Brian Shaw was standing in the doorway of the small private bathroom of his crew cabin as the geyser of water from his sink and shower flooded the bathroom's interior. Already his feet were covered and it was close to soaking his entire cabin floor.
He pulled on black uniform slacks and cream-colored turtleneck sweater and collected a pair of socks from his dresser. After collecting the only pair of dry shoes still in his cabin, he hurried out. He was as confused as Jake. They'd not hit anything as far as he could tell, and being on a crew deck below the waterline, he'd be pretty close to ground zero. No, he'd not heard a bloody thing, yet they were very clearly taking on a lot of water.
He hurried down the corridor to Julie McCoy's cabin on the port side and knocked on the door until she answered, tying a robe around her pyjamas. She seemed very confused to have her supervisor standing barefoot outside of her door. "Brian? What are you doing here?"
Shaw leaned against her door frame and, deciding his feet were dry enough, started pulling his socks on over them as he asked her, "Is your bathroom flooding?"
Julie turned in the darkened room and hurried to her bathroom doorway and turned on the light. "No," she told him before returning to where he was standing. Shaw stuffed his feet into brown loafers. Had he been American he might have had a passing thought about the mismatching of black slacks with brown loafers, but as he was from the United Kingdom, he did not.
Brian gestured to the soaked ankles of his slacks as they dripped onto the carpet outside her cabin. "Mine is. It was over my feet. We're taking on water and there's no alarm going. If the captain is unaware, then it's up to us get to the upper decks and inform the captain, quickly."
She nodded, turned on her main cabin light and shut the door to dress.
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At around the same time that Amanda and Jake were beginning to get dressed, in Rogo's Aqua Class cabin, 7110, a deck below them, he was standing in his own bathroom doorway in his own soaking slippers and was staring at the water flooding his cabin's bathroom.
"Well ain't dat a goddamn thing," he muttered to himself. "It also ain't goddamn good news, dat's for sure."
The final ocean voyage he'd taken with his Linda before she passed in October of 2003 was on the S.S. Norway. She'd spent many years before that crossing the ocean under a different name, the S.S. France. He still remembered that day, May 23rd it was, when the ship had docked in Miami.
Before 7 in the morning, they'd been woken from a sound sleep when the Norway rocked from an explosion deep within her hull. The owners of the ship had been cost cutting and they found out later that a boiler had exploded. None of the passengers had been killed, but eight crew members died.
He still remembered the fear both he and his wife had felt in that first moment. The fear that they were sinking, that the ship was in distress. They were so shaken they didn't realize the ship was actually docked. Thankfully, those fears they had were unfounded, but it rattled them. There had been other chances for another cruise before she'd passed, but neither of them had been able to shake that fear in time to book a ticket.
As he stood there, knowing the ship was in the open ocean, he felt that fear again. And as he witnessed seawater pouring into his bathroom, he was unable to make himself believe that the outcome of this was not going to be far, far worse.
He grabbed at some nearby clothes and started dressing. Somebody in a uniform had to know what the Christ was goin' on here.
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The news coming to Captain Catalano from maintenance and the crew members he'd dispatched to assess the situation was not good. The rough seas had breached the hull on the bulkhead Preston had been at only yesterday afternoon. Somehow the water was getting out of the bulkhead and had managed to get into the problematic sewer storage tank and was now fooding the ship through bathrooms in multiple locations on all the decks on the starboard side.
Even though the initial pressure build-up that had forced the water in geysers into the passenger and crew cabins had equalized, water was still being forced into the lower deck cabins and crew quarters from the breach in the hull right through the ship's own drainage lines. It was almost as if his grand dame was unwittingly killing herself.
Water was flooding the lower decks but the pumps were in place. The ship was heeling to starboard but not too severely. Catalano had already ordered the closing of the Ocean Princess' watertight doors, but they could not do anything to prevent the continued surge of seawater from coming in. They were meant to seal the ship from the hull being breached in one location. The ship had water spreading across eight decks. It was rapidly becoming not one fatal wound that was crippling her, it was more like death from a thousand cuts.
Maintenance informed him that it had finally reduced in pressure and was now only flooding passenger deck two and below, but it was still filling his ship from the bathrooms connected to that drainage line and once enough water had collected, it would spread to the many many other locations that were high and dry for now.
Catalano had ordered the ship turned to the nearest seaside port. His reliable first officer informed him it was Puerto Cortes, and he adjusted course. He had a plan, all he needed to do was get the Ocean Princess into a shallower depth before the water flooded his ship beyond the point of no return. While the pumps had been activated, they were only concentrated to the crew decks in the hull. Water was going to keep flooding the starboard side on the crew and passenger decks simultaneously, and the pumps could only handle so much of it.
He cursed every maintenance worker in the shipyard. Idiots, all of them. With the risk of sinking growing more and more, Catalano decided that he had to proceed with his plan. The best option he had available to him now was to try and get her into shallow water in an attempt to beach her. She would fill below her waterline and it would damage her hull, but the ship above the waterline would remain that way long enough to fully evacuate, then the Starlight Cruise Line could spend what it needed to in an attempt to make her seaworthy again, or salvage what was left.
"Captain?" The first officer held up the phone and Catalano took the call from Chief Engineer Lombardi. The news was the worst he could have heard. The onslaught of water was flooding the ship's engine room and threatening to disable the ship's turbo-electric COGAS power plant and kill the ship's two gas and steam turbines, which would leave the ship drifting in more than enough water to swallow her whole.
Lombardi moved the phone away from his mouth and shouted something over his shoulder, then only a moment later there was a muffled explosion from belowdecks. The electrical power immediately failed and the engines died. The emergency battery backups switched on, but it only made things partially visible.
The stern's "mermaid" azimuth pod-propulsion units and it's three bow thrusters stopped almost immediately, and the ship kept moving forward solely on the 20 knots of speed that had been built up before the ship became a powerless pile of floating steel.
"We're dead in the water, Captain," Lombardi told him. Catalano closed his eyes. "There's no way we'll be able to make repairs with water coming in and no way to pump it from the engine room." He hung up.
Catalano stood on the bridge and pondered the situation. Lombardi was right. The loss of power meant that the water that COULD be pumped back out again would not be. There was not enough power in the emergency battery backups to power the pumps. Water would continue to flow through the obvious rupture in the hull created by the rough seas and up through the ship through the drainage pipes and they were unable to pump any of it back out again.
The weight of the water would eventually pull the Ocean Princess over by her side, and drag the ship under the waves. Already the momentum of the ship was slowing, and soon it would be adrift. There was no getting around the situation. The ship was doomed.
The ship's officers, some of them young, green, and having only recently been transferred to the Ocean Princess' crew, began to panic. After all, the South American cruise was the easiest of the voyages, and so it had been determined that it would be the best classroom for them to get hands-on experience. Aside from his staff captain, first officer, and safety officer, everyone else was still learning. Catalano took charge and started giving orders, only some of them being understood and heeded.
Catalano considered his options. The Starlight Cruise Line paid well, but not enough for him to stupidly go down with the ship. Those days of ocean travel were long over. No, he was getting out. To convince himself he wasn't a coward, he reasoned that he'd be able to coordinate rescue efforts much more easily on a functioning ship with full power, rather than a dead one under emergency lighting. After all, there were probably hours to go before she sank completely.
Unfortunately for him, two of his most important orders were either overlooked in panic, or unheard by the inexperienced officers he gave those orders to. The ship's Emergency Locator Beacon was not activated, and the general alarm was not sounded through the ship to warn the passengers to evacuate.
"We will leave this non-functional ship and get picked up so we can coordinate rescue efforts from another location," he informed his officers. Then the officers informed the deck crew. He attempted to make the deck crew stay behind but the words were quite unconvincing from a Captain who was abandoning his own ship. So he relented and they all clustered to the nearest lifeboats.
Catalano, his officers, and much of the senior crew prepared them for launching and boarded them. With the engine room useless, the engineering crew arrived from below and began preparing their own lifeboat for launching. "What are you doing?" Catalano stared at them, his face like a thundercloud.
Lombardi was smug. "I could ask you the same...Captain." He turned back to the boat he was preparing.
Catalano appeared indignant. "Rescue operations will be much easier to coordinate from a functioning ship or on-land, rather than a dead ship with no power."
Lombardi remained smug. "And the engine room crew is useless on a ship with no power and dead engines. I see you and I are thinking much the same way...Captain." He turned his back on Catalano as they prepared to lower it. Soon, three lifeboats with the engineering crew, captain, senior officers, and deck crew were safely off the ship and moving away. As they approached the seas, which were still somewhat rough, but showing signs of calming, he finally realized there was a sound that was missing.
He turned to his apprentice deck officer. "Agosti! Why is the evacuation alarm not sounding!?"
Agosti looked at the captain with confusion, then pointed to the quartermaster, Donato. "I was under the assumption you had given the order to him." Agosti and Donato then began to bicker, each blaming the other.
The lifeboat, being lowered by multiple crewmen through two ropes being released as slowly as possible, was far too heavy to lift back to the deck with the number of men inside. He realized now that his plan to claim he left the ship to coordinate rescue operations would not be as believable. It would look like the crew purposely did not sound the alarm so their evacuation would go unnoticed. Worse, if the alarm wasn't sounded in time, the loss of life would be massive.
His career at sea was over. He'd be blamed for any and every death. Captain Catalano collapsed to a seat in numb shock as the lifeboat made contact with the sea, and the deck crew members who had lowered it released the lifeboat from the lowering lines and started the small engine, moving away from the ship.
The Ocean Princess was sinking, and now she was without virtually anyone but maintenance and the hospitality crew. Catalano's fears came as true as he expected. The actions of the cowards who fled the ship first would be later mocked by the press as "profiles in courage."
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Jake and Amanda joined about 25 other passengers who had stumbled to the promenade deck of the listing ship and were looking at the partially-lit walkways and interior rooms, baffled. Among them was Rogo, looking over the side of the ship at the water, trying to get a better look in the dim morning light.
Rogo glanced over at them as they approached and said, "Hey you kids, you got watah in your room too?"
Amanda had a brief moment to nearly giggle over the fact that Rogo had referred to her 36-year-old self as a kid before Jake answered, "Yeah, a steady stream of it. But we didn't feel any indications that the ship had struck something, so where is the water coming from?"
Rogo shrugged. "Somewhere. And a lot of it if it's reachin' us all tha damn way up here." He relayed to them his other experience on the Norway and told them the unease he felt there was much less than here. "We were docked and dere was no water in tha ship when it happened."
A man who was listening to their conversation and who introduced himself as Rittenhouse asked, "If we're in trouble, shouldn't there be some sort of damn alarm?"
Jake was silent. Yes, there should be. But there wasn't. Yet the cruise ship WAS obviously in trouble, wasn't it? A booming voice seemed to answer him. "You are correct, sir." Jake turned and saw Shaw had joined them in the semi-darkness. Beside him was Julie McCoy. They were also with a man in his late 30s to early 40s who was bespectacled. He quickly introduced himself as the ship's doctor, Adam Bricker.
Despite the situation, Shaw seemed calm and cool and even smiled at Jake. He was either controlling his emotions extremely well, or he was just that immensely cool under pressure. Oddly, his mind flashed very briefly to the humorous conversation he'd had with Amanda where they had jokingly referred to Shaw as a retired James Bond. Shaw's at-ease behavior made the joke just slightly less of one. All he needed now was a vodka martini in his hand. Shaw asked him, "I'm assuming you were also woken from slumber by a new indoor cabin pool?"
Jake nodded. He said quietly, "More like just a waterslide. I don't know what it was like where you were, but we had a steady stream of water coming up from the shower drain and out of the sink. I didn't notice if it was coming from the toilet too, but it might have been. You know ships at least somewhat better than any of us do. Any idea what's going on?"
Shaw responded quietly. "The only explanation I can think of is that somehow seawater has made its way into the wastewater pipes. It's the only connection that would encompass all of our separate drains. That means that it has unfettered access to places all over this ship. You've experienced it as high as deck eight. I'm not sure what it's doing in my cabin in the lower decks now, but it was like a geyser when I first noticed it. I had water over my feet across almost the entire floor of the cabin."
He gestured around. "You notice the silence? The emergency lighting and the lack of motion tells me we've lost power and are adrift. It means the engines aren't running. That can only mean one thing. The engine room is flooded and it's disabled all of the ship's power. Also, it means that the pumps aboard, and they are plentiful, are not in operation. There's not enough power left to run them. Since the group of you all seem to be a non-panicking lot, I'll be blunt. If we keep taking on water like this the ship is not going to survive, especially if she's powerless and adrift."
Even though the news was grim, they did remain calm. Jake found that even though Shaw had told them what he had, being in the presence of a member of the ship's crew was a relief. They didn't know exactly what was wrong but something was. But despite the reassurance of Shaw's appearance on deck, The lack of any other visible deck crew frantically doing ANYTHING at all was making him increasingly paranoid.
Shaw looked forward and said, "I'm going to the bridge and try and speak with the captain. Hopefully after speaking with him I can find out more information to share with you. Perhaps the fact that nothing seems to be happening is an indication that our fears are unwarranted, but that's likely just delusion. The engines are dead, and I doubt that I'll learn anything that will calm our fears, but I'm crossing the old fingers. Everyone please stay put."
Now that he had Shaw in sight, Jake was going to do no such thing. He didn't want Shaw to be swallowed up by the darkness like seemingly every other able-bodied seaman had. He followed Shaw. Amanda wasn't going to let Jake out of HER sight, so she quickly followed them as well, her flip flops slapping on her feet.
Shaw looked at them both with a bemused expression. "My first order, and already being ignored by passengers, what other atrocities am I to expect as the morning goes on?"
Amanda beat Jake to the punch. "We're VIPs, remember? We haven't had a tour of the bridge yet, so now's our opportunity. Make it a good tour and there's bound to be a Benjamin in it for you."
Shaw chuckled. "A side trip first." He stopped at a locked door before reaching the bridge and produced a key.
Jake looked at it and asked, "Side trip to where? Why are we stopping here?"
Shaw answered him, "Did you notice there weren't many passenger cabins on deck eight? It's because the rest of the deck houses crew cabins. The deck crew, officers, and captain are not quartered belowdecks, they're right off the bridge. It's designed that way for an emergency situation so they don't have to make the long trip like I had to make to get up here. I just want to see if somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the deck crew is just somehow still sleeping."
He unlocked the door and entered, with Jake and Amanda following. The corridor was dimly lit, and it was silent. Deadly silent. It was almost obviously deserted. Shaw tamped down his rising sense of dread as he moved further down the corridor, but the only noticeably audible sound, much like it was on the deck, was Amanda's flip flops.
"Start knocking on doors," Shaw commanded them. He went to the far end of the corridor and knocked on the door to the captain's cabin but received no answer. As he moved on to the doors to the officer's quarters, Amanda and Jake moved towards him from the opposite end of the corridor. Amanda knocked on the starboard side doors and Jake took the port side until they finally all met each other in the middle.
Nothing. Shaw made no effort to hide the frown on his face.
No doors opened after they were knocked on. No crewmen poked their tousled heads out and sleepily asked what the bloody Hell they were doing knocking on their doors the way they were, or why a member of the hospitality crew and a couple of passengers were the ones doing the knocking. For all intents and purposes, the entire section of the ship here was entirely deserted.
Still, he refused to give in to the panic. Not until he was sure. And even then, he couldn't panic. He may only be in hospitality, but he was still a member of the crew nevertheless. He hadn't performed as a low-tier ship's officer in over 20 years, but he had once, and that gave him a little extra experience if the worst fears he was feeling now were to come to fruition in a few moments when he finally entered the bridge.
Still, it was not unheard of. He recalled a ship in the 1990s which had been in distress and the captain and deck crew had also left in that instance. There were other examples as well. And in 2012, Shaw would recall Captain Catalano when the news reports came in about the Costa Concordia disaster, and the fact that the Costa Concordia's captain had fled before the passengers in that instance as well.
Yes, it was not frequent. But it happened. And while he tried to believe otherwise as he stood in that darkened corridor, his common sense would not agree with him.
Jake and Amanda were looking at each other and he knew their fears were the same as his. Also, this was Amanda's first experience on a ship and so the terror for her had to be even worse. He sympathised with her and made a conscious effort to joke to help ease the tension. "The early bird special at Blu is very lovely. Perhaps the deck crew all decided to take advantage of the all-you-can-eat-pancakes. I believe the captain's personal favorite is the chocolate chip variety." He chuckled.
Jake and Amanda both let out a nervous laugh. It didn't cure them of their rising panic, Shaw knew, but it put a bandage on it at least, which was good. Shaw said, "The captain and the officers are probably simply on the bridge as this is an emergency situation. The deck crew...I'm not sure of. Still, it's all going to work out, I promise. You and everyone else are going to be fine. In a moment we'll all have a good laugh over the fact that we were panicking for no reason."
Shaw would dwell on those words later. He would dwell on the promise he'd made them that they both would be safe. But at this moment, he'd been sure that they both would be. He said, "Let us go and I'll give you that VIP tour of the bridge. Unfortunately, the captain won't be able to give you the little wing pin like a pilot could. Perhaps he can pour a cup of water over both of your heads to compensate." He started to lead them, then paused. "And I'm not greedy. A fifty dollar bill for my troubles will more than suffice." He flashed the pair a devilish grin.
They laughed a little less nervously then and Shaw smiled, glad that his less than stellar jokes were having a calming effect on the couple. They were, in a way, a test audience. If his worst fears were realized, decisions would have to be made, and he would need the support and calm of the remaining passengers and crew if he ended up being the one to make them. Jake and Amanda had shown him, at least on a small scale, that he would be followed, if it came down to it, and he was reassured a bit that he would have the same effect on a much grander scale, as well.
"We've seen all there is to see here. Come, let us continue on to the bridge. Hopefully the captain did not join everyone else in the breakfast buffet at Blu."
He followed them out of the corridor, and when they got back to the promenade deck, they surreptitiously stopped and waited for him to get back in front of them and once again let him lead them down the rest of the deck to the bridge. Shaw calmly walked through the darkened doorway a few feet and then stopped. Amanda and Jake each followed and stood on opposite sides of him.
Jake wasn't sure what exactly he'd been expecting when he walked into the dimly-lit bridge, but the nerve center of the cruise ship being completely abandoned wasn't it. The high-tech equipment was mostly dark, save for a few of the consoles that remained lit by what Jake assumed was the auxiliary battery power that was fueling the emergency lighting.
Naturally, Amanda's cursing was the first thing to break the silence. "Fuckkkkkk." Amanda looked around in wide-eyed panic. "Where the fuck is everybody? They fucking left us all here? They left us here to fucking DROWN?"
Shaw delved deeply to try to find that humor he'd called upon just moments ago, but it had deserted him as concretely as the captain had. He walked towards the observation windows facing the bow, looked through the glass and saw the lights flashing from the lifeboats a hundred feet or so past the bow.
Shaw's voice, as it left his throat, was slightly defeated, but somehow still serenely calm. "It...Certainly appears that way. I wish I could offer you more words of encouragement, but in all my years on ships, I've never witnessed a captain abandon ship before even a single passenger was evacuated. It has happened, but not on any ship I've been on before this, and I never expected to actually witness it before I retired."
There was a silence. In that moment, it almost seemed like they were the only living souls aboard the stricken ship. The three of them looked at each other in the dim light and could find no words to say.
This time, it was Shaw who acted first and snapped them out of their panicked stasis before Amanda could litter the bridge with her F-bombs once again.
Shaw kept his voice controlled, but it was clear he was as shocked as the pair of them. He walked among the control panels. "We haven't time to worry about that at the moment. The first order of business is to get everyone on the same page. Help me find the general alarm. We've got to alert everyone still aboard that we're in distress. How we're in distress I still don't know, but we're in trouble for sure. We're bloody sinking."
Jake asked, "So some of these panels are powered with the emergency batteries? That's what I assumed." Shaw nodded.
"They have to be, in case we enter a situation such as the one we're in now. Most of the emergency systems are all equipped to run on the battery auxiliaries. They'll be separate from the emergency lighting batteries, in fact the power source is probably right here on the bridge itself. Let's find that alarm. People who saw the water are going to be up here but the port side is high and dry as far as we know, and they may not be aware of the situation. This will get everyone on the same ruddy page, immediately."
The three of them moved among the panels for a moment or two before Shaw uttered a cry of triumph and pressed something on the panel in front of him. Immediately the interior of the ship was filled with the roar of sounding alarms, and a pre-recorded message to report to the upper decks and assemble at their lifeboat stations in an orderly fashion. It was loud enough for them to hear, but not so loud that they had to shout over it to be heard. The first time the message was relayed in english, before repeating itself in several languages.
"This will run automatically for about 30 minutes," Shaw said. "We can restart it but by that time surely everyone who is still below decks would have heard it."
He stared out the viewing windows of the bridge, seemingly at war with himself for a moment, then he turned to look at both of them. "This is extremely out of protocol, but if you don't mind, I'd like to temporarily draft you for assistance. If there are some officers and some of the deck crew still aboard, naturally this will be unnecessary, but until I know for sure, I'd like to at least start getting some people together with their heads firmly on their shoulders...Because it's beginning to look like we're going to have to band together if we want to save ourselves. I'm fortunate to have some actual crew experience but most of the hospitality members are going to have about the same knowledge as you. The only difference is that they're in a uniform, and you're not.
Amanda started to speak. She didn't know a fucking thing about boats. Shaw cut her off. "Don't feel like you'll be judged on performance. Forget the uniforms. As of this moment, we're not crew and passengers. We're all the same. We're all in trouble, and we're all just trying to get off of this ship alive. Seeing activity, even if it includes passengers, will help prevent a panic."
Jake and Amanda nodded. "Follow me, Jake, we need to organize the strongest among us and get lifeboats ready and lowered. We also need to send out a bloody distress signal because I'm not sure if we'll be able to get everyone off in the lifeboats."
Amanda said, "Aren't there boats on these things to hold everybody? I thought I read that they made that the case after Titanic sank."
Shaw nodded and said, "Yes, but I'm not sure we'll be able to lower them all. As the morning progresses you'll see what I mean." He sighed. "And we've had no lifeboat drills. Catelano was intending to do them today, I believe. I should have seen this coming. He was supposed to do so the day we sailed, and so he committed a breach of protocol. Anyway, once everyone is on deck it's going to be completely disorganized. So we need someone in charge of that and someone operating the radio for a distress signal. I wish I could be in two bloody places at once."
Amanda thought of her small amount of technical expertise from learning engineering and recording audio tapes with John Kramer and said, "I'm guessing lifeboat lowering is going to require people stronger than me. I can try to, I dunno, send an SOS or whatever if you show me where that is. I can't promise anything but I'll stand at the fucking wireless until I get somebody to fucking answer."
Shaw waved her over to a corner of the bridge. "We've come a long way from the Titanic and wireless, Amanda. This is the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System." He lifted a handset. "This is a radiophone. You can use it to speak and receive messages from any nearby ships. Once I have an idea of who is still on board I'll draft someone to stand by and relay messages between the bridge and myself as we organize the lifeboat evacuations."
Because of the Starlight Cruise Line's fascination with the old-timey ships of old, the radiophone aboard the vessel was a custom-made brand new handset to resemble the style of old, and the handset was the same as an old-style wall-mounted telephone.
Shaw gestured at the controls. "I'm only very vaguely trained, but this button will allow you to be heard, and this button will transfer you through the available radio channels." He tapped Jake on the arm, "Come along, chap, let's start getting people off of here." They left Amanda alone on the bridge. She knew she was already short, but being alone in that massive, darkened space made her feel even smaller.
Amanda's heart was beating as she held the radiophone in her hands. It seemed easy, all you were doing was talking on a phone, but she was trying to get help, not order a fucking pizza. And if Shaw's warning was right about the fucking boats, they were really going to need someone else to come to the rescue and now it was all fucking on her.
Stop it! Amanda almost hollered at herself. You can cry about it later but right now is not the time to become a hysterical, scattered bitch. For fuck's sake, you once duped an entire police force. You've been in high pressure situations before. Shaw wouldn't have left you here alone if he didn't think you could handle it. Now hike up your fucking panties and get the fucking job done like you told him you fucking would.
She took a deep breath and she was as calm and serene as Shaw seemed to have been earlier. With her only experience with distress signals being from what she'd seen when Jake had watched "Titanic" with her, she started speaking an SOS into the receiver, saying the ship's name, and then asking for someone to send help.