Mutations

By Elizabeth Cameron

Grieving from the untimely death of his fiance, Ryan Winslow, the young dynamic director of the Fallbrook Museum boards a freighter in Southeast Asia bound for Prince Rupert. Then during a severe storm off the coastal shipping lanes, the freighter collides with a tanker. The passengers are alive in the bow of the freighter, 624 feet below the surface.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elizabeth Cameron
• Release date: Jun 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476486789

Elizabeth Cameron

Elizabeth Cameron is a known artist having published many non-fiction books as well as a syndicated newspaper column.Retirement has enabled her to concentrate on her true love of suspenseful and mysterious novels.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

It was a mortal wound. Swift, savage, brutal. Tearing, wrenching, crushing and devouring steel, men and machinery.

Despite gale force winds that hurled the sea in waves fifty five feet high, the tanker’s two GM 2 radar scanners and G.P.S. satellite had, since 1838 hours, picked up and plotted the size, speed and heading of the freighter, the information repeating itself every three minutes on the monitor. Variations had been instantly identified, putting into action the small yellow flashing light on the console panel and the gentle but persistent beeping of the auditory signal. The collision had been anticipated - even calculated. Yet in the last three minutes and forty seven seconds, it had been inescapable.

On board the tanker, 1st. officer Bryce Sanders had needed neither warning. In the preceding thirty-two minutes, his attempts to communicate with the freighter had taken on a desperate urgency, first, via the satellite system and then VHF radio. But after the freighter’s third erratic course, his urgency had turned to alarm. To Captain Charles Enright summoned to the bridge of the tanker by the now very worried 1st. officer, the continued silence that yawned back in response foreshadowed the impending critical situation. The tanker, a twenty five-deck-high structure of iron skin stretched tautly over her liquid belly she was bearing down fast on the freighter, now dead ahead of them, with horn blasting and lights blazing. Her vulnerable steel hull, twelve fathoms deep, was trapped in the narrow channel between the coastal reefs, a channel so narrow that for its one hundred and twenty three mile length, gave the tanker no option to change her heading more than a few degrees.

The engines at full astern, had only slowed the tanker by three knots. She needed far more maneuvering room than the channel provided to change course and she needed almost seven miles – some fourteen minutes to come to a complete stop.

One mile and closing, the collision was imminent. The alarm system shrieked through the ship, sending the damage control parties to their stations. At one thousand feet, the klaxon barked the emergency impact alarm. Men in florescent orange fire suits secured their positions by the main valves of the firefighting equipment. Each man knew that he could be catapulted into the night like a human firefly. Or incinerated by molten metal that would reach two thousand degrees.

Strangely, for those aboard the tanker, the impact was almost imperceptible. The collision registered only as a subtle shudder in the bowels of the super tanker as she ploughed through tons of water, her course unaltered and her speed only slightly impaired.

For the passengers and crew on board the freighter, however, the impact was lethal. Thirteen died quickly. But not quickly enough to be spared the horror of their impending fate.

On the bridge Captain Nicoli Kropopolis, and the first mate saw their death approaching. In a few brief seconds, the bulkheads around them gave way under the impact crushing them to pulp and leaving only their bloody remains to be washed into the sea. The passengers, some of whom who had had the good fortune not to become seasick from the turbulence during the storm, were now the next to die.

Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Manager had finally ventured out of their cabin, thoroughly frightened by the high winds and heavy seas. They had just made their way to the main lounge when the deck beneath their feet suddenly erupted and flung them savagely through a window and into the sea.

Shiela and Mike Anderson with their adult Down’s syndrome daughter, Debbie, had remained in their cabin. They huddled in terror at the sudden noise and then at the water that seeped down the walls and under the door. Suddenly a bulkhead gave way and turned the cabin into their coffin.

Nancy Pollock, a fifty two year old Australian had remained in the lounge, determined to persevere through the turbulence of the storm of the past hours by putting her nose in a good book and stubbornly ignoring everybody and everything. The clear high scream of ruptured metal caused the book to drop from her hands. She staggered across the heaving floor, wretched open the door leading to the main gangway and fell screaming into the sea.

Phyllis Derosa had remained prostrate on her narrow bunk, hours of seasickness leaving her exhausted. Never in her life had she felt so ill. For the hundredth time she wished she could die.

She got her wish.

Alarmed to find the tiny cabin suddenly tilting at an extreme angle, she crawled from the bunk and slid her flabby thighs over the edge till her feet found the edge of the lower bunk and then the floor. She staggered uphill to the door only to find it stuck.

Eddie...can you hear me...Eddie? She tugged and pulled at the door, twisting the handle with both hands.

EDDIE! HELP! SOMEONE...HELP! Horrified she looked back over her shoulder to find the lower bunk now almost under water. She screamed and beat at the door, kicking with her bare feet, her small round eyes filled with terror, while she gasped and choked and cried out at the top of her lungs.

One of the oilers, Big Jimmy Johnson Jr., in the engine room was remembering as a child the details of the nightmare his father had told him when in those dark days of forty one his father had been plucked from the waters of the Atlantic after a U-boat had sent a torpedo into the belly of his destroyer. He had been one of only twenty-six men who had survived.

The oiler, Big Jimmy, did not.

For one crew member in the boiler room, Ne'oan Cheung, it was the water that suddenly gushed from behind the main boiler, throwing him against the bulkhead. It was sea water. But how could that be? He was trying to comprehend such a thing when a half second later, the deck above his head collapsed on top of him.

The freighter broke in two as if split by an enormous steel chisel, screaming as ligaments of wire and cable snapped like angry cobras. For moments, reluctant as all things are to accept a watery grave, the trapped air gave the doomed ship the buoyancy to cling to the surface. But as the sea water gushed in, it squeezed the life sustaining air out. The stern section, laden with heavy machinery and with few air pockets, was the first to go. It thrust a ragged wounded belly into the air and sank, in less than two minutes.

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 23rd. 0200 HOURS

CHAPTER 2

On board the tanker, Captain Enright was now called on to make what might have appeared, to those unfamiliar with vessels and the sea, a heartless and callous decision. It was the only one he could make. At thirteen knots the tanker left the remains of its encounter behind, and proceeded on course. The debris, an oil slick and perhaps now only a fragment of human life if not already dead, then in temperatures not many degrees above freezing, doomed to become so, lay in the tankers wake.

It was a decision based on his ultimate responsibility, that of the safety of his ship and the lives of his crew. At the moment he feared that both might be in critical danger. Nothing on the master console registered damage. Nothing in the fire alert systems indicated the presence of flame, smoke, fumes or gas. All stations had reported.

All twenty-four crew members were uninjured and accounted for. On the surface it might have appeared to a less experienced man, that all was well. Not to Enright. Nothing on the console would tell him if damage, however slight, had ruptured the hull. Nine tenths below the water like an iceberg, fully laden as she was now, she could be taking on water. There could be a constant defecation of oil leaking before her sensitive ballast loading monitors would indicate any discrepancy. And then what? They could do nothing. Caught already in heavy seas in a narrow channel with a cargo as volatile as any at sea, she would be unpredictable to handle at best, and at the worst, an enormous drunken vessel out of control.

If her crude oil tanks had been punctured, she would be leaking devastation and death to birds and sea life for hundreds of miles of coastal and fishing waters, regarded as some of the best in the world. A single spark in or near those same tanks could set off an explosion that would blow the ship right out of the sea.

Yet for all her vulnerability, she was a hundred and fifty million dollar symbol of man's engineering genius. She was two thousand and twenty four feet long, over six football fields in length. In fact, it would take an athlete, running a four-minute mile, twelve seconds to run the width of the upper deck. The crew habitually used bicycles to move about the ship.

Built in Oppama Shipyard in Sumitomi, Japan she was one of the three largest tankers ever built. She had been destined to remain at sea, a homeless offspring to be rejected by every country whose harbors could not accommodate the seventy-two foot draught. Instead, four deep sea terminals stretched umbilical cords out into the sea to receive her cargo. One of them was her destination. Now, like a great whale she plunged onward to this sanctuary.

From her communications room, four messages had been dispatched almost simultaneously, setting in motion safeguards, mostly political, that would bear out the actions of the captain and the crew.

The first call went out to the Canadian Coast Guard whose vessels would be the first to reach the site of the collision. Then, Air Sea Rescue would fly in their amphibians and helicopters at dawn. The area would be photographed. Debris would be picked up. They would search for survivors. But that was a mere formality. The tanker's powerful searchlights had been trained aft for any trace of a lifeboat or raft. They had spotted nothing. It would have been almost impossible, given the speed at which the freighter had gone down, that one could have been launched. Even if it had, weathering such high winds and heavy seas for more than a few minutes was unlikely.

The second call went out on the international emergency channel to all ships in the area. Not every ship that sinks goes straight to the bottom. The sea is a complicated structure of thermal layers and streams. A ship might sink beneath the surface and remained suspended at a shallow depth submerged for hours, even days. Unchartered, unknown, it could lurk below the surface, a lethal obstacle to numerous ships that may respond in aid. The call therefore was to warn other vessels to remain clear of the area until it could be verified that the waters were free of underwater hazards.

The third call was a request for escort vessels once she was out of the channel. An expensive and perhaps unnecessary move, Enright would take no chances. For seven hours he would have no way of confirming his ship’s response to navigational instruments. After the seven hours it would take to clear Glacier Channel and reach Barsley Point, he would then have to make a change in heading, course and speed. Tugs would be there waiting if and when he needed them.

The Asia Acana Shipping Headquarters was the fourth to receive a call, put through on a high priority line that in turn summoned to the telephone, over the next forty five minutes, men in London, New York, Hong Kong. A legal counsel of some of the finest minds in the shipping industry began the carefully rehearsed procedures for defensive measures that would allow them to conduct their duel, if necessary in court for months, even years. Inevitably, Lloyd's of London was among the inner sanctum. Within two hours, arrangements had been made to have three senior inspectors flown to Seattle, ready to be helicoptered to the tanker as soon as possible.

For the next hour messages were dispatched and received, directives given and acknowledged. It was a formula adhered to as precisely as the most exacting traditions of the sea, for this was an incident that could likely result in financial, political and environmental ramifications of global consequence. There were those in high places who had been waiting for just such an accident.

Of least concern was the freighter. What remained of her would by now have been broken and scattered over miles of the raging sea. The tanker crew had glimpsed the few faded letters of her name and guessed at her tonnage. It was three hours and twenty minutes before she was identified. The Athenia. One hundred and twenty tons. Panamanian registry. Last port Yokohama, Japan, enroute to Prince Rupert. Six officers, twelve crew members, cook, steward, doctor and thirty-two passengers. Her agents were notified and began the unpleasant task of confirming the names of those known to have been aboard. Port by port, confirmation of all passengers and crew was determined. A deckhand had failed to return at Aberdeen, Hong Kong. He'd been replaced at Stanley. One passenger had booked San Francisco to Canton only. Another had boarded at Macao. Slowly the brief profiles of those lost and presumed dead were confirmed. As for the ship, the crew and the events that had precipitated the loss, little would ever be known.

In the shipping industry the Athenia ranked less than a pawn. She had merely been a name, ploughing a route on a lease that would soon have expired. Like so many others of her ilk she had been running out of time. She was old, tired, broken and to some, unsound and no longer seaworthy. In many ways her loss simplified the logistics of her destiny. Unfortunate for the crew. Untimely for the passengers. But a neat, tidy solution, nonetheless.

Air, Sea Rescue came in low, like giant bumble bees through the early gray light of morning, cross-hatching their coordinates, camera lenses scanning each section of the territory. The fluorescent orange stripes of the three Coast Guard cutters, two in position and one circling the perimeter searched the surface and monitored the first two fathoms with metal detectors. An oil slick was spotted and a vessel dispatched to sample it. Through the misty light of the now exhausted storm, high powered binoculars picked at the peaks and valleys of the rolling waves hour after hour, while the sea was autopsied for the merest sign of life. For twenty four hours like a jigsaw puzzle, each magnified section of the black and white photograph was scrutinized again and again before it joined the growing mural on the wall.

Forty eight hours later, the search was officially ended. The obvious and ultimate conclusion that all passengers and crew on board the Athenia had been lost could not be denied. No-one who had experienced the ruthless treachery of the sea would have held the merest hope of expecting to find a survivor.

Yet six HAD survived. Six passengers had found themselves behind a water tight door low in the bowels of the bow behind the double plated steel hull. The bow had gone down, slowly rolling and dropping into the depths until it had come to an abrupt stop, settling precariously on the edge of one of the thousands of shelves of the coastal reef more than six hundred feet down. Beyond the range of all radar scanners and monitors and most certainly beyond the remotest possibility of survival in the minds of the most experienced search and rescue teams.

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 23rd. 1000 HOURS

CHAPTER 3

She was dark, deep and deadly. Slithering in and out of depths no man had entered, she could lurk silently, waiting, watching, stalking her prey. Making almost no sound, leaving no trail, she could remain submerged indefinitely, escape through seemingly impenetrable traps. She could kill from either a submerged or surface position with infinite accuracy and with devastating results.

Three hundred and forty-two feet long, with a crew of one hundred and two men, the U.S.S. Eelfish was one of the U.S. Navy's most advanced Class 9 nuclear powered attack submarines ever to prowl the undersea world. Within her pressure hull she contained the most sophisticated and advanced technology for detection and destruction of any enemy threatening her or her country. From a World War II magnetic mine to an enemy nuclear missile, she could sniff out her prey with uncanny accuracy maneuvering in restricted and confining undersea canyons and yet run at depths and speeds never before unattainable.

While she was already a formidable enemy, it was her new breed of highly trained specialists like Andrew Jackson that made her even more deadly. Surrounded by scopes, digital counters and computer screens compressed in a space no larger than four feet by four feet Jackson scanned his world. It was a far different world than he could ever have imagined as a child.

The last of five children of a poor black family in Flushing, New York, he'd sat on the back steps of the apartment building on those long, humid, summer evenings and watched small dots in the sky grow larger and nearer as they converged on their common destination. After awhile he didn't need to look. His ears told him the almost imperceptible differences. DC 10's, 747's, 707's. He'd sit in the grassy field beside the small neighboring airport and do the same thing with private aircraft. Piper Cherokees, Bonanzas, Beech Barons, One Eighty fives, Apaches.

It seemed to his family that his fascination with airplanes indicated a career in aviation. But Andrew Jackson had no desire to fly. It was really just another game. He'd done the same with his bike, his father’s wristwatch, and with the family television set. When they had scraped up enough money to buy the secondhand TV, it had served them four months before the picture disintegrated and the set died. For a week Andrew probed and prodded, tested and rewired, replaced and renewed until by some miracle the screen once again blossomed with images, colors and sounds. But Andrew Jackson's mechanical abilities were not indicative of a career in electronics. It too, had been a game. What turned out to be his career had been the absorption of all the parts that had fascinated him as a child. Size and configuration. Color and detail. Course and speed. Function and purpose. Simply, he retained everything he learned.

Andrew Jackson had the uncanny ability to recall almost every minute detail of the mechanical profiles of all things that he observed. It was this ability that put him in the hands of the United States Navy as one of their most highly trained T.D.T. specialists.

It was because of this ability that a puzzled frown appeared across his forehead, as his attention concentrated now on the three instruments flashing their image on the screens before him. The sonar needle traced the peaks and plateaus, while a light beam revealed the x-ray-like image as if it were a hologram.

Beside him, running on the continuous tape, the time frequencies correlating the information registered the small deviations in fractions of seconds.

Captain, sir, could you come below?

What is it, Jackson?

Something I think you oughta see.

OK. Be down in a minute.

To Captain Frank Bowers this was an unusual request. The officers and crew under his command were among the most highly skilled specialists the navy had ever produced. The U.S.S. Eelfish, because of her unique design and purpose had been assigned men of outstanding caliber.

Frank Bowers, a lean, handsome man of fifty three, had maintained the well muscled physique of his youth. Except for the liberal graying of his black hair and the deep lines permanently etched around clear blue eyes, he could pass, at a quick glance, for a man ten years younger. Added to the unfaltering judgment of men and equipment, it made him as respected by his crew as admired. This had been the cornerstone of his long and distinguished career. To receive a request, therefore, by Andrew Jackson, a man considered one of the best in his field immediately commanded his attention.

Bowers made his way along the alleyway, slid the security lock open and squeezed into the small compartment.

Got a problem, Jackson?

Well sir, I got somethin' I can't I.D. Thought maybe you could help.

Thanks Jackson. Bowers frowned. It had been spoken with absolute sincerity. But if Jackson couldn't I.D. it, this was definitely something strange.

What have you got?

That sir.... His chocolate eyes picked up another read out. ...as of three minutes twenty nine seconds ago...two hundred thirteen feet below us.

Below us?

Yes sir...'bout thirty five feet in length by twenty.

You sure you haven't picked yourself up a whole bunch of belugas?? Bowers’ quip had gone unnoticed.

No sir. No mammals or sea life. She's heavy metal and active.

How heavy and how active?

I'd say steel mostly. Probably ‘round thirty, forty ton.

You sure? That's goddamn heavy for that depth! What are your sonar readings?

Well sir...she's registering every three seconds with about five second intervals.

That makes it sound like a Turtle. You double checked any of their new locations with the O.R. Branch?

Yes sir. There are none reported in the immediate area. And their equipment scans out on a much higher frequency. Besides, that's just it. The timing is off.

Off?

Yes sir...by more than a two second margin for it to be any of the O.R. Branch stuff. Even their old stuff was within a one per cent deviational reading. There are no shadows, only echoes. Metal to metal. So it can't be an engine, turbine or rotor.

What about a dumping ground in the area? Anything radioactive?

No sir. We 'bin over every square inch of this area and we've never picked it up before.

Bower's expression deepened to even greater concern as he recalled the recently received a dispatch. He turned his attention back to Jackson and assessed the sudden and immediate implication. If you're saying those imprints aren't being made mechanically, by machinery of some kind...then they've got to be made by a human....

Andrew Jackson turned to look up at the Captain's face, the dark brown pools of his eyes trying to comprehend some logical, acceptable explanation. But captain...sir...at six hundred and twenty four feet?

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 23rd, 1000 HOURS

CHAPTER 4

Survival is man's most basic instinct. It feeds on hope, on cries for help, on answers to prayer. It exists without reason, despite all circumstances and evidence of futility.

It was their common bond.

That and the gray steel hull, the cold, the dampness, the darkness.

Surprisingly, most of them had slept. Fitfully, restlessly, sleep had come after the screams and cries, the shouting and pounding, the soothing of cuts and bruises, the comforting and consolations. Sleep had wiped away the first waves of terror, distorted their first perceptions of how and what had happened, confused their memory of time, destroyed the razor edge of panic. Afterwards it brought them back from their caves of unconsciousness, to huddle silently in the dark, alone with their thoughts and fears, and the cold dread that clutched at their souls.