Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) (12 page)

Wellesley waved away their thanks. “No problem. Y’all about ready to shove off?”

“Yeah,” Bollinger said, “thanks again to you fellas.”

As hoped, their new shipmates had readily agreed to help get the Coasties’ boat over the narrow strip of land and back into the canal. If many hands hadn’t made ‘light work,’ they had at least made it much faster and possible without necessitating the use of the electric winch.

A dozen towboat men had taken their flat-bottom aluminum skiffs and motored over to come ashore by the bridge abutment and meet the Coasties at the boat ramp they’d discovered earlier. The patrol boat nosed into the ramp and Kinsey untied the trailer tow rope and tossed it to the men ashore before Bollinger backed the boat back out into the bayou. Their new helpers pulled the trailer toward shore until the wheels engaged the sloping concrete ramp and then held it there until Bollinger drove the boat onto the trailer, and Kinsey splashed down to hook the securing cable into the pad eye on the front of the boat and used the hand winch to pull the boat the rest of the way on to the trailer. Bollinger hopped out of the boat as well, and the mass of men clustered around the trailer, straining and grunting, to roll it up the boat ramp.

Even with a dozen extra men, the task had been difficult, with the combined weight of the boat and trailer increased by Dan Gowan’s improvised flotation pontoons. They worked the trailer up the ramp in increments, all of them heaving on a count of three. It took two dozen heaves to get the trailer to level ground, but after that, rolling it over to the canal had been relatively easy.

They reversed the process to relaunch the boat into the canal, the challenge here being the muddy slope of the canal bank. They countered that with wide wooden planks the Coasties had brought along, lashed to the trailer in anticipation of just such a situation. They laid the planks end to end behind each wheel, providing a firm path for the trailer to roll into the water until the boat and trailer were both afloat. The boat had separated from the trailer easily and was now tied alongside the
Lacy J
, the floating trailer in tow behind her, with the planks lashed down securely.

“About that,” Wellesley said. “That was a bear even with a bunch of folks to help. And I ain’t so sure you’re gonna find convenient shortcuts at the Bayou Sorrel and Port Allen locks. I’m thinkin’ you and Bollinger here are gonna have a tough time gettin’ around those locks. I mean, you really think that electric winch is gonna work?”

Kinsey’s nod was less than confident. “I think it will if we can find some sort of reasonable slope to pull the trailer up and something heavy and stationary to hook the winch cable to. For that matter, we got plenty of spare gas in the boat; if we can find an abandoned car or truck, we can use that. Don’t worry, Lucius. We’ll make it work.”

Wellesley nodded and held out his hand. “All right then. I best get to work before the rest of the fellas think I’m goofin’ off. Y’all have a safe trip, and I hope to be meetin’ that family of yours one of these days before long.”

Kinsey stood and took the outstretched hand as Bollinger rose to follow suit.

“Thank you, Lucius,” Kinsey said. “When are you leaving for Beaumont?”

“It’ll be a few days, at least. We got enough folks to take all six tows on the west side of the lock. I mean, I can’t see leavin’ all that fuel here. Even if we can’t use it, it’ll sure come in handy for trading. And besides, the boats will give us some extra beds when we get to Texas. Likewise, we’re stripping all the tows on this side right down to parade rest. Not just the food, but mooring lines, spare parts, basically everything.” He smiled. “I got a feeling we ain’t gonna be sendin’ in any purchase orders any time soon.”

“That’s a fact,” Kinsey said. “Sounds like you have your work cut out for you.”

“You know, it feels good for a change. We been sittin’ on our asses for weeks, gettin’ on each other’s last nerve, but now we got a plan and it just feels good to have a purpose.” He smiled again. “Even if we don’t really know what the hell we’re doing.” He grew serious. “But the problem is gettin’ it all to the other boats. Some of that stuff is heavy and gettin’ it up on the lock, all the way down to the other end, and back down on to the boats is gonna take some time.”

“Something tells me you’ll make it work,” Kinsey said.

“You can count on it,” Wellesley said.

M/V
Pecos Trader

Sun Lower Anchorage

Neches River

Near Nederland, Texas

Day 26, 6:45 p.m.

“So how long before these towboats get here?” Gowan asked.

Hughes grinned across the coffee table. “You mean how long before you get your hands on that lube oil, don’t you?”

Gowan shrugged. “I can’t deny it was welcome news. We got diesel coming out of our ears, but lubes are gonna be hard to come by, especially in the quantities we need. It’s not like we can raid an AutoZone for a thousand gallons of lube oil. Two barges full is about a gazillion times overkill, but it means we’ll have enough for anything we do in the future, to say nothing about its trade value. Everyone’s worried about fuel, but machinery won’t run very long without lubrication.”

Hughes nodded and looked at the group assembled in the sitting area of his office, his ad hoc advisory council, for want of a better term. There was no doubt he was in charge (whether he wanted to be or not), but it wasn’t the military, and the situation on the ‘Ark,’ as everyone had begun to jokingly refer to
Pecos Trader
, was outside anyone’s experience. He needed all the help he could get and had no problem whatsoever listening to the advice of subordinates.

His three senior officers sat across the low coffee table from him on the sofa, Dan Gowan in the center flanked on either side by Georgia Howell and Rich Martin. Torres sat to his right in an armchair, filling in for the absent Kinsey as security chief. But perhaps the most surprising member of the informal advisory council sat beside him on the love seat. He glanced at his wife and silently marveled at how quickly she’d adapted over the last week.

Laura Hughes had rebounded quickly from the harrowing ordeal of her family’s rescue. With their twin daughters safely aboard
Pecos Trader
and with neither the obligations of the farm at Pecan Grove nor her large animal veterinary practice to occupy her, she’d quickly become bored. She first attempted to ‘help’ in the galley, where her suggestions to make things ‘more efficient’ did nothing to endear her to Chief Cook Jake ‘Polak’ Kadowski. Rebuffed there, she’d found a perfect outlet in seeing to the needs of the Coast Guard dependents who’d joined
Pecos Trader
in Wilmington.

Essentially passengers, the five Coast Guard wives made themselves as unobtrusive as possible and tried to keep their nine kids out of the way. The officers and crew of
Pecos Trader
were kind, but there were neither facilities nor activities for dependents on a working ship, and no one really knew what to do with the non-sailors. For their part, the women never complained, as they understood they represented a disruption to the normal rhythm of shipboard life, but they were nearing their wits’ ends. As one woman confided to Laura soon after she arrived, they were all going ‘totally frigging Loony Tunes.’

But if the Coastie wives had been hesitant to address the situation with the captain, Laura was anything but. He wasn’t the ‘captain’ to her, but ‘Jordan,’ and she quickly pointed out that unless accommodation was made for the children and if the women weren’t somehow blended into shipboard life, things would go downhill in a hurry, especially since they expected even more passengers as the families of other crewmen were rescued.

Hughes had conceded the point and placed her in charge of organizing the dependents. Delighted to have a representative with ‘the captain’s ear,’ the wives responded enthusiastically, and Laura was presently engaged in planning classes for the children as well as learning as much as she could about shipboard routine to see where the women’s skill sets might be most useful.

As a veterinarian, she was also the closest thing they had to a doctor and was already treating minor injuries, earning her the nickname of ‘Doc’ from both the Coasties and the
Pecos Trader
crewmen. Hughes was proud of Laura, but a bit uneasy. This was a dynamic they’d never before experienced in their twenty years of marriage, and he wasn’t completely sure he liked it.

He turned his attention back to the group and cleared his throat.

“I talked with Captain Wellesley on the VHF a couple of hours ago,” Hughes said. “They’re stripping all the trapped tows of everything that might possibly be of use. He figures three days minimum before they head this way. He’s gonna check in with us every day with a progress report.”

“Which gives us some time to try to gather in some of our folks,” Gowan said. “The crew is getting restless, Cap.” Both Howell and Martin nodded agreement.

Hughes sighed and sat back in his chair. Things had been tense since the rescue of his own family and the unexpected skirmish with the escaped convicts ashore. They’d all been on high alert since then, as well as helping Kinsey prepare for his mission to Baton Rouge. He knew his crew was anxious about their own families, and rightfully so, but he just couldn’t figure out how to send out shore parties and protect the ship simultaneously.

“The problem is intel,” Torres said. “They got it; we don’t. We got no idea how many people they have and how they’re spread out, but they can watch us easy enough. We scared ’em away this morning with the air cannon, but they’re probably back by now, and there’s a hundred places to hide across the river. They’ll just be more careful.”

“That’s my concern,” Hughes said. “They already saw Kinsey leave, so they know we’re down a boat and two shooters. If they see the police boat leave, loaded with a shore party, I’m afraid they might be tempted to hit us when we’re the weakest.”

“Well, we can’t just SIT here,” Gowan said. “Most everyone’s got family out there, and with these assholes pretending to be the law, who knows what’s happening.”

Hughes started to respond, but Torres spoke first. “Maybe we can send out a party without them seeing it.”

“How?” Hughes asked. “At night? Y’all have night-vision glasses, so what makes you think the cons haven’t looted police and sheriff’s armories. They might have it too.”

Torres shook his head. “Nope. I’m talking broad daylight. We’re anchored with the bow upstream, so they can’t see the starboard side from the opposite bank. What if we launch the starboard lifeboat and go around the island, keeping the ship between the shore party and any observers on the opposite side of the river? If we’re slick enough, they won’t even know anyone left.”

Hughes stroked his chin. They were anchored in what was known locally as the Sun Lower Anchorage, directly across from the Sun Oil Company docks. An inlet off the main channel of the river, the secondary ‘oxbow’ channel continued inland perhaps a mile and then made a U-turn, rejoining the main channel of the Neches about a half mile upstream of their present location. The mouth of the downstream inlet had been dredged to the same depth as the main river channel, both to give loaded tankers a place to turn around in the narrow river and to anchor when fogbound or awaiting a berth. Nestled between the hairpin turn of the secondary channel and the main channel was a low marshy island and, at the slightly higher third of the island nearest the main channel, a thick stand of Chinese tallow trees and brush.

Hughes shook his head. “They’ll hear the engine and see the boat when it comes out the upper inlet. It’s only a half mile away and the boat’s bright orange, for God’s sake.”

“It’s bright orange now,” Torres said, “but it doesn’t HAVE to be. And as far as the noise, I think we can mask the noise of the lifeboat engine as well as giving any peeping toms something to worry about. With any luck, they won’t even know anyone left.”

“That might work once,” Georgia Howell said, “but we have over a dozen crewmen with families in the area. No way we’re gonna find everyone and get them back with one shore party, so how are we going to handle that?”

“How about a collection point?” Gowan suggested. “We take enough food and water to feed people a few days, then head upstream and find a place to hole up. That way we can just leave a few guys up there to find and collect folks, then bring ’em back as a group, or maybe groups. In fact, we could probably use the yacht club just north of the I-10 bridge. It might take a couple of trips, but that’s better and a whole lot less obvious than sending out parties every day.”

Hughes nodded. “Might work. In fact, it sounds like our best bet.”

“I’ll do it,” Gowan said. “Me and—”

“No way,” Hughes said, “we need you here.”

Gowan reddened. “Dammit, Jordan, it was my idea.”

“And it’s a good one, but you and Rich have a hundred things working no one else can handle, at least easily. I’m sending Georgia and whoever she wants along, along with some of the Coasties for security.” Hughes turned to Torres. “That is, if you agree.”

Torres shrugged. “It’s not perfect, but it’s probably the best option. We’ll make it work, but I sure wouldn’t send less than two.”

“I still think I should go. I know where the yacht club is,” Gowan said lamely.

Georgia Howell grinned. “Let’s see. It’s on the river just upstream of the I-10 bridge. I think I can find it, Dan. I did pass the navigation part of my license exam you know.”

“I know you’re worried about Trixie, Dan,” Hughes said, “but sending Georgia is the right choice. It’s not like we’re standing navigation watches or handling cargo. The second mate and I can handle any deck-related stuff in her absence, but I need you here to help me figure out how we’re going to make a ship built to accommodate twenty-five people house four times that many.”

Gowan nodded sullen acceptance, and Hughes looked around. “Well, if that’s it, let’s make it happen.”