Chapter 21


It had turned out pretty much the way Calvin had predicted. The crew of the Roby Celeste simply had nothing but a series of bad choices and they took the lesser of all evils. When their tramp steamer moaned in a pain that sounded almost like a sea monster rising from the depths, all but the captain scrambled for their motor launch. It was about the only thing they had left that was seaworthy.

There had been eight of them to start with. The skipper of Roby Celeste had elected to stay on his bridge. He radioed Calvin and said as much. Cal just mournfully told the guy, “good luck pal.” Of course Calvin realized this was not some heroic act on the skipper’s part. If that guy came back without his ship then, the odds were, he would be over his head in debt to the Canadians. Drowning in water was sometimes a lot less painful than being in debt. That was particularly true where the Canadians were involved.

Of course, the skipper of the doomed ship probably also knew another little fact. Escaping to that launch was only prolonging his life by another few minutes. When they first tired to get it in the water, it sure looked that way. The combination of the waves and the steamers sudden pitch forward had managed to slam the launch right up against the larger vessels fantail. The launch was still attached to it’s wench lines and was swinging around like a ball at the end of a chain. That left several very large breaches in the launch that would most likely not hold back water. It also killed two of the crewman, one who was smashed and the other who fell twenty feet into the water and was never seen again.

The remaining six crewmen were not much better off. They managed to catch two breaks. The first one did not seem so lucky but, it got some major obstacles out of the way. When their ship slid beneath the surface it put them on it. One of them had the presence of mind to pull the safety pins on the wench system so, when Roby Celeste went down it did not take them with it.

Now, also, with the ship out of the way, Calvin could get the BMV closer to the survivors without the worry of smashing into the much larger freighter. Of course, that was the least of their worries at this point. The launch, or what was left of it, was in the opposite direction of the tidal current and the wind. Cal was afraid he was going to burn out his engines fighting that kind of force. It also meant they went airborne a few times, jumping swells. Normally jumping a wave would not be so bad since the BMV was built to handle that kind of thing. What it was not designed to do was go over a peak, and then fall a good three stories, through the air, and into a depression. Every time they jumped, Cal was holding his breath and praying.

The Rangers luck held out. The luck of the survivors didn’t, in a way. The first real swell they encountered had, predictably, flipped them over, bottoms up. It did serve them in one way. Now, at least, what was left of their boat was not sinking. Three of them had managed to hold on to, what was now, their capsized pile of wood. 

Cal was amazed because, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that Garcia had come up with a winning plan. Did he realize all of this was going to happen or was he just lucky? Cal kind of hoped that Garcia had just been lucky because, it would mean he was on a role and they needed all of it they could get with this stupid stunt.

Down in the hold, Johnson had taken over for Amy on the radio. She was now up on the deck helping Garcia. Even the most simple of tasks was not so monumental on an open deck. Johnson had to wonder if even two of them could get it done in time. What he was sure of was that he was of little use up there. He could, however, with the aid of a few motion sickness pills, try and raise the beach. There had been very little progress on that front.

No matter how frustrating it was they still had to try. Bob was only too well aware of the score. They had no idea where Kent was except that he was in the water. Shannon should know the exact coordinate but, the entire station was silent! Without those coordinates, it would have been rough finding Kent on a good day with clear weather. At night, in this storm, the chances were virtually nil.

There was some progress though. Bob switched over to intercom and called Cal up in the pilot house, “I raised Tony. He said he can’t get anybody on the radio either. He can’t even get Chuck.”

That made no sense. Chuck was in a damn bunker! He had all the weather monitoring equipment, and the stations com system, hard wired right into it! Cal looked out rear window of the cabin and saw Garcia and Amy out there. Garcia gave him a thumbs up. He then replied to Bob, “can he see the station?”

“Yeah,” Bob replied. “He said the tower is still up and the building looks fine, well, from a distance anyway.”

Again, that made no sense to Cal. Even if they had a failure at Ops, Chuck had the back up and was pretty safe where he was. The odds of the storm knocking out both stations was astronomically low. If the tower was still standing then that meant there was nothing wrong with it. All the radio tower had to do was just stand there!

It told Calvin two things. The first was that something was really wrong. The second thing, unfortunately, was that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Calvin huffed, gave a wave to Garcia, and prepared to do what stood about an even chance of swamping and flooding out his own vessel. If that happened there wasn’t going to be a soul on this planet that would come looking to rescue him. He gritted his teeth, put his hand on the throttle, and waited for the signal.

Out on the deck, Garcia looked up at the crane tower that they had finally managed to get wenched up as high as it would go. The crane’s swing arm was moaning every single time the boat pitched one way or another. The reason for that was the weight it was now holding in place, at the end of a line, some forty feet in the air. That weight, really just an empty metal storage box from the deck, should not have been taxing to the crane tower or the swing arm. The BMV’s were built with the idea of deep sea salvage and recovery. The box did not weigh anything near what the specs on the tower said it would lift. Then one had to consider that nobody had ever intended for this crane to be used in weather like this. Nobody had ever thought about swinging a heavy metal box around on the end of it either.

Amy crawled her way over to Garcia at the crane controls. She yelled at him over the noise of the storm, “that thing isn’t sounding too good!” She looked up at the arc it was making with every pitch of their boat. The motion was getting more violent with every swing.

Garcia was actually happy to see it, “just like fishing! You got to know when to…” Garcia judged it at the perfect point before he could finish his sentence. If he was wrong they were not likely to get another chance at this. He yanked the pin on the cranes base, that kept it from swiveling. He pushed down the lever that sent the cable, holding the box, into free motion. The crane snapped aft and the box went soaring into the air. Garcia had his hand on the lever as he watched his improvised, extra large, fishing rod do it’s job.

When the line looked to be the distance he wanted he pulled back on the lever, the wench locked into place, the line snapped tight, and the big metal box broke free. It hit the water and actually skipped a couple of times before it quickly vanished beneath the waves. The net, that had been balled up on the lines thick metal hook, broke free once the box was gone. It landed almost on top of the survivors and their capsized launch. It was not a direct hit but, it was close enough. The remaining two seaman abandoned their rapidly deteriorating life raft and grabbed the net. As Garcia had hoped, they were rapping themselves up in it. They understood enough to realize they were going to need to be pretty secured and that was without even knowing what was coming next. If they had it is possible they might never have left their destroyed launch.

Amy was amazed that it all worked. She had definitely had her doubts. She had been particularly concerned with having that damn box swinging around. If one thing had gone wrong it could have come down and smashed almost anything. That included both herself and Garcia, or worse, put a hole right through the BMV.

Amy even yelled at Garcia in relief, “watching that thing, I had images of Edgar Allen Poe!”

Garcia winced, “who the hell is that?”

“Oh,” Amy shrugged, “some movie star from the twentieth century.”

Now Garcia really winced, “they had movies in the twentieth century?”