“Man overboard!” he screamed. He pointed and kept pointing at the spot where he’d seen the young woman go in. He felt the Interceptor backing away—Gomez making sure they didn’t run over the person in the water. Chinchilla had the spotlight now. She swept it back and forth over the foam.
No sign of the woman.
Finn knew, like every mariner, the first rule of man overboard is, keep it to one man overboard. You throw the man a life ring, a life vest, a line, anything; you never dive in after him.
Finn ignored the rule. He had trained as a rescue swimmer with the navy’s Maritime Expeditionary Security Force. He unclipped his utility belt.
The moment he hit the water, his clothes became instantly heavy. He also got a shock from the cold: it was March, and the water temperature hadn’t broken sixty degrees. He kicked hard to get his head above the surface, and when he did, he heard the shriek of the wind, like an endless piece of paper being torn. Voices in Spanish and English screamed from both boats. The DHS seal on the Interceptor’s side—an eagle with an olive branch in one set of talons, arrows in the other—looked huge from the water’s surface. Waves surged over his head. He swallowed mouthfuls of seawater. Chinchilla was still sweeping the light over the spot where the young woman had gone under; he swam toward it and dived.
Beneath the surface, the spotlight’s muted shine penetrated three or four feet, and in this dimly lit sphere the sea’s dark shades shifted in sudden streaks like wet paint beneath an artist’s scraper; below that, it was entirely black.
At the very edge of the reach of light, he glimpsed a flash of white.
He took two big strokes and swept a hand in front of his face as though pushing aside a curtain; it brushed against something solid. He reached around the woman’s torso with one arm and with his free hand pressed the inflator trigger on his emergency vest. He burst through to the surface and into the howling wind.
An emergency-yellow flotation sling attached to a line hit the water next to Finn. He wrangled the woman into it, clipped her in, then tugged on the line. He watched her get lifted out of the water, hauled up, he imagined, by Chinchilla’s barbell-tooled arms. Someone on deck kept shining the spotlight down on him. By its light, he noticed dozens of twenty-dollar bills floating on the surface all around him. He swam for the ladder on the side of the Interceptor, grabbed the lowest rung, waited for the hull to roll toward him, kicked hard, and pulled himself out of the sea.
* * *
Gomez helped him over the side and kept holding him. Finn shrugged him off and made it clear he was all right. But his teeth were chattering, and he wrapped himself in the space blanket that Gomez handed him. He felt something sticking to his cheek. He peeled it off: a twenty-dollar bill.
He turned his attention to the girl supine on deck. Chinchilla was kneeling beside her, her ear to the young woman’s mouth, listening for breath. After a moment, she pinched the woman’s nose, covered her mouth with her own, and blew hard, her cheeks puffing; the marine interdiction agent pulled away, and the young woman puked; Chinchilla stuck two fingers into the woman’s mouth, scooped out vomit, then bellowed another lungful of air into her; the woman coughed, puked some more, opened her eyes. Her white T-shirt was hitched up above her belly button, revealing a money belt. Finn noticed that its zipper had split open.
Then he looked up and saw Figueroa with his back to the wind, staring at Chinchilla reviving the woman.
“Figueroa! Goddammit, keep your eyes outward!” he yelled.
The young man wheeled around. Finn grabbed the spotlight and scanned the nearby water until he found the panga. It had drifted away twenty feet and was even lower in the water now. Two guys were frantically bailing with buckets; everyone else was scooping with their hands. Finn calculated that there were still sixteen people aboard. Only the children, the young woman that he had rescued, and the captain were safely aboard the Interceptor. Without taking his eyes off the panga, Finn held up his open hand and yelled, “Gomez! Watch my signal! Another ten feet forward and to starboard … Hold!”
On the command Hold! he clenched his fist. The Interceptor drifted alongside the panga, closing the gap. Chinchilla joined Finn at the rail. Finn said, “Tell them if they crowd the ladder, they’ll capsize.”
Chinchilla turned to the people below and fired off a series of commands. He was relieved to see that there was no rush for the ladder. The migrants came up one by one, moving with orderly haste, shuffling around to rebalance the panga whenever a person stepped off. As each person came over, Finn handed them each a space blanket, then directed them where to sit on the foredeck, distributing the weight. He noticed the young woman he’d pulled out of the water curled up under a silver sheet, next to the child she’d helped out of the panga. They were both looking at him gratefully. He unclenched his jaw a little. The operation was almost over.
Right then came a scream from the dark side of the boat. Everyone turned to the windward rail. Looming out of the night, high as a mountain, was the bow of a container ship.
Finn’s heart broke its chains and rushed his throat.
* * *
Viewed close up and from sea level, even in the dark, the bow of the cargo occupied most of the sky, and Finn had to tilt his head back so far to see its top that the back of his skull pressed against the top of his inflated life preserver.
The freighter blasted its foghorn. The bone-shuddering volume left everyone aboard the Interceptor shell-shocked. Finn shone his spotlight on its red bulbrus bow shouldering aside the sea, displacing a huge wave, coming at them like a locomotive. He knew that this close, a ship that big hadn’t enough room to veer, let alone stop, and that it would crush them the way a battle tank crushes a lizard. If the people aboard the panga and the Interceptor wished to remain alive, the ship’s horn was saying, they needed to get out of the way.
Now.
He turned away from the monster and tamped down his own terror. The Interceptor had been designed to go fast; if he moved now, they’d clear the freighter’s path. But moving now meant abandoning the remaining people in the panga. He counted four still in it, plus one on his way up the ladder. He figured he needed ninety more seconds to get everyone aboard. He turned back to the freighter.
“What’s it going to be, boss?” said Chinchilla, her voice quicker than usual.
Finn met her gaze.
“Carry on,” he said.
She nodded, went back to helping people come over the rail. Finn handed them emergency blankets and pointed where to sit. They had enough time, he told himself. It would be close, but they had enough time.
“Are you crazy?” said a voice behind him. Finn wheeled around. Figueroa. His eyes as wide as eyes can go.
“We’ll all die!” he screamed. He waved his hand at the freighter. “We have to get out of the way!”
“Sit down, Figueroa,” said Finn.
But the young man didn’t listen. He shoved Gomez from the wheel. “I don’t want to die!” he screamed. “We have to g—”
He slumped to the ground, midsentence. Gomez calmly reholstered his Taser and returned to his position.
Finn shone the spotlight back on the panga and saw that in the commotion, the two boats had separated. The two men still aboard, the ones who hadn’t stopped bailing since the Interceptor had found them, looked back at him. They’d stopped bailing now. What was the point?