CHAPTER FIVE
CHRISTIAN
The last of the passengers comes off The Sovereign at dawn, and I count her down the ladder myself.
An old woman, ninety if she’s a day, furious about leaving her cabin, gripping my forearm with a strength that surprises us both. “You’re the owner,” she says, rain running down her face. “I’ve seen you in the brochures.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Your ship is sinking.”
“My ship is hurt,” I say. “She’s not sinking, and neither are you. Down you go.” I pass her to the tender crew and she goes, still scolding me, and I would gladly take her scolding every day for a year rather than carry one more body count home from this sea.
Okafor appears at my shoulder. “That’s everyone, Mr. Morse. Passengers and nonessential crew. The ship is yours, God help us both.”
“She was always mine,” I say. “That’s the problem.”
We stand a moment, two men in the rain watching our life get towed out from under us.
Okafor has captained for Morse Oceanic for eleven years, and before that he captained for my father, back when the fleet was three ferries and a prayer.
He knew me at twenty-five, all jaw and opinions, and he never once let me near a decision I wasn’t qualified to make.
“The tow will reach her by tomorrow night if the sea allows,” he says. “I’ve left my best skeleton crew aboard. Pumps holding, generators holding. She’ll wait for us, sir.”
“She’d better. I promised my wife this ship was unsinkable, in so many words, and I’d like to stay married.”
Okafor gives me the look he gives green officers. “Ships don’t keep marriages, Mr. Morse.”
He goes to supervise the tow preparations, and I stand there longer than I should, because he’s right and I don’t have a reply ready.
We’re on the embarkation deck where eighteen hours ago I put my wife and daughter on a lifeboat.
The sea has not improved. The Sovereign sits heavy and wounded, her forward sections sealed, her pumps holding, and she will make port under tow when the weather allows, because I built her too well to die of one bad night.
I believe it because ships are simple. Ships do what physics says.
People don’t.
Aubriella finds me on the wing of the bridge an hour later, two coffees in hand, headset around her neck, dry for the first time in a day. She hands me a coffee and a situation.
“The Meridian Belle,” she says. “Evacuation charter running the northern passage with passengers off the two smaller ships. She’s reporting engine trouble. One engine down, steering sluggish, sea state building where she is.”
Before that, though, the manifest.
I make Aubriella wait while I pull the Morse Cay arrival list on the bridge terminal, because paperwork is how I pray.
The tender logs came across an hour ago: every name off The Sovereign accounted for, checked into the resort, room assignments attached.
I scroll to the M’s with my heart somewhere it has no business being, and there they are.
MORSE, HAZEL. MORSE, MAREN, INFANT. Main building, third floor.
I stand in the red glow of the weather display and read two lines of a spreadsheet, and my hands stop shaking for the first time since the impact alarm sounded.
Arrived. Checked in. Inside my building, behind my glass, on my island.
“Mr. Morse.” Aubriella, patient, headset in her other hand. “The charter vessel.”
“How many aboard?”
“Two hundred and change. Plus crew.” She doesn’t dress it up.
She never does. It’s why she’s beside me in every crisis I’ve managed for six years.
“Coast Guard assets are stretched across the whole system. Our two fast response boats are an hour from her. The command cutter is the best platform and it’s here, with us. ”
I look at the weather display. The red mass that broke my ship has sagged south and east, dragging its trailing edge across the whole island chain.
Morse Cay sits on the display as a small green dot with a status flag beside it, and the flag says what it’s been saying all night: PARTIAL POWER LOSS, STRUCTURES STABLE.
“Island report first,” I say.
“Partial power loss, main generator offline, backup holding. Service dock damaged, main dock operational. Structures stable, no injuries, supplies adequate.” She reads it flat, no color, the way I want reports.
“Doyle’s people have it in hand. The Belle is two hundred people in open water with one engine and a steering fault, in seas that are getting worse. ”
I take the coffee. It’s terrible. Everything on a damaged ship is terrible. “Get me a direct line to the island before we move.”
I get Hazel on the satellite phone while the cutter is being readied, standing in the lee of the bridge wing with the handset pressed to my skull, and the connection is the worst I’ve had. She comes through in pieces.
“Tell me Maren’s okay.”
“She’s fine. She’s—” Static. “—slept through most of it. The resort is—” Static, a long hole of it. “—dock is damaged.”
“I know,” I say. “The service dock. Main dock is operational.”
“Do you?” Her voice sharpens through the mush.
“Some rooms are without power. Ours went out this morning. Christian, the engineers said the generator housing got soaked, I heard them—” Gone.
Five seconds of nothing. Then: “—don’t know what it’s like standing here watching pieces of this island float away. ”
“The main structures are rated for double what they’re getting. I wrote the specs myself.”
“I know you designed the specs.” Something in her voice I can’t read through the static, or don’t want to. “You keep telling me what the island can survive. I’m telling you what it’s like inside it.”
“You’re safe, Hazel. Wet and uncomfortable and furious at me, but safe. I need you to hold that for a little longer.”
“And where will you be while I hold it?”
The line dies before I answer, which is maybe a mercy, because the answer is: somewhere else. The answer is always somewhere else.
I dial back. The satellite declines to cooperate. I dial again and get thirty seconds of static shaped like my wife and then nothing. Doyle’s office confirms through the island relay that all guests are secure, backup power online, no injuries.
I tell the relay operator to get a message to my wife: connection failed, I’m moving to support a vessel in distress, the island is holding, I’ll call as soon as I have signal.
The operator repeats it back in the flat singsong of a man reading a grocery list, and my marriage gets transcribed between a water-order confirmation and a diesel report.
My father ran his ferries the same way, always out on the worst boat in the worst weather, and my mother waited on dock after dock with a thermos and a face that never once showed him what it cost.
I decided young that I’d never put a woman through that.
I married a woman who laughs at my jokes and reads me better than my own board, and I’ve put her on a storm-battered island with our daughter and a promise, and the promise is true, and I keep having to say that to myself, which is the first crack in it.
Aubriella is waiting for me at the rail above the cutter’s deck, hood up against the rain. She doesn’t ask how the call went. She watches me put the phone away and gives me the bottom line instead.
“The island is holding,” she says. “The evacuation vessel isn’t.”
I stand there with the rain running off me and do the math I’ve done my whole career, the math my father taught me on his first ferry with a bilge pump and a bible.
Open water kills. Walls don’t. People on a crippled boat in rising seas, against my wife and daughter inside a building I overbuilt with my own arrogance and my own money.
There is no version of the math where the building loses.
“If that were your family on the island?” I ask her.
Aubriella looks at me level, rain on her face, and answers without a flicker. “I’d want you to save the people who could drown tonight.”
She’s right. God help me, she’s right, and the worst of it is that she knows she’s right and has no idea what it costs to be. For her it’s calculation. She’s never stood on a dock watching a lifeboat carry away the only two people who’d notice if she drowned.
“Direct the response boats to the Meridian Belle,” I tell the operations chief on the cutter’s radio net. “We’re transferring command and moving to support. I want continuous status on Morse Cay, thirty-minute intervals, and I want to know the second anything there changes. Anything.”
“Thirty-minute intervals, confirmed,” the chief says. “And sir? The Coast Guard liaison wants to know if Morse Oceanic’s chairman is seriously riding out to a civilian evacuation vessel in a storm.”
I look back at The Sovereign, my wounded flagship, her lights dim on emergency power, riding the rain with her bow up, patient, waiting to be told she’s been good.
Somewhere south and east of her is a green dot with my whole heart inside it, in a building I promised was safe, and I meant the promise, and the promise is holding, by every report I have.
“Tell him the chairman doesn’t sit out his own company’s emergency.”
The transfer across is serious seamanship, the sort I pay other men to perform and insist on watching anyway. The cutter comes alongside The Sovereign on the lee side, both hulls working, a gangway rigged between them that rises and falls six feet with every swell.
I go across with my bag and my radio and the sick, familiar vertigo of leaving a ship in trouble.
Halfway over, the gangway drops away under my boots and the void between the hulls opens up, black water gnashing between two walls of steel, and then it rises to meet me and I’m across and a bosun’s mate is steadying my arm and I’m fine, I’m across, I’ve done this a hundred times.
Aubriella comes over behind me without ceremony, tablet in a waterproof case slung across her chest like a bandolier.
On the cutter’s bridge she plugs straight into their comms and starts talking to the response boats, and within three minutes the cutter’s captain is standing slightly to one side of his own command space, watching her work with the expression of a man whose orchestra has been politely seized by the first violin. He doesn’t object. Nobody ever does.
“Meridian Belle confirms steering casualty,” she reports. “They’re holding course on one engine but they can’t maneuver. Coast Guard rescue helicopter is forty minutes out, weather-dependent. Our response boats, fifty.”
“And us?”
“Seventy-five minutes at best speed in this.”
Seventy-five minutes for two hundred people on a boat that can’t steer.
I look at the chart table, at the penciled positions, at the small green dot already sliding toward the edge of the plot.
Morse Cay. PARTIAL POWER LOSS, STRUCTURES STABLE.
My wife is wet and angry and behind my glass.
My passengers are in open water on a boat that can’t turn.
The cutter pulls away from the ship and turns its bow into the weather, north and east, toward the open water, toward two hundred strangers in trouble I can fix.
Behind us the island chain slides down off the edge of the radar coverage, one green dot at a time, and I tell myself the flag still says STRUCTURES STABLE, and I don’t check again for a long time.