Sea of Greed

Kurt looked around for something to slice through the metal rail or bend it out of the way. Nothing obvious jumped out at him. But he had an idea. “Get ready for the drop. It’s going to come suddenly.”

“Hurry,” the man said. “We’re cooking in here.”

Kurt had no intention of wasting time. He backtracked to the bundle of loose pipes that he’d climbed over earlier, found a long, thin one made of a lightweight alloy. It had threaded ends where additional pipes could be attached by screwing them together.

He grabbed three matching pipes, compared the ends and then went back to the stranded escape boat.

His first thought was to use the pipes as a long lever, bending the misaligned launch rail back and freeing the boat, but that proved impossible.

“Give me a lever and a firm place to stand,” Kurt said to himself. “But if there’s no firm place to stand—”

Something detonated in the lower levels. The catwalk shook and debris tumbled toward him from above. Kurt ducked out of the way. The water was the key.

He quickly screwed the pipes together, twisting them tight. With all three sections linked, he now held an unwieldy forty-foot tube of metal, which he lowered into the water below, deliberately submerging the pipe into a dense area of flame.

Balancing the pipe against the catwalk, he removed his secondary regulator, split the hose and directed a jet of oxygen across the open top of the pipe. This created a low-pressure area that drew the volatile gas into the pipe and gave the fire pure oxygen to breathe.

It took a few seconds for the gas to rise up the pipe, but when it reached the top, a jet of fire burst out the end.

Kurt held it up against the launch rail, stretching dangerously over the gap to direct the fire against the actual bend in the rail where the metal was already the weakest.

The pipe warmed in his hands, with the heat soaking through his fireproof gloves. “Come on,” he whispered.

The jet of flame was continuous and intense. It quickly blackened the launch rail and then reddened it like the embers of a fire.

With the rail glowing red, it softened quickly. The escape boat inched forward.

“Just a little more…” Kurt grunted, his hands beginning to burn.

All at once, gravity took over. The boat slid forward, breaking off the weakened rail and knocking the makeshift torch out of Kurt’s hand.

Everything fell in tandem. The pipe clanging into various things and the orange pod hitting the sea like a small bomb.

The impact forced so much water aside, it created a temporary void in the flames down below.

“No time like the present.” With two steps, Kurt jumped over the edge. He dropped feetfirst, with both arms holding the helmet in place. He plunged twenty feet below the surface and then kicked upward with all the strength he had left.

Kurt broke the surface and swam for the tail end of the escape boat, which was already motoring away.

A desperate grab for a trailing rope failed and Kurt was on his own. He began swimming, following the wake made by the orange boat. It kept the fire off him, but he was rapidly being left behind. Eventually, the boat pulled far enough ahead that a wall of fire closed between them.

Kurt stopped swimming and began treading water. He turned from side to side, looking for a gap in the wall of flames. There wasn’t one. He looked below the surface, but the fire extended downward as far as he could see. He couldn’t swim through, couldn’t swim under and couldn’t swim around.

“Definitely need a Plan B,” he said to himself.

Slowly, the ring of fire closed in on him, the safe space in the middle shrinking until Kurt was treading water in a circle no more than fifteen feet across. Just as he was about to pick a direction and swim for it, something hit his feet, lifted him up and left him sprawled out flat.

Joe had surfaced the submersible directly beneath him.

Kurt grabbed on and steadied himself.

The hatch opened and the smiling face of Joe Zavala popped out. “The weather’s a lot nicer on the inside.”

Kurt was already moving toward the hatch. “You don’t have to ask twice.”

He swung his feet over, dropped down inside and sealed the hatch tight while Joe vented the tanks and took the small craft downward.

With an oxygen alarm beeping and a coolant warning flashing, Kurt pulled off his helmet for the first time in what seemed like hours. “Took your own sweet time getting here,” he said to Joe.

“I was giving you a chance to get out of there on your own,” Joe said. “Thought it might help build up your self-esteem.”

“That’s thoughtful of you,” Kurt said, pretending to be appreciative, “except that I almost ended up like a baked potato.”

“More like pasta,” Joe said. “Actually, it was hard to find you. And hard to navigate through all this fire, even in a submarine. It was only when the escape boat hit the water that I got a clear bead on where you were.”