Two police cars, blue lights flashing, squealed to a stop as close to the disaster as possible. I jumped to one side to avoid an ambulance wailing and honking behind me. The crowd in front of me parted to let it through. I followed quickly in its wake and made it close to the wreck.

A crane and a couple of forklift trucks had been waiting at dockside. All three were thoroughly chewed up by the oncoming freighter. The police helped the ambulance driver pry one of the forklift drivers out of the mess of crumpled steel. An ugly sight. The crowd—stevedores, drivers, crew members—watched avidly. Disasters are good bowling-league conversation pieces.

I turned away and found a man in a dirty white boiler suit looking at me. His face was sunburned dark red-brown and his eyes were a deep bright blue. “What happened?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Ship rammed the dock. My guess is they were bringing it in from the engine room and someone went full ahead instead of full astern.”

“Sorry, I’m a stranger here. Can you translate?”

“Know anything about how you steer a ship?”

I shook my head.

“Oh. Well, it’s hard to explain without showing you the controls. But basically you have two levers, one for each screw. Now if you’re out at sea you steer by turning the wheel. But coming into the dock, you use the levers. Putting one full ahead and one full astern—toward the back, that is—will swing you to the right or the left, depending on which one you move which way. Putting both of them full astern is like putting your car in reverse. Slows the ship way down and brings you gently up against the wharf. It looks like some poor bastard thought that was what he was doing but went full ahead instead.

“I see. It seems strange that a little thing like that could cause so much damage.

“Well, if you drove your car at the pier—assuming you could get down in the water and do it—you’d be chewed up and the concrete walls would laugh at you. But your car—what kind do you drive?—about a ton and two hundred horsepower? Now that thing has twelve thousand horsepower and weighs about ten thousand tons. They did the equivalent of flooring her accelerator and that’s the result.”

Someone had rigged a ladder up to the front of the ship. A couple of crew members, rather shaky, came down onto the pier. I felt a hand on my shoulder and jerked around. A tall man with a sunburned face and a magnificent shock of white hair shouldered past me. “Excuse me. Out of the way, please.”

The police, who were keeping everyone else back from the forklift trucks and the ladder, let the white-haired man through without a question.

“Who’s that?” I asked my informative acquaintance. “He looks like a Viking.”