rage.
A fresh waved surged under the tanker, making her hull moan with the stress. The tear along her port side slammed closed as the swell buckled the keel. Then, as it passed by, the split opened again, tearing wider than before. Singer had seen the gap and was far enough from the rail to avoid it when it closed but when it yawned opened he never thought it would rip the deck so easily.
Singer tried to avoid it, and was awkwardly shifting his weight when his foot fell through, shredding his rain pants and the flesh of his leg against the jagged edge. The paperback-sized battery pack went skittering. He screamed at the pain and his other leg fell into the hole, dangling above the slick surface of the flocculent still sloshing in the tank. The searing metal blistered his hands as he struggled to pull himself free before the gap slammed shut.
Cabrillo dove into him at full speed just as the tanker shifted again and the two sides of the tear scissored closed. He tumbled with Singer amid a spray of warm liquid and a keening cry that pierced his brain.
When he recovered from the fall he looked at Singer. Everything below the top of his thighs had been cut off and had dropped into the tank. Blood spilled from the clean slices in torrents that turned pink in the rain.
He crawled to Singer and turned him faceup. He was ghostly pale and his lips had already turned blue.
His scream suddenly ended as his brain refused to feel anymore pain. He was slipping into shock.
“Why?” Juan demanded before the man succumbed to the trauma.
“I had to,” Singer whispered. “People have to act before it’s too late.”
“Haven’t you figured out that the future takes care of itself? A hundred years ago you never saw the sun in London because of the industrial pollution. Technology evolved and the pall went away. Today you say the problem is cars causing global warming. In ten or twenty years something will come along that makes the internal combustion engine obsolete.”
“We can’t wait that long.”
“Then you should have spent your millions on inventing it sooner rather than squandering it on a demonstration that can’t possibly change anything. That’s the problem with your movement, Singer.
You’re all about propaganda and press releases, not concrete solutions.”
“The people would have demanded action,” he said weakly.
“For a day or a week. To effect change you need alternatives, not ultimatums.”
Singer said nothing, but as he died it was his defiance that was the last thing to fade from his eyes.
Fanatics like him would never understand the nature of compromise and Juan knew he shouldn’t have bothered. He lurched to his feet to recover the battery pack and started running for the bow.
“Talk to me, Max.”
“You’ve got three minutes before the torpedoes run out their charges.”
Because of the guide wires spooling out from theOregon , the outer tube doors couldn’t be closed to load any more torpedoes from the ship’s store. If Juan didn’t set off the Hypertherm now it would take thirty minutes to get two fresh torpedoes into the water and he knew theGulf of Sidra would break up before then.
“Don’t wait for me no matter what. If I can’t detonate the Hypertherm, hit the ship with the torpedoes anyway. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the blast will ignite the cutting charges.”
“I hear you, but I don’t like it.”
“How the hell do you think I feel?” Juan said as he ran.
The tanker seemed impossibly long, her bows like a horizon that never grew closer. The heat radiating from the deck made his pores run with sweat and each time his left foot slapped the ground he could feel the blisters popping. He ignored it all and sprinted on.
“Two minutes,” Max said over the radio when Cabrillo finally reached the string of Hypertherm bisecting the ship.
When Singer had yanked the battery from the detonator, he had torn the wires that carried the electricity to set off the charge. Juan had to first disconnect the detonator from between two lengths of the explosives so he didn’t accidentally complete the circuit. Using the pocketknife Eddie had recovered at the Devil’s Oasis, he had to peel back the plastic insulation to expose the copper before he could twist the wires back together. There were three of them and it took twenty seconds each.
A status light embedded in the detonator turned green. He had a complete circuit.
“One minute, Juan.”
He clipped a length of Hypertherm to one side of the detonator and was moving to the second when he heard over the radio. “Chairman, it’s Murph. Torpedoes are a hundred and fifty yards out.”
“Keep them coming. I’ve almost got it. There!”
The string was complete. He turned and started running aft, hampered by the stinging pain radiating from his charred foot. He was now in a race against two torpedoes homing in on the ship at forty knots. He’d covered a hundred feet when Murph reported the torpedoes were a hundred yards away. He accelerated through the agony, not caring that he was crying out with every step.
“Fifty yards, Chairman,” Mark said as if it were his fault.
Juan let it go for another few seconds, gaining a couple more feet before pressing the remote.
In a blazing arc that rivaled the sun, the Hypertherm ignited, its magnesium core spiking to two thousand degrees. The burn raced from the center of the ship like lightning, making the steel deck as soft as wax and then heating it further so it dripped into the hold like water. The bow was wreathed in a noxious cloud of smoke and scorched metal. The light it gave off filled the sky, turning the cheerless gray into brilliant white. The explosive cut completely across the deck and then continued on, slicing open the hull down to the waterline in a blink of an eye.
Juan could feel the intense thermal shock on his back from three hundred feet away and had it not been for the rain he probably would have lost the hair on his head.
As quickly as it had ignited and burned through the ship, the Hypertherm exhausted itself, leaving in its passing a long narrow gash with edges that glowed with residual heat.
He managed to cover another twenty yards before the Test-71s hurtled into the ship directly below where the charge had cut the hull. The concussion from the twin explosions lifted him off his feet and threw him down the deck as water and torn metal geysered up from the blasts. The bow was torn free of the rest of the tanker and sank in an instant. The force of her passage through the ocean caused water to surge into her holds, forcing the nearly three quarter load of flocculent to squeeze toward the stern through the pipes that connected the tanks. A gout erupted from the tear in her side, sending gel squirting more than a hundred feet. They had known this would happen, but accepted it as a small price to pay as the remainder of the organic flocculent remained trapped within the ship.
Juan staggered to his feet, his head pounding with an unholy ring. Looking forward he could see the ocean climbing up over where the bow had been in a wall of water that seemed to grow in height as the ship settled into the sea’s embrace. TheGulf of Sidra was sealing her own fate as her massive diesel engine continued to turn the propeller, ramming her under the waves at seventeen knots.
“Juan, it’s George.” He looked up to see the chopper hovering above him. “I think I have enough fuel to make one attempt.”
“You won’t have time,” Juan said as he ran aft again. “This pig’s sinking faster than I thought she would.
She’ll be gone in less than a minute.”
“I’m going to try anyway. I’ll meet you at the stern rail.”
Cabrillo just kept running.
“And we’re coming in,” Max Hanley called from theOregon . “Rescue crews are gearing up now if you go into the drink.”
Juan ran on, coming down the starboard side of the ship so he could avoid where the hull had been breached. Behind him the sea climbed higher. Already a third of the tanker was awash and every second saw more of her go under.
He reached the superstructure and raced down the narrow space between it and the rail, his legs pumping up
