Devil's Gate

promise you’ll die on this boat!” “I’m sure,” the hidden man replied, “that you’d like to believe that.” By now the water was lapping at Kurt’s thighs. It felt like the tide coming in, only way too rapidly. The ship’s equilibrium was changing. As the pitch increased, loose items began sliding down the deck toward him.

Kurt glanced up at the woman again. She had to be in tremendous pain. He wanted to shoot the scum who’d hung her up there, but he didn’t dare risk a look for her tormentor.

Then the sound of large outboard motors starting echoed from over the starboard side of the ship. In a moment, the soft rumble turned to a fierce roar, and what looked like a stripped-down powerboat began racing off into the distance.

“Go,” Kurt shouted.

His men sprang into action.

“Hawthorne’s down,” someone said.

“Get him up,” Kurt shouted. “Get him and Foster into the boat.” “What about the search?”

“I doubt these guys left any survivors,” he said. “Either way, you don’t have time to look.” The ship had tilted ten degrees nose down, far enough for a length of chain to come sliding toward him like a great metallic snake.

Kurt dodged the chain. It hit the edge of the cargo hatch and poured itself into the cavernous space below, rattling ominously as the links slid over the edge until the chain released itself into oblivion.

“Get off the ship,” Kurt ordered.

“What are you going to do?” one of his men asked.

“I’m going to get that woman.”

6

AS THE KINJARA MARU FOUNDERED, Kurt Austin scrambled forward and up the sloping deck. The footing was treacherous where the deck had become coated with water, oil, and sludge. He pulled himself upward with anything he could grasp.

Reaching the ladder that led up to the crane, Kurt climbed it, catching sight of the pirates racing away to the south. Putting them out of his mind and hanging on to the railing, he reached the crane operator’s hutch.

A strangely shaped folding knife with a black handle and a steel or titanium blade stood on its point, embedded into the crane operator’s seat. A little present left behind by the thug who’d strung the woman up. Kurt grabbed it, folded it up, and slid it into a pocket.

Turning to the control panel, he checked for power. Thankfully, the lights on the panel remained illuminated.

“Hold on,” he shouted to the woman, realizing even as he spoke that she wasn’t holding anything at all, but guessing that “Hang in there” would have had a terrible ring to it.

Years in the salvage business had left Kurt very familiar with cranes. He grabbed for the control handle that would retract the crane back to his position. As he operated the lever he heard a whirring sound, and the crane jerked backward a few feet and then slammed to a halt. The poor woman swung back and forth like a pendulum, crying and screaming in pain. Seconds later a hydraulic warning light came on.

It was only then that Kurt noticed red liquid pouring down the side of the crane. He glanced and saw that the hydraulic line had been cut clean through. Now the little gift made sense to him. He could almost hear the thug laughing.

His headset crackled.

“Kurt, we’re off the ship, but you should know that we can see the top of the rudder. The fantail of this thing is coming out of the water.”

Kurt looked forward. The front quarter of the ship was submerged, debris floating everywhere. Time was running out fast.

With the crane dead, he had little choice. He dropped his rifle and began to climb out onto the crane’s boom. It was a tricky crawl made worse by the grease, oil, and hydraulic fluid. Trying to keep the boom underneath him, he scooted forward.

From behind him, a group of steel barrels came tumbling down the deck. One of them hit something sharp, sparked, and then exploded. The blast knocked Kurt sideways. His feet slipped, and the weight of his boots threatened to drag him off the boom.

Ahead of him, the woman screamed, sobbing as she shouted out to him. “Please,” she begged. “Please hurry.”

Kurt was doing all he could just to hang on. He glanced back. Fire enveloped the hutch he had been standing in only moments before. Moving had been a lucky break, but not if it just postponed the inevitable.

He swung his legs to one side and then back the other way and up, catching the boom with one leg. A smaller secondary explosion echoed from below as the smell of kerosene enveloped him. Down through black smoke, Kurt could see flames licking across the water as the burning fuel spread, blasts of heat roasting him as he moved forward.

Another ten feet and he reached the spot where the woman was hooked. The wire wrapped around her wrists was slicing into her skin. Her arms were scarlet with flowing blood, and her face was pasty white.

He grabbed her by the arms and tried to pull her up, but he had no leverage. Swirling waves of heat rose up from the crackling fires below. The ship shuddered as something internal broke loose. One of the engines or even the cargo sliding around.

“Kurt, she’s going,” came the call over the radio. “Any minute she’s going.”

I’m aware of that, Kurt thought. He grabbed her arms again.

“Pull yourself up,” he shouted.

“I can’t,” she cried. “My shoulder is out.”

That didn’t surprise Kurt. But it left him with only one choice.

He grabbed the knife from his pocket, flipped it open, and slid it under the wire that held the woman. Trying desperately not to cut her but knowing he didn’t have much time, Kurt began to saw. The wire snapped all at once, and the young woman plunged toward the ocean.

Kurt pushed off and dropped in after her.

Smoke and fire passed him in an instant. He hit the water, and felt one leg strike something beneath it. When he came up, the woman was right in front of him, bravely trying to tread water with one arm.

Kurt grabbed her and splashed away from the flames of burning gas and oil. Quickly, he realized a much greater danger. The water was swirling around them. He felt it pulling at his feet like the undertow at the beach.

The ship was going down.

He looked aft. The fantail had risen up like the Titanic, the bow was beginning to plunge.

Grabbing the woman’s good arm, he began to swim, pulling her along. When the ship went down, it would create a massive wave of suction dragging everything within a hundred-foot radius down with it. Both of them would be long drowned before it released their bodies back to the surface.

It was hopeless, but he swam hard anyway. And then the fast boat from the Argo suddenly raced in. It slid to a stop beside them.

The men rapidly hauled the woman in, literally yanking her out of the water, as Kurt pulled himself over the side. The engines roared again.

Kurt fell into the back of the boat. Looking up he saw the “castle”—the five-story structure that housed the crew’s quarters and the bridge and the antenna masts — plunging toward them at a forty-five-degree angle, like a building falling out of the sky.