Infernal

MONDAY

Jack awoke in the dark not knowing where he was or why the room was rocking or where the hell that awful noise reverberating through his skull was coming from.

He hit his head as he sat up.

"What the—?"

And then he realized where he was.

Tom's boat.

Okay. That explained everything but the noise… a booming moan… like a foghorn…

Or another ship!

Jack lurched to his feet, trying to remember where the steps up to the deck were… left or right? He guessed left, found them, and started up.

What was he worried about? He and Tom had split the nighttime steering chores into two six-hour shifts. Jack had taken the first. Talk about boring—the boat drove itself, leaving him nothing to do but make sure none of the equipment failed. He'd caught himself dozing off a couple of times.

Finally his six hours—seeming like twelve or more—were up. He'd yanked Tom out of his bunk and sent him topside.

Tom would be up there now. Even if he'd dozed off at some point, that horn would have awakened him.

Jack reached the deck. At last—light. Not much. The cockpit's instruments and running lights didn't cast much of a glow, but enough to see what was what.

The first thing Jack noticed was the unmanned helm. He did a slow turn, checking the deck chairs, expecting to find Tom slumped in one, but they were empty.

Jack was the only one here.

His gut tightened. Where was Tom? Had he fallen over—

Another booming honk—louder than ever—shook the boat. Jack turned toward the bow./p>

"Oh, shit!"

Ahead and to his left—port, north, whatever—a looming supertanker, a mile long if it was a foot, lit up like some bioluminescent behemoth, plowed through the black water on a collision course. Obviously the Sahbon had shown up on the tanker's radar or whatever it was ships used to detect each other, and it was sending out a warning that Jack read loud and clear:

Yo, pip-squeak! No way I can stop or turn, so it's up to you.

The tanker's prow plowed along less than a hundred yards ahead at eleven o'clock, with the Sahbon aimed like an arrow across its path.

Jack had a flash vision of the collision, the Sahbon reduced to kindling while the tanker barely noticed the impact—a fly glancing off an elephant's thigh.

Panic hurled Jack to the cockpit, where he grabbed the wheel and—

Which way to turn? Left? Right?

He chose left. Or port. Whatever. If he couldn't completely avoid contact with the tanker, at least he might escape with a glancing blow. He spun the wheel as fast and as far as it would go. Holding on as the deck tilted under him, he found the throttle and hauled back on it, reducing the power but not fully cutting it—no power would mean no control.

The Sahbon was slow to respond, but it came around. It would miss the prow, but a long, long span of reinforced steel remained to be dealt with.

Just then the Sahbon hit the tanker's bow wave square on, lifting the front half of the hull clear of the water as it came over the top. The boat angled downward, plowing deep into the water behind the wave and killing most of its momentum.

Jack yanked the throttle back to idle and looked at the knobby expanse of riveted steel sliding by.

Close… too goddamn close.

Above he saw half a dozen figures backlit by the wash from the tanker's superstructure lights, standing along the rail, looking at him. One of them gave him the single-digit salute.

Jack waved. We deserve that, he thought.

No, wait… not we…

A noise behind him. He turned to see a bleary-eyed Tom emerging from below.

"I just got tossed out of my bunk. What the fuck's going on, Jack? What are you doing up here?"

Jack wanted to kill him—flatten his nose, knock out a few teeth, and toss him overboard—but he limited himself to grabbing Tom by the scruff of the neck and yanking him around to face the tanker.

"Avoiding a collision with that!"

He felt Tom stiffen in his grasp, then go slack.

"Jesus, God!" He looked at Jack, his face a mask of shock. "What… how…?"

"How?" Jack shook him by the neck. "You sack out on your shift—worse than sack out, you left the helm unattended—and you have the goddamn nerve to ask me how?"

"Hey, fuck you, Jack!" Tom said, regaining some of his bluster. "You don't know shit about any of this. I'm the one who's made this trip before. I'm the one—"

"You're the one who was supposed to be up here, watching the store. That was our deal."

"Screw the deal. I've made this trip on my own lots of times. I always sack out while she's running at night. You know what the chances are of seeing another boat let alone crossing paths with one? Astronomical!"

"Well, so far in my experience we're one for one. One hundred percent. But I don't care how many trips you slept through the night before. On this trip we agreed—"

"Would you forget about that? You're like an old—"

Jack punched him. Once. In the gut. Then he headed below. He turned at the top of the stairway. Tom was bent almost double, one hand clutching the gunwale, the other pressed against his stomach.

"Here's a new deal: You set so much as one foot downstairs before sunup and you're shark food."

He slammed the door behind him.