First 5 Chapters

Wednesday morning, April 16th, 1947
( 9:12 AM, Pier O, Texas City Railway Terminal, Texas City)
A dark plume of smoke rose into the clear Texas sky. At its base was a burning cargo
ship, the SS Grandcamp. On the pier, where the ship was docked, firefighters sprayed streams of
water onto the smoking vessel, hoping the liquid would run down into the holds and quench the
inferno raging in its belly. Along the shore curious onlookers gathered to watch the battle.
Suddenly the deck around the rearmost hatch of the rusty freighter began to swell and
grow, like a malignant boil. A microsecond later it burst with the bright flash.
From the bridge, in the center of the ship, to the stern, half of the 14,000 ton ship
disintegrated into a cloud of flying shrapnel. Chunks of twisted metal, some weighing several
tons each, flew through the air. The pressure of the enormous blast forced the 35 feet of water
under the vessel out and away, briefly exposing the muddy bottom of the south slip.
The heroic Texas City firemen disappeared instantly. Hundreds of curious onlookers and
dock workers also vanished. They were all ripped asunder by the enormous blast, their remains
joining a growing wall of debris that expanded away from the dock at five times the speed of
sound.
The warehouses on the pier next to the stricken ship were obliterated, along with the
thousands of tons of goods stored inside. On the other side of the pier the High Flyer, another
freighter, was ripped from its moorings by the rising wall of water and by the shockwave of the
explosion. The crewmen aboard the boat were blown off the deck, or tossed about inside like
beans inside a baby’s rattle.
Across the slip, eight hundred feet east of the detonation, the buildings of Monsanto
Chemical Company imploded from the blast pressure. Numerous employees suffered severe
injuries from flying glass and collapsing walls, some dying from their wounds.
A four ton chunk of the Grandcamp’s hull picked up one of Texas City’s fire trucks and
slammed it into the Longhorn II, an acid barge that had just been ripped from its moorings. The
force wrapped the chassis around the barge’s side and prow, with the dual-wheel rear axle
pointing toward the sky. Debris, that was once the Grandcamp’s bridge and the crew’s quarters,
shot a thousand feet into the air, mixed with cargo that had been stored in the holds above the
detonation. Blended inside this mushroom cloud was a crimson mist that was once the ship’s
Captain.