Captain Reynaldo Bautista was standing at the center console in a yellow raincoat with his reading glasses on their cord bouncing against his chest. He turned when the door banged, and his tight gray face broke open with relief.
"Captain Mansour. Salamat sa Diyos. Thank God."
"Captain." She was already unzipping the orange case, pulling out the laptop, clipping the GPS antennas to their mounts. There was no time to go out on the bridge wing to set them properly; she stuck them on the inside of the forward windows, where they'd get a sky view through the glass. They would be less accurate. They would be enough. "What have I got?"
He talked fast and she listened fast. The forward breast line had parted. The forward spring was still on but slipping its winch brake. The bow had come off the dock perhaps forty meters and was still swinging, slowly, pivoting on the stern lines, which were holding for now. The wind was northwest at forty-five knots, gusting fifty-eight, on the ship's port beam, pushing her straight off the berth. The engine was on standby, ready. Bow thruster ready. The Evangeline was standing off the bow, the Bayou Rose off the stern, both waiting for a pilot.
And astern of them, at Berth Five, three hundred meters downstream, was the Aldora Spirit, a product tanker loaded with gasoline, tied up and helpless, with her lights blurred to smears in the rain.
Rania looked at the laptop screen, at the little ship-shaped outline of the Corvina Star glowing on the electronic chart, its bow pointed out into the channel at an angle that was getting steeper by the second, its stern still stuck against the dock like a hinge. She looked at the wind. She looked at the Aldora Spirit. She thought it through once, all the way, the way her father had taught her to think through an engine before he touched a wrench: what happens if, and then what happens if, and then what.
If they tried to push the ship back onto the berth, against a sixty-knot gust, with one line already gone and the others failing, the tugs would be fighting the whole weight of the wind on a ten-story sail, and if one more line parted while they were doing it, the ship could come down on the wharf, or the stern lines would go, and she would drift, sideways, down onto the Aldora Spirit. If they held her where she was, half on and half off, every line still made fast to the dock was a bomb waiting to go off.
"We're not going back on that dock tonight," she said. "We're going to take her off. Clean. Into the channel, head her up into the wind, and hold her there under power until this blows through. Agreed?"
Bautista looked at her for one second. "Agreed. You have the conn, Pilot."
She keyed the marine VHF on her chest. "Evangeline, Bayou Rose, this is the pilot on the Corvina Star."