Chapter 17

Over the next few days, James (or Brandon as she still needed to call him in public) and Eve were inseparable. At some level, James knew that spending this much time with her, particularly in public, would make it utterly impossible to deny a relationship if (when) he was approached about it by his contact, Deep Throat. The reality of it would hit him from time to time, during the few quiet moments he found himself alone. He knew that to continue this way would mean an end to his career, but for the life of him, he couldn’t bring himself to recognize it as a bad thing. This job had treated him as well as it could, but it was beginning to feel like it was time for him to move on to something else, even if that something else was the “normal” cubicle life he’d wanted so desperately to be freed of two years before. Somehow, James thought, working in a cubicle wouldn’t be so bad if he was coming home to Eve afterward. He didn’t mention any of this to her; knowing he was effectively choosing her over his profession could make her uncomfortable, nervous even that he was moving too fast. Decisions like that, in a normal relationship, don’t come until much further down the road. Apparently, James decided, dating within the spy game forces one to make these decisions far earlier.

Of course, their time together didn’t preclude James from completing Brandon’s responsibilities. In just a few days, the Allure of the Seas would be coming into port and depositing thousands of people onto the little island which meant that both of Brandon’s professions called for a substantial amount of preparation. As a cruise ship liaison, he had to check and recheck each of the establishments on the approved dining and excursion lists, make sure the final preparations were in order for The Skytop, and ensure there were enough English speaking employees at each location (Americans like to travel, but they prefer to take their language and diet with them). Ships full of supplies, mostly American style foods like frozen chicken strips and hamburger patties, had been coming in steadily for days already. There was enough food stock piled on the island to feed an army for a year… or a few thousand American tourists for two days.

From the agent perspective, this was a prime opportunity to view the way in which the tourism based companies operated in preparation for the first rush of the season (and the last of the year, as there would only be a few more ships arriving between the Allure and New Years Eve). Complaining is a normal part of doing work, so James paid little attention to the grunts and swearing of the day laborers, he was much more concerned with the people that had money to invest. Most people don’t realize it, but every country is a business. James had come to accept that America was a corporation with financial concerns while he was still in the Marine Corps, deploying to God awful countries with no justifiable tactical advantage but for some reason, a substantial “need” for a US military presence. Eventually, he came to recognize the time he spent in Africa and the like as bullying nudges toward permitting financial interests from the US and her allies into the region. Many countries in Southern Africa are cripplingly impoverished. Poverty is a weakness that can be taken advantage of by anyone, so if the US didn’t step in and flex some muscle, throw a few dollars at the locals and make promises of security and peace someone else would have: possibly someone playing for the wrong team.

Roatan Island wasn’t much different. James needed to keep his finger on the pulse of the locals with any power to flex and make sure they continued being friendly to the idea of foreign trade. As far as he could tell, aside from some cultural snarkiness (every culture considers itself superior to all others, it’s not a uniquely American viewpoint), the people of Roatan Island saw tourism as their only respite from the fate shared by many other communities in Central and South America. Tourist money kept legitimate business profitable enough to keep drug cartels and paramilitary organizations at bay. Cartels take advantage of the impoverished, welcoming them into a community in order to gain a strong foothold. They could force their way in, but forcing their way into communities that didn’t want them there would be more trouble than it was worth with so many other villages hanging on by a thread and welcoming them in with open arms. It was the cruise lines that kept these people from living under the rule of the cocaine kingdom, and even if the locals didn’t always love the way they were treated by tourists, it was much better than being “drafted” into service by a cartel.

Eve had brought her laptop to James’ apartment so she could work on her field notes as he wrote his reports. They worked to sync their schedules so she could be out conducting interviews while he was busy testing water samples and the like. In the span of a week or so they had developed a schedule that permitted them to spend the most amount of time together possible. Eve seemed to genuinely long to be with him, something he found himself wondering about when he was alone. What was it that she saw in him? He didn’t feel as though he brought too much to the table once the excitement of being with a “secret agent” had subsided. His insecurities always did this to him, he knew, and in a way it was refreshing to have a reason to dust them off. Even the bad parts of relationships are pleasant to someone who had been alone as long as he had.

Time flew when they were together and would have dragged while they were apart if James didn’t have so much to do; before he knew it, the day had arrived and the Allure of the Seas was closing in on the pier from the horizon. Off in the distance, without anything to provide a frame of reference, the speck of a ship hardly seemed like anything to be impressed with; a tiny dot creeping across an endless expanse of dark blues meeting the orange and red hues of sunrise. Before long though, the ship was close enough to see alongside the twenty and thirty foot fishing vessels, dwarfing them like ants as the gargantuan ship moved through the water toward a port James was beginning to wonder it could even fit in. Cruise ships were all massive, floating skyscrapers that seemed to have no earthly right to float, but the Allure of the Seas was so much bigger than the average ship James had seen that it didn’t seem to float at all. It wouldn’t have surprised him to know there were wheels on the bottom that were simply driving the monster ship along on the ocean floor. People, so small they were barely distinguishable from the railing of the ship waved their tiny hands at the dock workers. James adjusted in his seat, realizing that although he could now make out the ship clearly, it would still be some time before it actually reached the port. Plenty of time for another cup of coffee.

James stood from the chair he’d claimed as his own on a day like this nearly two years prior and crossed the small office space he shared with two other men with managerial positions: one named Juan Carlos who was in charge of the pier workers who would be securing the Allure to the dock when it arrived, the other was a man in a well pressed white suit that James had never seen before. The badge he had used to gain access to the pier said “STX” in large red letters. James recognized it as the name of the company that had built the Allure for Carnival, though he was still a bit surprised to see a man wearing a suit that was worth a few thousand dollars to simply oversee the ship’s arrival at Roatan Island. Then again, a ship like the Allure of the Seas must have been a multibillion dollar investment for the cruise line, so it wasn’t that strange to see a representative from the company they made rich(er) on site. James had intended to introduce himself, but the man had yet to remove the phone from the side of his head, hurriedly speaking Italian at someone James couldn’t help but feel bad for on the other end. It was just as well, James had been up late the night before talking with Eve and wasn’t in the mood to be particularly sociable. Juan was busily relaying orders in English, Spanish and a mix of the two over the radio, which left James to quietly sip his coffee and wait for the first of what were sure to be many small emergencies to arise.

He filled his small Styrofoam cup with the instant coffee percolating in the coffee maker and didn’t bother to add any sugar or cream. He didn’t particularly enjoy black coffee, but he wasn’t drinking it for the taste. After Eve had fallen asleep, his anxieties about the Allure’s arrival had gotten the better of him. He couldn’t shake a weary feeling about how it would all go and it had cost him a good portion of the few hours he’d been left to rest. Eve, he was sure, was probably not doing any better in the interviews she had scheduled to conduct this morning. Her eyes were still swollen and groggy when he’d left her at Ramon’s a few hours prior. James didn’t regret the lost sleep though, their late night conversations were the highlight of his days. Last night’s was primarily about the cartoons they both had watched growing up. Despite the fact that James was nearly ten years older than Eve, it turned out they had both been fans of “The Rugrats” – a fact Eve took to mean they were clearly meant for one another. James smiled at the recollection of Eve’s insistence that he was a grown up “Tommy,” the main character and adventurer of the children’s show. He turned and leaned on the counter in front of the coffee maker, still thinking about Eve’s beautiful smile and the way she laughed and climbed on top of him when he was less than convinced. She was terrible about remembering that he was still hurt; he was terrible at reminding her.

He took another sip of the black coffee and wondered how much Ramon’s business would improve if he would stop fiddling with his awful machine and simply sold instant coffee. Even without cream or sugar, somehow this cup was better than Ramon’s usual. James looked up from the cup to see the looming presence of the Allure as it was finally closing in on the pier. It was huge and beautiful; a testament to the might of man and the power of capitalism. It dwarfed not just the buildings nearby but the very hillsides. It was like watching the arrival of Mount Olympus, surrounded by scurrying peasants as it came closer to the pier.

And then it exploded.

The ship was still a few hundred yards off shore when the first explosion ripped through the starboard side of the bow a few decks above sea level. The ship’s nose was pointed directly toward James’ office and although the explosion was off to his left, the shockwave tore the windows from the frames and sprayed shattered glass all over James and the other two men. James found himself on his rear end against the counter he had been leaning on, his view of the ship was blocked by the desk he had been sitting at but he was still in shock. His ears were ringing and glass still seemed to be coming down on top of him from above. He looked to his right and saw Juan Carlos on the floor by his chair, clawing at the skin around his eyes, pulling at the glass that embedded itself in him from the blast and as the ringing in James’ ears began to subside he realized Juan was screaming about being blind. He shifted his weight to crawl toward him when the deafening sound of a second explosion blasted through the empty window frames, carrying a shockwave of dust and hate over his head, knocking over everything that remained on the counter. James felt the explosion in his chest like a grenade in the next room, despite the ship’s distance out to sea. Juan rolled under the desk for protection and the mystery man in the white suit was already behind the filing cabinets, only his alligator shoes remained visible.

James didn’t know what had happened. It could have been an accident, a malfunction in the ship’s engines, a gas leak… it could have been a mistake, but he knew it wasn’t. James rubbed his eyes, hoping it was only dust and not glass that was making them water, and stood up knowing he would be looking out into hell. This was no mistake, and thousands of people were dying right outside his window.

It was hard to make sense of what he saw at first, clouds of dust and smoke were rising up from the ship, blocking his view of the hull where the explosions had gone off. The second one seemed to have been lower than the first, possibly below sea level and close to mid-ship. The ship seemed much smaller than it had a minute ago and James realized it was because it was going down… quickly. Boats that looked tiny compared to the sinking behemoth were already crisscrossing the waves toward the ship, hoping to scoop up the passengers that had already determined the wait for the life boats to be futile and had begun jumping from the deck. It was a bit too far to make out who was jumping exactly, but James knew many of them wouldn’t survive the impact with the water. The ship sat more than two hundred and thirty feet above the water line, even with it sinking, a few hundred foot fall promised low survivability for your average middle aged vacationer, water or not. James got to his knees and crawled to Juan. His face was still bleeding, but it was under control.

“I’ve gotta go help, I’ll be back for you,” he half yelled to Juan, hoping he could hear over the ringing he assumed was also in Juan’s ears. He then took off out the door to the office and toward the pier. There were a number of small motor boats that were used for getting around the big ships by the pier workers that were tied up only a hundred or so yards away and thus far no one seemed to have thought to put them to use. He knew Juan’s injuries wouldn’t cost him his life, but wondered how many people were already drowning in the salty blue water just ahead of him. Two dock workers poked their heads up from behind a dumpster as he passed and James yelled to them to follow him, though neither did. When he reached the boats, he jumped into the last one, allowing him a clear path to the destruction. He untied it and hopped in but the boat shifted under his weight when he landed and James found himself on his side, his twisted knee throbbing beneath him. He used his arms to pull himself onto one of the two benches that spanned the width of the small boat and span around, grabbed the pull chord for the boat’s motor and yanked with all his might. It started on the first pull and Brandon twisted the throttle as far as it would go.

He sped toward the sinking ship, at first unsure where to go as it was longer than a city block and the closer he got the bigger and more daunting his rescue hopes became. He passed two lifeboats traveling toward shore and wondered why he didn’t see more of them. He got his answer as he saw one of the forty foot life boats come crashing down from what must have been six stories up. The crowd was screaming on the side of the ship as it fell and two crew members were standing where it had just been with axes. They immediately began chopping at the cables keeping the next one secured to the side of the doomed ship. The hydraulic system that lowered the ships was down, damaged in the explosion he assumed, and whatever backup method of deployment the ship must have had wasn’t working either. The life boats were stuck on the side of a sinking skyscraper.

The lifeboat that had fallen was nearly completely submerged for a split second before shooting back out of the water and nearly capsizing. James watched it bob in the water for a moment before the screams from above brought his attention again back to the men chopping at the cables with the axes. One cable broke on the next life boat, swinging the bow straight down as it hung by the rear line and flinging three people out of the open doors and down onto the bobbing lifeboat below. The motors on the lifeboat that had fallen first fired to life just as the second cable snapped, either from the weight or the sharp end of an ax. The second lifeboat plummeted nose first onto the back end of the first boat and in a moment they were both gone. James turned the motor and tried to twist the throttle further to get him there faster but it was already redlined. The three minutes it would take to reach the ship felt like an eternity to James. The hours he spent pulling bodies, some living, some not, out of the water once he got there felt even longer.