The Dicky's throttle linkage had broken before, when they had been off
Key West a year ago. It had broken between the bridge and the engine,
and Samantha had watched Tom Parker fiddling with the engine, holding
the lantern for him to see in the gloomy confines of the smelly little
engine room. She had not been certain how he did it, but she remembered
that he had controlled the revolutions of the engine by hand - something
on the side of the engine block, below the big bowl of the air filter.
Samantha turned and dived down the vertical ladder into the engine room.
The diesel was running, burbling away quietly at idling speed, not
generating sufficient power to move the little vessel through the water.
She tripped and sprawled on the greasy deck, and pulled herself up,
crying out with pain as her hand touched the red-hot manifold of the
engine exhaust.
On the far side of the engine block, she groped desperately under the
air filter, pushing and tugging at anything her fingers touched. She
found a coil spring, and dropped to her knees to examine it.
She tried not to think of the huge steel hull bearing down on them, of
being down in this tiny box that stank of diesel and exhaust fumes and
old bilges. She tried not to think of not having a life-jacket, or that
the tanker could tramp the little vessel deep down under the surface and
crush her like a matchbox.
Instead, she traced the little coil spring to where it was pinned into a
flat upright lever. Desperately she pushed the lever against the
tension of the spring - and instantly the diesel engine bellowed
deafeningly in her ears, startling her so that she flinched and lost the
lever. The diesel's beat died away into the bumbling idle and she
wasted seconds while she found the lever again and pushed it hard
against its stops once more. The engine roared, and she felt the ship
picking up speed under her. She began to pray incoherently.
She could not hear the words in the engine noise, and she was not sure
she was making sense, but she held the throttle open, and kept on
praying.
She did not hear the screams from the deck above her.
She did not know how close the Golden Dawn was, she did not know if Hank
Petersen was still in the wheelhouse conning the little vessel out of
the path of the onrushing tanker - but she held the throttle open and
prayed.
The impact when it came was shattering, the crash and crackle of timbers
breaking, the rending lurch and the roll of the deck giving to the
tearing force of it.
Samantha was hurled against the hot steel of the engine, her forehead
striking with such a force that her vision starred into blinding white
light; she dropped backwards, her body loose and relaxed, darkness
ringing in her ears, and lay huddled on the deck.
She did not know how long she was unconscious, but it could not have
been for more than a few seconds; the spray of icy cold water on her
face roused her and she pulled herself up on to her knees.
In the glare of the single bare electric globe in the deck above her,
Samantha saw the spurts of water jets through the starting planking of
