The officer still lay where he’d left him in the house where the wheel was, and on the decks below everybody was shouting and running around dragging hoses as they shot streams of water into the fire which still roared and threw flames as high as the stack. He himself had started to leave the boat deck once, before they discovered him up here where he had no business, but the men with guns were around the ladder below him, with no way for him to get past them unnoticed, so he had remained. His white jacket and trousers were drowned, and water ran out of his hair and down into his eyes. But since he was the only one watching, he would continue to watch.

He went over to the rail between the starboard lifeboats and looked down. She wasn’t there, but he could see that the ship was barely moving now. He searched the surface as far out as he could see through the blown curtains of rain. Nada. He went over to the portside and peered outward and then down. Truly, they had not yet reached her. He went back to the door of the wheelhouse and looked in. The officer was trying to sit up. He was very weak and holding his head with the dolor, and a little stream of blood ran down across his face.

* * *

It was agonizingly slow and exhausting, trying to make any headway against the wind and the steep-sided chop it was kicking up into their faces, and they’d had to stop several times and rest. Goddard didn’t know how long they’d been struggling after the orange glow in the rain, dragging the life ring. They’d almost lost it at first. It had faded until they could scarcely see it, but the ship had lost way rapidly as she continued to turn and had finally come head up into the wind and sea. She was dead in the water now, directly ahead. The dark shape of the counter materialized below the column of flame. In a few minutes they were under it. They looked up at the railing of the poop far above them, and then at each other in mutual admission of what they’d both known all along. When they did reach her, there was no way to get aboard.

To call out would be to attract the attention of Lind or one of his men. They’d simply be shot in the water, or ignored, to be left there when the ship got under way again. If she did, Goddard thought, looking up at the tower of flame and smoke blown back across the poop by the force of the squall. If they didn’t get the fire under control very soon, the Leander was doomed.

Lind and the bos’n would be back here directing the fight, so their best chance of attracting the attention of someone else would be to go forward. He gestured to Karen, and they began kicking ahead along the black steel cliff of her starboard side. They could hear shouted orders and the roaring of the fire, but no one appeared at the bulwark above them. They passed the well-deck, and were below the midships house.

* * *

Harald Svedberg climbed unsteadily to his feet, assisted by Gutierrez. He was nauseated, his head was splitting, and when he put a hand to his face, it came away with blood on it. The ship was stopped, he noted, they were still enveloped in the opaque fury of the squall, and there was nobody else on the bridge except this waterlogged and obviously insane Filipino messman who appeared to have taken up residence on it. There was a roaring sound in his ears, which he took to be part of the headache until he became aware the messman was speaking English now and was saying something about a fire. He made it to the door of the wheelhouse and looked aft, and the whole picture clarified itself then as he remembered Mayr and that other messman with their guns. Lind had taken over the ship, that man he’d seen back there in the wake had probably been thrown overboard, and now they were all fighting the fire.

Their only hope was that Captain Steen was still alive and that he might have a weapon of some kind. He went in through the office to the captain’s stateroom. The improvised oxygen tent was gone now, but Steen still lay on the bunk in