Chapter 18 - Clash of Steel and Salt
The rogue freighter loomed ten stories over our humble tugboats, a mountain of black steel carving through the sea foam. On her bridge, we could see armed mercenaries pointing assault rifles down at our deck.
"Brace for collision!" Silas yelled, throwing his weight against the hydraulic throttles of *The Sovereign*.
With an earth-shattering boom of screaming metal, our tug rammed the starboard bow of the freighter, her reinforced rubber fenders groaning under thousands of tons of dynamic pressure. The impact tossed me against the console, but I held the satellite lock, systematically shutting down the harbor's electronic navigational buoys to blind the rogue captain’s radar.
Bullets began pelting the armored glass of our wheelhouse like hail. Old Sal took a shard of glass to his shoulder, grunting in pain as he slumped against the bulkhead.
"Elena! Take the secondary helm!" Silas ordered, drawing his rifle and kicking open the armored side door of the wheelhouse.
I gripped the massive wooden wheel with both hands, my muscles screaming as the violent suction of the freighter’s giant twin propellers threatened to drag our tug under her hull. "I’ve got her, Silas! Push her port side toward the sandbar!"
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Silas stepped out onto the open bridge wing into the teeth of the gunfire. With superhuman precision, he fired three high-caliber armor-piercing rounds directly into the glass of the freighter’s bridge windows above. Screams of dying men drifted over the roar of the storm.
At that moment, the other three union tugboats slammed into the freighter’s port flank simultaneously. The combined torque of twenty thousand diesel horsepower began pushing the monstrous 60,000-ton cargo vessel off course, inch by agonizing inch, away from Berth Nine and straight toward the shallow sandbanks of Dead Man’s Shoal.
