien pallor.
“Depth of the target ship?” he snapped at one of the technicians bent over a sonar scope.
The target ship was of course the Grandam Phoenix as she plunged to the distant bottom.
The sonarman didn’t look up from his equipment.
“Six thousand feet, sinking at a thousand feet every seven minutes.”
The man glanced at his watch and jotted down some numbers on a pad. After a brief pause he looked at his watch again. “Two minutes from my mark.”
The hold was noisy. The sound of the ship’s diesel generators filtered in through the steel walls and the air conditioners necessary to cool the computers sounded like aircraft propellers. Yet the seven men in the room could have sworn that during those two minutes there was not a sound in the world. They were too focused on their jobs to notice any distractions.
“Mark,” the young man said with a casualness that was not forced.
Another crewman flipped several switches. Nothing happened.
The civilian counted down under his breath. “Four. . three. . two. . one.”
The shock wave started nearly seven thousand feet below the surface and had to travel a further ten miles to reach the ship, yet it struck only five seconds after detonation. Billions of gallons of water had been vaporized in a fireball with temperatures reaching 100,000 degrees. The main wave rushed to the surface at 150 miles per hour and threw up a dome of water half a mile across. The dome hung in the air for a full ten seconds, gravity fighting inertia, then collapsed, thunderously filling the six-thousand-foot deep hole in the Pacific Ocean.
Caught in a man-made Charybdis, the freighter tossed and pitched as if she were in a hurricane, her hull nearly out of the water one moment and almost swamped the next. The young man, the architect of such destruction, feared for a moment that he had cut the margin too thin, placed his ship too close to the epicenter. Before his concern could crack the glacial facade of his face, the sea began to calm. The huge waves leveled out and the gale wind created when the ocean fell back on itself, dissipated.
It took the young man a few minutes to reach the deck of the freighter, for she still rolled dangerously. On the horizon, a blanket of steam clung to the sea and glowed luminously in the weak moonlight.
“I have laid the foundation of Vulcan’s Forge.”
Washington, D.C. Present Day
The only thing that the President really enjoyed about his new job was his chair in the Oval Office. It had a high back and soft seat and was made of the most supple leather he had ever felt. Often he would sit in that chair after all of the staff had gone home and remember his simpler youth. He had achieved the most powerful office on the planet, fulfilling his lifelong ambition but sometimes he thought the price had been too high. The college sweetheart he had married had been turned into an emotionless automaton by the pressures of her husband’s career. The vast network of friends he had built during the years had become sycophants groveling for favors and his once perfect health had deteriorated so he felt ten years older than his sixty-two.
He would sit some nights with all the lights off so the network watchdogs across the street wouldn’t think the President was burning the midnight oil, and he would think about his younger days growing up outside of Cincinnati. He missed guzzling beer with his hot-rodding friends, shooting trick pool to impress overly made-up, plump girls, and saying whatever came to mind when someone pissed him off.
A perfect example of why he longed for that puerile freedom was seated opposite him in full African splendor, robes and headband and sandals. He was the ambassador to one of the new central African nations. A tall man with sarcastic eyes and a complacent attitude about nearly everything that they had discussed.
The ambassador was saying, with a dismissive wave of his hand, that the intelligence gathered by the Red Cross, the United Nations and the CIA was all false; that his government was not involved in any type of tribal genocide through starvation or the intentional spread of disease. He insisted that his government was committed to all tribes under their care and all the people suffered, not just the smaller, less politically influential tribes.