Dead Sea

There was a high pitched metallic groaning from below and the decks trembled, dropping Saks on top of Menhaus. He crawled free.

“Move it! Move it!” he shouted. “Fabrini, you fucking cock mite, what the hell are you standing around about? Lend a hand, goddamn you!”

The decks were mass confusion as crewmen and mates rushed about in the swirling mist, calling out orders, clearing debris, and desperately stripping tarps from lifeboats.

The ship continued to drift with a jolting, uneasy motion, leaning further and further port as the fire raged and the sea rushed in.

27

Gosling jogged across the lurching decks, climbing the see-sawing ladders to the pilothouse. The air was thick and pungent with belching black smoke and the stink of charred wood.

He saw the deck lights flicker in that cloistral fog.

Go out.

The ship was plunged into seething blackness. Men started to scream again and he wondered if they’d ever stopped. The world was a hive of noise. Timbers crunching, metal creaking and groaning with fatigue. Voices were calling for help. Voices were arguing. Grown men were shrieking like babes and he wanted very much to join in.

Then the lights came back on, flickered with a dim strobe effect, but finally caught.

As he entered the pilothouse, or was thrown into it, he saw Morse at the radio. He was shouting into it. “MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” he bellered. “THIS IS AN SOS! THIS IS AN SOS! WE’RE SINKING… OUR POSITION…” he tossed the mic against the bulkhead. The lights kept flickering. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! We don’t have any goddamn juice!”

Gosling grabbed him by the arm and spun him around. “Captain, we have to get off her,” he stammered. “The sea’s coming in too fast for the pumps… if the rest of those drums go-”

“I’ve seen the Fourth of July, Mister, I know what’ll happen. Let’s get off this bitch. Lower those boats.”

Gosling had already given that order, just as he’d given the order for the men to don their survival suits just as they’d been trained to do… but in the confusion and panic with the ship yawing and rolling severely, well, he figured most never heard.

“Let’s go, First,” the captain said.

He took the lead, Gosling at his heels, making for the hatch… but never got there.

A tremendous ear-shattering roar ripped the night into shreds. The deck beneath them heaved and buckled. The pilothouse collapsed in a rain of splintered wood, glass, and twisted metal.

Gosling crawled from the wreckage, bleeding from a dozen gashes in his face. He found what was left of Morse: he’d been split in two by a beam.

It happened that quick.

Gosling made it out to the ladder, started climbing down the superstructure, deck by deck. The fog had thinned now, it seemed, been replaced by funneling black smoke. He almost made the spar deck when another explosion tossed him through the air. Girders and flaming sheet metal collapsed on top of him.

He tried to pull himself free, but his foot snagged.

“Help!” he called out. “Over here! Lend a hand!”

28

George, Soltz, and Cushing were gripping the portside handrail for dear life as they’d been instructed by one of the mates when the latest series of explosions barked in the night. They were thrown to the deck, but they all saw what happened.

And what a sight it was.

The explosions hit with more force than the previous ones. Like cannon shots. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! The decks reeled and buckled with a cacophonous screech of tormented metal, splitting open with great jagged rents that emitted eruptions of boiling flames. George saw the hatch cover over the starboard cargo bay actually bulge momentarily like a balloon suddenly filled with air before bursting its latches with a thundering boom and shooting into the sky like a rocket. Great rolling clouds of mushrooming fire and black greasy smoke poured into the sky, mixing with that noxious fog into a seething storm of fumes that sucked the oxygen from the air.

“Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God,” Soltz whimpered.

George held on to him and Cushing, almost afraid to let go. Flames licked over the decks now, engulfing everything in their path. Lifeboats went up like kindling. Men were blazing like torches. The big dozers were shrouded in fire. George saw four or five men dive off the writhing decks, stick matches consuming themselves.

The deck lights went out for good now.

They were no longer needed. The ship had become a flickering funeral pyre of orange and yellow billowing light, backlit by the mist.

There were flashes of purple and red light, more detonations from below, more flames, more dying and screams of agony. The air was reeking with a hot, raw stink of seared flesh and crackling thunderstorms.

“Come on!” George screamed over the jarring racket. “We gotta get off her before she goes!”