When they had settled all the details, Juan turned to Linda. “I’ve got enough air for us to buddy-breathe back to the surface.”
She didn’t consider his offer for a second. “These are my people now. I’m responsible for them and I’m not leaving them until they’re all safe.”
He bent and kissed her forehead. “I knew you wouldn’t. Close the hatch behind me. This should take about an hour to set in motion. We can start cutting now, and once the
“Got it.”
“Then we’ll lever the hatch closed, clear the antechamber, let the pressure build back up inside here, and do it again.”
“Sounds good.”
“Okay, hotshot. See you later.”
It took Juan just ten minutes of quick swimming and a few minutes of decompression to reach the surface and drag himself back onto the
“Linda saved all but a couple of them,” Juan said with a proud smile.
“Booyah!” Linc whooped. “I knew my girl would pull through. What happened?”
“She got everyone down into the bilge after the
“Launched MacD and Eddie twenty minutes ago, and, if you could see past the rudder, you’d know she’s about ten minutes from pulling alongside of us.”
“Perfect.” Juan strode over to the chopper to open a line to Hanley. He laid out what they would need, and Max promised to have it ready by the time they arrived.
While Linc got the cutting torch ready, Juan changed out of his scuba suit, dried himself with a rag Gomez promised was clean, and threw on the outdoor clothes he’d grabbed from his cabin, complete with rubber boots that went up to his knees.
As soon as the
There was no time for small talk. The storm was intensifying. Soon waves would sweep clear across the hulk and suspend any attempt at getting the survivors out. From the measurements Vogel had given him, Cabrillo marked out a three-by-three-foot spot on the hull, and Linc got busy with the torch. Molten metal was soon drizzling through the cuts he made as the torch slowly ate the inch-and-a-half-thick plate. Hanley had brought over a second plasma torch, and he was at Linc’s side cutting with abandon. Farther along the hull, the
In all, Cabrillo’s people were working like the well-oiled machine he knew them to be.
Juan had told Linda that they’d be ready in an hour. He missed that deadline by only two minutes and that’s because he didn’t factor in the time it would take Max to set up a hydraulic ram down in the antechamber. They would need its power to close the hatch against the pressure of air gushing out. Fortunately, it wasn’t high enough to warrant decompression for those trapped inside.
Cabrillo gave her the signal, she tapped back that she was ready, and Juan opened the hatch. In the explosive blast of air, five people tumbled into the antechamber, sprawling on the ground in a tangle of limbs. One woman screamed when her already-broken leg was smashed against the far wall. Max activated the ram and it slammed the door closed, as promised.
“What do you think?” Cabrillo asked. The ship didn’t feel like it had settled any deeper.
“How should I know? You didn’t leave a barometer in there. Gunner’s manning the compressor. He should be able to tell the back pressure. That’ll give us an idea of when we can let out the next group. But truth be told, I think it worked like a charm.”
Juan grinned. “Me too.”
By being patient and cycling air back into the bilge space, it took forty minutes for the last group, including Linda, Vogel, and the Emir, who had insisted despite everyone’s entreaties not to wait, to emerge from the bowels of the ship. Max dogged down the hatch while the last survivors picked themselves up.
Dullah shook Juan’s hand again. “Now we are, as you say, out of the forest?”
“Close enough, my friend, close enough.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
In an idealized, fictional world, the
No more than a minute after the Emir crawled out of the bilge, an HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter painted in the Coastie’s traditional orange-and-white thundered over the hulk at fifty feet, filling the already-stormy air with water kicked up by the rotor wash.
Juan had known this was coming and had already shut down the
Max’s latest invention would take care of that. He had recently replaced the steel plating on the
In the past, it took the crew up to thirty minutes to change the ship’s name. Now it took less than ten seconds.
Cabrillo fished an encrypted walkie-talkie from his back pocket when the Coast Guard chopper had backed off to assess the situation. “Talk to me, Max.”
“That bird’s off the cutter
“I’ll need my Captain Ramon Esteban ID,” Juan said. It was the identification that went with their Cypriot disguise.
“Stoney’s putting it in the desk in your cabin.”
“We’d better make this look good. Lower one of the life rafts as if we planned on taking the survivors with us. Then jam up the davit controls so the Coasties will have to take them off our hands.”
“Already ordered,” Max shot back, then added with mild rebuke, “Do you think this is my first time at