Chapter 17 - The Iron Armada
Within twenty minutes, Berth Nine was awake not with fear, but with righteous fury. The siren Silas had sounded wasn't a cry for help; it was the assembly horn of the Longshoremen's Union.
When Silas and I arrived at the marina, three hundred dockworkers, riggers, and crane operators were waiting on the piers under the glare of industrial sodium floodlights. They carried iron bars, heavy flare guns, cutting torches, and fire hoses. They had built this harbor with their sweat; they had buried their brothers under its concrete. They would not let Italian cartel remnants turn it into an inferno.
"Brothers and sisters!" Silas shouted over the roar of the diesel engines. "A rogue ship is bearing down on our homes. She intends to ram the seawall! We meet her in the narrows! Block the channel! Pin her screws!"
A deafening roar of defiance erupted from the crowd.
Four immense ocean-going tugboats—vessels weighing five thousand tons each with immense steel-reinforced icebreaker prows—roared to life, their twin stacks belching white smoke into the midnight rain. Silas and I boarded the flagship tug, *The Sovereign*, alongside old Sal, the grizzled chief engineer.
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I plugged my tablet directly into the maritime satellite terminal, overriding the harbor beacons. "Channel channel nine is locked down," I announced over the VHF radio to the entire harbor. "All civilian traffic cleared. Tugs one through four, assume wedge formation at Buoy Twelve!"
Out of the black squall, the massive, rust-streaked bow of the rogue freighter materialized like a leviathan, plowing through the swell at twelve knots directly toward the main terminal.
