Her accommodations were designed to carry fifty-five first-class passengers, eighty-five second-class, and 370 third-class. Normally she carried a crew of 190, but on what was to be her final voyage, she was manned by only thirty-eight.

Hunt thought of his ancient command as a tiny island on a turbulent sea engulfed in a drama without an audience. His attitude was fatalistic. He was ready for the beach and the Princess was ready for the scrap yard. Hunt felt compassion for his battle-scarred ship as she wrestled with the full brunt of the storm. She twisted and groaned when inundated by the titanic waves, but she always broke free and punched her bow into the next one. Hunt's only consolation was that her worn-out engines never missed a beat.

Down in the engine room the creaking and groaning of the hull were uncommonly clamorous. Rust danced and flaked off the bulkheads as water began to rise through the walkway gratings. Rivets holding the steel plates were shearing off. They popped out of the plates and shot through the air like missiles. Usually, the crew was apathetic. It was a common occurrence on ships built before the days of welding. But there was one man who was touched by the tentacles of fear.

Chief Engineer Ian "Hong Kong" Gallagher was an ox-shouldered, red-faced, hard-drinking, heavily mustached Irish-man who knew a ship in the throes of breaking up when he saw and heard one. Yet fear was pushed from his mind as he calmly turned his thoughts to survival.

An orphan at the age of eleven, lan Gallagher ran away from the slums of Belfast and went to sea as a cabin boy. Nurturing a natural talent for maintaining steam engines, he became a wiper and then a third assistant engineer. By the time he was twenty-seven, he had his papers as chief engineer and served on tramp freighters plying the waters between the islands of the South Pacific. The name Hong Kong was given to him after he fought an epic battle in one of the port city's saloons against eight Chinese dockworkers who tried to roll him. When he turned thirty, he signed on board the Princess Dou Wan in the summer of 1945.

Grim-faced, Gallagher turned to his second engineer, Chu Wen. "Get topside, put on a life vest and be ready to abandon ship when the captain gives the order."

The Chinese engineer pulled the stub of a cigar from his mouth and stared at Gallagher appraisingly. "You think we're going down?"

"I know we're going down," Gallagher replied firmly. "This old rust bucket won't last another hour." "Did you tell the captain?"

"He'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to figure it out himself."

"You coming?" asked Chu Wen.

"I'll be right behind you," answered Gallagher.

Chu Wen wiped his oily hands on a rag, nodded at the chief engineer and made his way up a ladder to a hatch leading to the upper decks.