Operation Underworld Read Free Page A

he was doing, raised his head and listened. Then, either smelling smoke or sensing the steadily mounting pandemonium, they ran for the exits. In less than ten minutes, the port-side promenade deck was completely engulfed.
    The mild breeze which blew that afternoon fed the flames enough oxygen so that by half past two, all the weather decks were involved. To add to the rapidly mounting problems, the freshly applied coat of paint allowed the entire main deck to be consumed only minutes later. The resulting 1,000 degree temperatures were in stark contrast to the 33 degree levels of the ambient air of the harbour. To appalled observers, the involvement of the lower weather decks meant that anyone working above those levels, if they had not yet escaped, was suffering the most horrible death imaginable.
    By now several things were occurring simultaneously. A number of men working at pier level began to realise what was happening, and three of them ran for the guard shack, which housed the only land line. As they burst through the door, they discovered that the alert young Marine had already notified the NYPD, the fire department, and was currently in the process of dialling the Harbor Master on his emergency line.
    “Did you call for the docs?” one of the men asked in a frantic voice. The big guard held out his index finger while he finished dialling.
    “Yeah! The police are going to notify the hospital to prepare a triage team.”
    Talking into the telephone the Marine continued. “Harbor Master, this is Lance Corporal Deuth, Pier 88, Luxury Row. We‘ve got a code two emergency. Yes sir, yes sir. Already done both of those! Thank you, sir!” As he hung up the phone, the Marine instructed two of the men to return to the ship to help, and one of the men to stand by the main gate to prevent anyone from blocking access by parking in front of it. As they ran back to the ship, one of the men turned the other,
    “Hey, Harry!”
    “What?”
    “What the hell’s a triage?”
    “I don’t know, but they better get a shit load of them out here!” With Normandie longer than the width of Central Park, the 2,000 foot long dock, plus the additional two to three hundred feet to the main gate, was a distance few of the men had given any thought to until that day. Running from the guard shack towards the ship was not only complicated by the bitter cold, but wading through the crowds of workers moving in the opposite direction while wearing heavy work boots and heavy winter coats made it a triple effort. Tools and gear and canvas fire hoses littered the dock, half of them covered in ice and men tripped and stumbled regularly.
    Several workers, noticing that all four gang planks were clogged with fleeing workers, immediately set about erecting ladders against the hull at appropriate hatchways.
    Through the unending stream of panic-stricken workers, the Foreman fought his way back up the starboard-side forward gangplank. Halfway to the Quarterdeck he recognised the exhausted face of his chief engineer. Taking the awestruck man by the shoulders, the Foreman looked straight into his eyes.
    “Mac, what’s our status?”
    Gasping between phrases, the out of breath engineer stared through the Foreman as he responded. “Bilge to ‘C’ level is clear. But if it reaches the POL stores, everything from Jersey City over to Broadway’s gonna be a fuckin’ airfield!”
    “You’re sure there’s no one else below?”
    “Only those two lunatics.”
    “Which two lunatics?”
    “How many lunatics you got working Damage Control?”
    As the Foreman continued to struggle his way through the Zfleeing workers deeper into the ship, it occurred to him how easily a man could vanish into one of the thousands of human-sized pigeon holes the partially stripped down ship had become. Fighting through the passageways below decks, he spotted an OBA case on the port bulkhead. The Oxygen Breathing Apparatus would buy him at least fifteen minutes of breathable