Brown went first. Keeping a wary eye on the sharks, he firmly planted his feet on the gunnels and balanced his body. He stretched out his arms, grabbed the ladder and pulled it toward him. As the launch rose on the crest of the wave, he stepped onto a rope rung and climbed steadily upward, covering the vertical height of nearly fifty feet in less than three minutes. At the top, he caught the railing and pulled himself over onto the forepeak. Next, he swung one of the lines the survivors had thrown off the bow until it was caught by one of the men in the boat. The line was then tied to the end of another line that the launch had towed from the tug.

After three of his crew had ascended the Jacob's ladder to the forepeak, the line was pulled up and slipped around an enormous round towing bollard whose designers never expected it to be used this way. Then the end was passed back down to a man in the launch, who tied it off. Brown watched the launch as it returned to the tug, where the heaving line was passed up and secured to the end of a cable wound around a huge winch. Before Brown gave the signal to engage the winch, he watched as one of his crew smeared grease around the bollard.

With no power on board the Emerald Dolphin, it was no small chore to lift aboard the tug's massive eight-inch-diameter tow cable that weighed one ton per hundred feet. By using the bollard as a pulley, the winch was engaged and began pulling the line running between the two ships around a small drum attached to the main winch. A two-inch cable that had been attached to one end of the line soon began winding itself around the bollard and back to the tug again. The other end of this cable was connected to the big eight-incher, which was then pulled up to the bow of the cruise ship and clamped with a series of U-bolts to the anchor chains because the big liner did not have a capstan on the foredeck. It was mounted below on a deck that was burned and unreachable.

"Cable secured," Brown notified McDermott over his portable radio. "We're coming back aboard."

"Acknowledged."

Ordinarily, a small crew would remain on board a derelict under tow, but without knowing to what extent the fire had ravaged the hull, there was too great a danger for the men to remain on board the Emerald Dolphin. If she should abruptly head for the sea floor, they might not have time to escape and would be sucked down with her.

Brown and his men dropped down the ladder into the launch. As soon as the launch and its crew were taken aboard the tug, McDermott gave the order for dead slow ahead. Brown, who was operating the gigantic tow winch, paid out the cable until the cruise ship was a good quarter of a mile astern. Then he set the brake, the slack went out of the cable and the winch took up the strain as the Audacious began to inch forward.