hatchway, and he was just about to continue on to the bridge-he thought he could probably get some decent shots by leaning out a porthole or doorway- when he saw, through the sliding door, an apparently seamless picture of gray sea and gray sky, a panorama in which the horizon was unrecognizable and the world was reduced to a scene of flat, inarguable desolation.
He could visualize the finished shot already.
Putting up his hood, he fumbled for his camera with his gloved hands, and let it hang just below his neck. He had to use both hands to pull back on the door handle, and when it slid open even a few inches, the wind reached in and grabbed him by the collar. This was probably, he realized, a very bad idea, but then sometimes his best shots had come from his worst ideas. He pulled harder, then slipped through the crack, the door sliding shut again the second he let go.
He was on the deck, just below the bridge, with ice water sluicing down around his feet, and the wind pummeling him so hard that tears were whipped out of his eyes and his forehead burned. He wrapped one arm around a metal stanchion and pulled off one glove with his teeth, but the ship was heaving too much to frame a shot. And each time he tried, some part of the boat got into the picture. He didn't want that. He didn't want anything identifiable, anything concrete, to intrude on the image. He wanted a pure, almost abstract picture of empty, disinterested, all-powerful nature.
He waited for the ship to roll on the coming swell, then lunged for the next handhold, a steel armature that housed one of the lifeboat rigs. From there, looking out over the rail, he'd have nothing to worry about-except for the freezing salt spray that dashed into his face and doused the camera. He snagged one arm through the rail, as he had before, and raised the camera. But just then, the ship was canted at a forty-five-degree angle, and all he could get was the turbulent sky. He slipped a foot or two forward, waiting for the roll to correct itself, raising the camera. His fingers were already freezing, and he found that he couldn't open his mouth to breathe without the wind taking his breath away. He tried one shot-still at too much of an angle-and was about to try another when a bullhorn directly overhead blared, “Mr. Wilde! Get off the deck! Now!”
Even in the roaring wind, he could make out the voice of the Ops, Lieutenant Healey
“Right now! And report to the captain!”
Before Michael could even turn around, he saw the sliding door opening and Kazinski, in a waterproof jacket over his running shorts, reaching out to him with a yellow life preserver. “Just grab it!” Kazinski shouted, and Michael, slipping the camera back into the top of his parka, fell back to the stanchion, then put his gloved hand out toward the preserver; his other hand was almost completely numb.
Once Michael had hold of it, Kazinski reeled him in like a fish, slammed the sliding door latch back, then stood there, brushing off the ice-cold water and shaking his head in dismay. “All due respect, sir, but that was truly a numbnuts thing to do.”
Michael did see his point.
“The captain's up on the bridge. If I were you, I'd be prepared to have him tear me a new one.”
At the moment, Michael just wanted the feeling back in his fingers. He wiped the hand briskly back and forth on his pant leg, but the cloth was so wet it didn't help much. He unzipped his parka, and shoved his hand inside, into his armpit.
Kazinski gestured at the stairs leading up to the bridge, as if it were the way to the gallows. Maybe, Michael thought, it was.
He went up them slowly, and as soon as he entered the brightly lighted bridge, Captain Purcell swiveled in his chair and said, “What the hell do you think you were doing out there? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
Michael shrugged and finished unzipping his coat, letting the flaps fall open. “Probably not the best idea,” he offered, knowing how feeble it sounded, “but I thought I might get some great shots for the magazine.”
The other two officers seated in front of the navigation consoles stifled their amusement.
“I'm used to some pretty harebrained stunts from the scientists I have to ferry around down here,” Purcell said, “but I figure they're so smart, they're entitled to act stupid sometimes. You, I can't figure out at all. You're no scientist, and you're sure as hell no sailor.”
Ensign Gallo, who was standing at a silver wheel mounted on a freestanding console, said, “Barometric's falling again, sir.”
“What to?” Purcell barked, swiveling back in his chair and adjusting the headset that had slipped askew while he was chewing out Michael.
“Nine eighty-five, sir.”
“Jesus, we're in for it tonight.” His eyes scanned the glowing screens and dials, the sonar, the radar, the GPS, the fathometer, all of which showed a constantly changing and multicolored stream of data.
A spattering of hail clattered against the square windows on the westward side, and the ship heaved like a great hand had just slapped it. Michael snatched at one of the leather straps that dangled from the ceiling and hung on tight; he'd already heard tales of seamen who had been flung from one end of the bridge to the other and broken arms and legs in the process. He wondered if his public flogging was over, or if he was supposed to wait around for more.
Despite the roar of the sea outside, the slashing of the rain and the howling of the winds that seemed to be coming from all directions at once, the atmosphere in the bridge quickly returned to the tranquillity of an operating room. The flat white light panels in the ceiling cast a cold even glow around the blue walls of the room, and the officers all spoke to each other in low, deliberate tones, their eyes fixed on the instrument arrays before them.
“Port engine, full forward,” the captain said, and Lieutenant Commander Ramsey, whom Michael had met a couple of times, reached for a short red-handed throttle. He repeated the captain's words as he executed the order.
Then, Ramsey nodded discreetly toward Michael-who was still standing around like a kid who'd been haled into the principal's office-and said offhandedly to Purcell, “If Mr. Wilde is no longer needed here, sir, perhaps he should join the Ops in the aloft con? It's impossible to fall overboard from there, and he might like to see how the ship is steered.”
Purcell blew out a breath of disgust, and without turning around, said, “If he does fall out, tell him he can float all the way back to Chile before I turn this ship around.”
Michael didn't doubt it, and he took it as his cue to step toward the spiral stair that Ramsey gestured at, and swiftly start climbing.
“How'd you like some company, Kathleen?” he heard Ramsey say into his headset, but he didn't slow up to find out if he wasn't welcome. He went straight up until he was well out of the bridge, and found himself standing on a platform in a virtually black funnel, with only a steel ladder leading higher. The ship juddered, and his shoulders crashed against the rounded wall; he felt like he was in the chimney of the house in The Wizard of Oz, the one that got picked up by the tornado and spun all around. Up above, at least twenty or thirty feet, he could see a blue glow, a lot like you'd get off a TV screen, and he could hear the beeping and hum of machinery.
He put his boot on the bottom rung of the ladder and slowly started to climb. When the prow of the ship came up, he was slung backwards off the ladder, and when the ship righted itself, he was flung forward again; once, he narrowly missed knocking out his front teeth, and he had a sudden terrible flash of having his dental clearance revoked. The rungs were cold and clammy, and he had to grip each one firmly before reaching for the next. As he went up the last few, he saw first a pair of black, rubber-soled shoes, then a pair of blue trousers. He hauled himself up the rest of the way, and when the ship seemed level for a second or two, clambered to his feet.
The Ops was holding steady to a smaller version of the wheel down below, her stern expression illuminated by a GPS screen and a couple of other scopes that Michael couldn't identify. Her eyes were set straight ahead and her jaw was locked; a headset clung to her short brown hair. The aloft con itself-the modern-day equivalent of the crow's nest-was barely big enough for the two of them, and Michael tried not to breathe down Kathleen's neck.
“Going out on deck was a very bad idea,” she said, reminding Michael that she was the one who'd busted him. “We're clocking winds of over a hundred miles per hour.”
“Got it,” he said. “The captain happened to mention it, too.” Then, hoping to change the subject, he said, “So you're up here, all alone in the driver's seat?” On all sides, there were reinforced windows, equipped with Kent screens-whirling discs powered by centrifugal force to throw off water like windshield wipers-that provided an unobstructed, 360-degree view of the boiling ocean all around. Behind him, on the aft deck, one side of the
