Through the bridge windows, I could see not a single coastal light, only palisades of fog that parted to reveal more of the same, though soon I would encounter something more solid than mist.
I throttled both engines forward and held the wheel steady. The sea map showed the tugboat driving precisely down the center of the Hecate’s Canyon channel, though still a mile offshore.
Not six weeks ago, at St. Bartholomew’s Abbey in the High Sierra, I had seen the first snow of my life, and within days, I had endured enough of the stuff to last a lifetime.
Magic Beach had been my first experience of a coastal town. At first it had seemed balmy and a welcome change from the blizzard that had buried the abbey.
Perhaps I would feel differently in time, but at that moment, as I approached the coast aboard the tug, through fog on treacherous seas, I felt homesick for the dry Mojave and Pico Mundo, and sick to death of water in all its forms, except as it might be necessary for bathing and flushing the john.
On Channel 22, the communications officer aboard the cutter, observing me by satellite, had stopped repeating the same questions and had begun to issue warnings in an urgent voice.
I was tense enough without having to listen to his shrill predictions of disaster. I switched off the radiotelephone.
The depth-finder began to pong more frequently.
“Ode to Joy” played again. Based on my experience with Utgard Rolf, something by Wagner or anything by any gangster-rap group would have been a better fit with his personality.
What had Beethoven ever done to Utgard that such lovely music should be used as a crime-phone ring?
On the screen: the white of a deep-water channel narrowing and funneling toward a narrow crescent of blue ahead, and beyond the blue a crescent of green, and beyond the green a great stately gold swath of land as solid as anyone could want it, the magnificent western ramparts of America the beautiful.
Motoring right down the center of the channel.
No need to check the fuel gauge. Only a few ounces were required to complete the trip.
The voltmeter. To hell with the voltmeter. I had no idea what a voltmeter did. Probably no more than one in a million people knew what a voltmeter did. Yet there it was, occupying a prime lower-left corner of the gauge board, so proud of itself, mocking everyone who was not a lifelong seaman with high voltmeter awareness.
Gear-oil pressure gauge, engine-oil pressure gauge, water temperature gauge, tachometers: They were of no interest to me now, suppliers of useless data, silly instruments of no import.
What respect I still had for marine technology was reserved for the depth-finder, the sonar soundings, ponging faster and louder, faster.
My plan, as patchwork as it might be, had been predicated on the belief that nuclear bombs were pretty much as hard to detonate as were sticks of dynamite.
You can throw a fat stick of dynamite against a wall, whack it with a hammer, stab it with a knife-and, at least as I understand the subject, it will not explode. A lit fuse will do the trick, as perhaps will a jolt of electric current from a plunger box, but if you want to drive across twenty thousand sticks of dynamite in a Peterbilt, you can do so, if I have my facts straight, without risk of being blown to bits.
Pure nitroglycerin is another matter.
I had separated the nukes from their triggers or from objects that I sincerely believed to be their triggers. At the time these events occurred, I was not a nuclear physicist-nor am I one now, as I write this-but I felt as certain as a nonphysicist could be that all four thermonuclear devices would ride out a hard jolt without vaporizing me.
The fog did not relent: nothing but fog, fog, fog.
I took a wide stance, leaning toward the console, feet pressed hard against the deck, and gripped the wheel tightly with my left hand.
The pong of the sonar counted a cadence grossly out of sync with the rhythm of “Ode to Joy,” and relying sheerly on intuition, I chose what I hoped might be the last best moment to punch the ENGINE STOP button.
I gripped the wheel now with both hands, holding course but mostly just holding tight.
A boat has no brakes. The only way to halt forward motion is to reverse engines. Switching off the engines, as I had done, at once kills further forward thrust but has no effect on current momentum.
We traveled the final meters of the Hecate’s Canyon channel with significant momentum. Water, of course, offers momentum-diminishing resistance, but less than you might think when the boat has a modest beam, a V-bow, and a round-bottom hull.
Only subsequent to these events did I learn about these aspects of the seagoing tug’s design, and come to appreciate fully how much it still has to give even after you kill its engines.
Sand offers greater resistance than water, as you might imagine, and mud outperforms sand in this regard. I cannot claim to have been able to discern when the tugboat finished ramming through sand and began beaching itself more firmly in mud. All I remember is that one second the channel was still deep enough to accommodate the boat’s draft, and the next second it was not deep enough.
The bullet-punctured bridge window shattered completely out of its frame, and every unsecured item aboard the boat flew as objects do in any building rocked by an earthquake. Nothing clobbered me, which spoke well to Utgard’s attention to maritime safety.
My legs went out from under me, but I held fast to the wheel.
Shrieking, twanging, cracking, popping, hissing, the tugboat climbed out of the waters of the cove-bow rising, rising-like a prehistoric amphibian deciding that the hour had come to declare itself sufficiently evolved for life on land.
When the craft came to a stop, I got my feet under myself, but for a long moment my cramped hands would not let go of the wheel.
FORTY-ONE
ALTHOUGH I HAD STOPPED THE ENGINES BEFORE impact, I assumed a fire might still break out, even though diesel fuel does not burn as readily as gasoline.
The question about whether thermonuclear weapons might detonate from a hard knock had happily been answered in the negative. Fire, if it erupted, was not likely to faze the cast-steel jackets in which the shaped plutonium appeared to have been encased; therefore, I was not concerned about the release of radioactive material.
Finally able to let go of the helm, I retrieved the satchel containing the bomb triggers.
Earlier, when so much had remained to be done to convey the nukes to a place from which they could not easily be spirited away, I had been too frantic to notice how heavy the bag was. Handling the first of the triggers, I had estimated its weight at four or five pounds. That extrapolated to a maximum combined weight of twenty pounds, but the satchel was at least half again as heavy as that.
James Bond, especially as played by Daniel Craig, would have snatched up the satchel as if it contained politicians’ promises. Smiling insouciantly, he would have dashed off with the triggers at a pace qualifying him as a marathon runner in the Olympics.
Bond, of course, has the advantage of being fortified with a diet largely consisting of martinis. I drink nothing stronger than red wine, and not much of that.
