Chapter 10 - THUNDER OVER LAKE MICHIGAN
The Victor L. Schlaeger was a retired ninety-foot city fireboat, built with twin twelve-cylinder diesel engines capable of chewing through thick ice and churning out twelve thousand horsepower. The city had mothballed it along the industrial canal two years ago, but its diesel tanks were full for winter maintenance.
Vance hotwired the primary starter while I strapped Emily into the navigator’s suspension seat in the wheelhouse. Jackson, having finally neutralized the silo sniper, sprinted down the gangway and cast off the heavy hemp mooring lines.
The massive diesels fired with an earth-shaking roar that rattled the wheelhouse glass.
I shoved the twin brass throttles full forward.
The fireboat surged out of the slipway like a battering ram, its heavy steel prow slicing through the oily canal water, throwing two massive white wakes against the rusted sheet-pile walls. We shot out of the canal mouth, past the blinking red navigation buoy, and slammed straight into the violent, churning black water of Lake Michigan.
The storm here was savage. Ten-foot waves hammered the bow, throwing tons of freezing spray over the wheelhouse roof. The wind screamed off the open lake at fifty knots, threatening to rip the radar antenna from its mount.
“Jackson!” I shouted over the engine roar. “Do you have radar contact?”
Jackson wiped salt spray from the display screen. “Got him! Two miles out, heading northeast toward the Michigan state line! It’s the Iron Vanguard—a commercial tug running with no transponder!”
“Vance, take the helm!” I ordered. “Keep her steady on their stern! I’m going to the foredeck.”
“General, that deck is an ice sheet!” Vance yelled back. “If you go overboard in this water, hypothermia will stop your heart in three minutes!”
“Then don't let me fall,” I said.
I climbed out the wheelhouse hatch into the freezing gale.
The cold was an open blade against my face. The deck pitched violently beneath my boots, coated in a treacherous sheen of freezing spray. I clipped my harness lanyard to the safety cable running along the starboard rail and worked my way forward toward the massive brass water monitor—the deck cannon capable of pumping three thousand gallons of water per minute at two hundred pounds per square inch.
Through the black rain and churning foam, the dark silhouette of the tugboat appeared, pitching wildly in the swells three hundred yards ahead.
On its stern deck, two figures in bright orange survival suits were hauling a small, limp form wrapped in an emergency blanket toward the open hatch of the engine room.
Lucas.
Even across three hundred yards of raging, pitch-black water, through the blinding curtain of sleet, I recognized the shape of my boy.
I powered on the auxiliary diesel for the high-pressure water pump. The giant brass nozzle hissed with building hydraulic pressure. I grabbed the dual steering handles, lined up the sights against the tug’s aft wheelhouse windows, and engaged the valve.
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A solid column of pressurized water, thick as a tree trunk, erupted from the nozzle.
It crossed the two-hundred-yard gap with terrifying velocity, striking the tugboat’s upper cabin with the force of an artillery shell. The tempered safety glass exploded inward. The tug’s wheelhouse flooded instantly; the vessel yawed violently to the left, caught in the trough of a twelve-foot swell, its propeller lifting out of the water with an agonizing mechanical whine.
