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“Up you go, Nissa,” Cole ordered. He clipped a rope that Bass threw down onto the body harness they’d made her wear and which they’d used to lash her into their boat.
She looked up at the rope ladder swinging around over her head and gulped. He must have seen her hesitation because he moved up behind her and leaned forward to shout in her ear, off microphone, “I’ll be right behind you.”
Right. As if that was reassuring. At least she knew to grab the rope ladder from the side and not to try to go up it facing the rungs head-on. With one rope of the ladder against her cheek, she turned her feet pigeon-toed to climb the ladder.
It was okay for the first ten feet or so. But then the ship got sideways of a swell, and it tilted toward her sickeningly. The rope swung out into space. She wasn’t even over the SEALs’ boat anymore. Black water yawned below her. I’m going to die. Frozen in terror, she squeezed her eyes shut and clung to the ladder for dear life.
The ship tilted back the other way, and the ladder swung back toward the ship, slamming her into the cold steel hull. She lost her grip on the wet ladder and swung out to the side on the safety rope, smashing into the ship’s hull hard enough to knock the wind out of her. She screamed, but the sound was ripped away from her by a huge gust of wind and rain that hit her with the force of a fire hose.
“Grab the ladder!” someone shouted.
She opened her eyes and swung sickeningly out in space as the ship rolled again, black water reaching up to her and the listing ship looming above, as if it was about to come down on her head and drag her to the bottom of the sea.
Panic paralyzed her so completely that she couldn’t even form thoughts, let alone take action. She bumped along the hull of the ship as it tilted away from her, and by some miracle, she banged into something hard and rough. The rope ladder. She grabbed it with both hands and wrapped her legs around the rope, hanging on with superhuman strength she didn’t know she possessed. God bless adrenaline.
A big green shape came up the ladder. It didn’t stop at her feet, though. It moved up behind her until the figure’s head was at her waist.
“Keep going!” It was Cole.
Not. A. Chance.
No way was she letting go of the rope to keep climbing.
He climbed until his head was level with hers, his body spooning hers, his longer arms grasping the rope ladder around her slender frame. Warmth from his body penetrated the back of her wet suit as he plastered his entire body against hers.
“One foot. Just put your right foot up one rung for me,” he shouted into her ear as another huge gust of wind buffeted them. “It’ll be calmer on the deck of the ship.” His breath was warm against her exposed cheek. He felt alive. Vital. Real in the midst of this unreal nightmare.
He patiently talked her through the rest of the climb, one hand and one foot at a time. Bass kept tension on her safety rope from above, helping her make the climb, and Cole steadied her with his big body and strong arms, protecting her from the worst of the storm.
It took a lifetime, but eventually Bass hauled her onto the deck beside him. She lay on her belly and although there was nothing left in her stomach, she dry heaved anyway, so terrified she didn’t think she was ever going to be the same again.
Of course, Ashe jogged up the ladder as if it was a walk in the damned park. The party all aboard, they knelt together in the shadow of a pile of containers, shadows among the shadows in their black sea-land suits and black facial camo grease. Of course, she looked the same, her blond hair tucked under her neoprene hood, her skin blackened like theirs.
“Any sign of movement out here?” Perriman asked.
Bass replied, “Negative.”
The deck tilted steeply beneath her, and she looked down at water as the ship listed worse than ever.
“Man, she feels top-heavy,” Cole remarked.
Ashe replied, “She looks violently misloaded. Death trap. This storm gets much worse, and she’s going down.”
“Then let’s get our guy and get the heck off her,” Perriman ordered. “You have your orders.” He glanced at Nissa huddling miserably against a container and said off mike, “You’re with me.”
The team split up and ran off in different directions to search the ship. She and Cole were supposed to make their way to the bridge. He was going to have a word with the captain and obtain the guy’s cooperation—at gunpoint if necessary. The other team members would go below decks, searching the ship and making their way to the bridge by other means.
Hanging on to the deck rail with both hands, she followed Perriman aft toward the conning tower. In a storm this bad, they didn’t expect to see any crew above deck, and indeed, the open area between the tall stacks of shipping containers and the ship’s superstructure aft was deserted and dark.
Perriman stopped in front of a hatch, and she endured a nauseating roll by the Anna Belle way over to one side, the sickening pause while the ship teetered on the brink of capsizing, and then the roll back the other way.
How Cole unlocked the steel door, she had no idea. But she was relieved when he threw it open. She dived inside and helped him haul the heavy door shut against gravity as the ship rolled again. He threw the handle and latched the door behind them.
The relative quiet and the relief from the hammering pain of hurricane-driven rain was intense. The ship still rolled like a big dog beneath her feet, but in here, she couldn’t see the ocean and had less of a sense of being ready to capsize.
Perriman hand-signaled her to follow him. She nodded and fell in behind him as he raced silently up a set of metal stairs. He paused at the doorway to the next deck, peering through a tiny window before opening the door. Bracing herself against the wall as the ship rocked, she followed him into what looked like a small dining room.
“Stay here,” Cole breathed.
Gladly. She nodded and he disappeared behind a swinging door into the kitchen, according to the ship’s diagrams that they’d studied on the helicopter ride out here. Perriman swung back into view, staggering a little as the ship heaved.
“Clear,” he announced.
Deck by deck, the two of them cleared their way up the superstructure toward the bridge. Oddly, they didn’t run into a single crew member. Maybe the captain had sent everyone to strap themselves in the sleeping quarters below decks to ride out the storm. Cole had mentioned that such a thing was possible, so she wasn’t completely freaked out by how deserted the command portion of the ship was.
They turned the corner to the last flight of steps leading to the bridge. Unlike the living areas below, this space was guaranteed to have crew members in it. Cole paused, checked over his shoulder that she was ready with her pistol drawn and then he charged the bridge.
She went in on his heels, awkwardly spinning left as the deck tilted underfoot to cover Cole’s back as he spun to cover the right half of the space.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed.
The bridge was deserted.
From up here, she could see outside again, and the ship rolled dangerously far over onto its side as she glanced out. From this high up in the air, the list was even more pronounced, and she all but froze again in panic.
Perriman jabbed at his throat mike. “Bridge is abandoned. I repeat. Abandoned. Report if able.”
Bass and Ashe both reported immediately that they’d been unable to find any crew members aboard the vessel.
“Complete your search and join us on the bridge,” he ordered.
She looked over the panel of controls. Every needle was at zero. The ship was completely shut down. This could not be good. “Can we start the engines or something?” she asked.
“Diesel engines are not as simple to start as flipping a switch. But maybe I could get a generator online.” Perriman fiddled with a set of controls to one side of the ship’s wheel, and then swore quietly. She gathered that meant they weren’t going to get any lights on.
“Batteries are dead, too.”
“Has the crew abandoned ship?” Nissa asked.
Perriman frowned. “They sent no distress signals.”
“Maybe there was no time to send one?”
“The ship’s still afloat. Granted not for long the way she’s listing, but still. We could send a signal right now if we had even an inch of battery power. I can’t believe they ran the batteries all the way down before they got out a call for help.”
The door opened behind them and Nissa spun fast, jumpy as heck, weapon drawn. It was Bass and Ashe.
“Funny thing, boss,” Bass said. “The generators looked like someone took a sledgehammer to them. The batteries were pulled free of their moorings and smashed up, too.”
“The engines?”
“I couldn’t see any damage at a glance,” Ashe replied. “But I got nothing when I tried to start up the diagnostic panel at the engineer’s panel. I looked under the console and found a bunch of ripped out wires beneath it.”
Curious, Nissa dropped to her knees to take a peek under the dashboard in front of her. “Uh, guys. All the wires and conduits I’m seeing down here are trashed, too.”
“So the ship’s been sabotaged,” Cole responded. “Why?”
The ship leaned particularly far onto its port side just then and everyone grabbed on to something to stay upright. She stared in dread at the tall stacks of containers tilting perilously.
“I’ve being doing weight and balance calculations on ships my whole naval career, and I’ve never seen a ship this badly loaded. The manifest showed the cargo spread out in three layers over the entire deck, not stacked six high all afore midships like this,” Ashe complained. “She feels too light in the water for the weight listed on the manifest, too.”
Cole looked at him keenly. “What are you saying?”
Ashe shrugged asking instead, “Hey, Bass. Are the holds full to the brim with wheat like the manifest said?”
“Negative. All the holds are empty.”
“Holy hell,” Ashe breathed. “Sir, we have to get off this ship immediately. She’s in imminent danger of capsizing.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, the storm’s getting worse. Fast. The idea was to turn this ship around and sail it back to New Orleans with the prisoner in custody.”
Ashe replied urgently, “Even if we could get the engines running, this ship is top-heavy as hell and has no ballast below decks. I can’t believe she hasn’t gone over already. I’m telling you, sir, we have to get off the Anna Belle now.”
“And you’re sure no one but us is still aboard?” Cole asked.
Bass and Ashe both nodded and murmured in the affirmative.
Perriman ordered tersely, “Let’s get out of here, ASAP.”
After that, it was all elbows and assholes as they raced downstairs, Ashe’s warning ringing in Nissa’s ears.
The trip back down the rope ladder of doom wasn’t nearly as bad for Nissa because she was so bloody relieved to be getting off the Anna Belle. She’d had enough of those rolls and those endless, breathless pauses while the ship debated capsizing.
She landed in the SEALs’ tiny boat with relief. They might be a cork in this vessel, but it was better than being aboard the doomed Anna Belle.
They untied their mooring lines and motored away from the big ship. Nissa had never breathed so big a sigh of relief to be away from the Anna Belle.
“Nearest land?” Cole asked from his position at the tiller.
“Louisiana coast. Nearly a hundred nautical miles,” Bass answered.
Yikes. Even traveling at twenty knots, it would take them hours to make shore. Hours for the storm to intensify around them.
They’d been lucky to catch a ride outbound on a big Coast Guard cutter heading into the gulf to take measurements of the approaching storm, but they’d made no arrangements for a lift back to New Orleans. The plan had been to sail the Anna Belle back.
“Do we have enough fuel to make it?” Ashe asked practically.
Oh, hell. Now she had running out of gas to worry about.
“Close, but enough,” Cole replied casually.
Jeez. What else could go wrong?
“Give me a course heading for the nearest land,” Cole ordered Bass.
While Cole steered, the other two men put up a framework of curved poles and stretched a tarp over them, lashing it down tight. It created a low clamshell covering over the vessel. It didn’t keep out all the rain, but it knocked down the worst of the water and wind. They still had to use a motorized pump to empty water out of the hull, and the ride was rough as all get-out. But after the rolling of the Anna Belle, this freezing-cold misery was a boon. And their boat wasn’t trying to capsize.
Until Bass, on the radio again, shouted something directly into Cole’s ear off headset that put a grim look on the man’s face.
Cole ordered over the radio, “Everyone don a life vest and let’s go ahead and put Nissa into an exposure kit.”
An exposure kit turned out to be a body-sized pouch of some slick neoprene-like material that encompassed her entire body and attached to the donut-shaped life vest the guys inflated around her neck.
“What’s this for?” she asked as Cole checked the connections around her neck.
He paused at his task to gaze at her from a range of about one foot. Lord, he was gorgeous with those lean cheeks and firm jaw. His voice rumbled comfortingly. “If you end up in the water, the kit provides a layer of insulation to extend how long you can survive hypothermia by hours or days. It also protects you from sharks. They can’t smell you through the material. In pockets attached to the interior of the bag are water, rations, a small desalinization kit, a GPS locator beacon, a mirror and an emergency radio. My team and I know how to climb into one in the water and bail out any seawater. But since you haven’t had the training, we’re popping you into yours now, to be safe. Try to think of it as a sleeping bag, and it won’t freak you out so bad.”
“Thanks.”
How did he know that being wrapped up in this giant condom was scaring her half to death? She’d always struggled with claustrophobia, and this situation wasn’t helping matters one little bit. She fought like crazy not to hyperventilate and hung on by a bare thread to the ability to breathe.
She muttered under her breath, “Please, God, don’t let me need this stupid contraption.”
Cole cracked the first smile she’d seen from him. Even in the dark, it was dazzling. “It’s purely a precaution.”
But when he had all four of them lash their safety harnesses together with rope and bungee cord, she had to wonder just how unnecessary a precaution it really was.
They finished the Boy Scout knot project before she asked on radio, “Does someone want to tell me why we’re suddenly preparing for disaster, here?”
Bass answered, “Jessamine has gone from a Category 1 to a Category 3 hurricane in the past few hours. Weather service is now forecasting that she’ll spin up into a high Cat 4 or Cat 5.”
“Isn’t that just special?” she responded sarcastically.
Everyone laughed.
Seriously? They could laugh while sailing around in the middle of a hurricane in a rowboat with motors?
The SEALs took turns at the tiller, wrestling the ocean until they became exhausted and had to switch out. The interminable journey settled into a steady-state nightmare, and the team chatted on headset to pass the time. The good news was the hurricane wind at their backs was blowing them landward at an impressive clip, shaving hours off their journey.
Ashe took the radio from Bass and had an earnest conversation with someone at the other end that culminated in him saying, “Let me know when you’ve run the numbers.”
Ashe piped up after a few minutes, “The Coast Guard has pulled the Anna Belle’s manifest and compared it against what we saw on the ship. She definitely left New Orleans with a belly full of wheat. But sometime in the past twenty-four hours, the ship’s crew must have dumped all of it overboard.”
That made everyone frown. The weight of the wheat low in the ship’s belly would have been critical to making the ship safe and stable.
“And,” Ashe continued, “the Coast Guard checked with the harbormaster. She left the port of New Orleans loaded three deep in containers across her entire deck, not six deep, all fore of the beam, like we found her. The crew of the ship moved the containers after they sailed. They intentionally built a high-profile stack that would catch the most wind.”
“Were they trying to sink the ship?” Nissa blurted.
