"Pull the gangway," she said. "Get it up now, before it tears off. Tell the captain I'm aboard."
He was already talking into his own radio in Tagalog. She was already on the stairs.
There were eleven decks between the gangway door and the bridge on a car carrier, and she had climbed them on dozens of ships, and she had never climbed them faster. Her bag banged against her hip. Her lungs burned. The stairwell was narrow and steep, steel steps with yellow-painted edges, landing after landing, each with a heavy watertight door and a stenciled deck number, and somewhere around deck seven she felt the whole ship shudder, a long, deep, sickening tremor that came up through the soles of her shoes, and she heard, far away and muffled through all that steel, a crack like a rifle shot.
Out at Gate Two, in the white shack, Wade Toups heard it too, through the radio.
He had not sat back down. He was standing in the open window with the handheld held up close to his face, the way you'd hold a phone in a loud room, listening, and through the hiss and roar of the wind in Alcide Batiste's microphone he heard a sound he had not heard in twenty years and had never stopped hearing: the flat, enormous, cracking bang of a mooring line parting under load. And then, right after it, a second sound, a heavy metallic clang and a scream of tearing metal, and men yelling, all at once, over each other, and the radio clicked off.
The channel went silent.
Wade stood there. He stood there with the rain starting, the first fat drops of it smacking against the window and the asphalt and the roof of the shack like thrown gravel, and then not drops anymore but sheets, horizontal, blowing straight in through the open window and soaking the front of his shirt, and he did not close the window. He did not move at all. He was holding the radio so hard his fingers hurt.
"Line Four," he said into it. His voice cracked. He was not supposed to be on this channel unless it was gate business. He did not care. "Line Four, Gate Two. Alcide. Alcide, who was that. Who's hurt. Alcide."
Nothing. Static. The roar of the rain on the roof.
Then: "Line Gang Four, this is the pilot." Her voice. Breathless now, he could hear she'd been running, but level. "I'm almost on the bridge. Alcide, I heard a line part. Report your people."