“The Dorsett mine on Gladiator Island,” Sandecker said, tempering the awe in his voice.
Ames nodded. “As good a choice as any. The intensity of the energy would not have the strength to kill humans after making a round trip. But it should put the fear of God in them and give them one hell of a headache.”
This was the end of the line. Pitt thought bitterly. This was as far as any human was expected to go. This was the conclusion of the valiant effort, the future desires and loves and joys of each one of them. Their end would come in the water as food for the fish, the pitiful remains of their bodies sinking a thousand fathoms to the desolate bottom of the sea. Maeve never to see her sons again, Pitt mourned by his mother and father and his many friends at NUMA. Giordino’s memorial service, Pitt mused with a last vestige of humor, would be well attended, with an impressive number of grieving women, any one of whom could have been a beauty queen.
The little boat that had carried them so far through so much chaos was literally coming apart at the seams. The crack along the bottom of the hull lengthened fractionally with every wave that carried the boat over its crest. The buoyancy tubes would keep them afloat, but when the hull parted for good and the pieces went their separate ways, they would all be thrown in the merciless water, clinging helplessly to the wreckage and vulnerable to the ever-present sharks.
For the moment the sea was fairly calm. From crest to trough, the waves rolled just under a meter. But if the weather suddenly became unsettled and the sea kicked up, death would do more than merely stare them in the eyes. The old man with the scythe would embrace them quickly without further hesitation.
Pitt hunched over the rudder in the stern, listening to the now familiar scrape and splash of the bailer. His intense green eyes, sore and swollen, scanned the horizon as the orb of the morning sun flushed from a golden-orange glow to flaming yellow. He searched, hoping against hope that a hint of land might rise above the clean straight horizon of the sea surrounding them. He searched in vain. No ship, aircraft or island revealed itself. Except for a few small clouds trailing to the southeast a good twenty kilometers away, Pitt’s world was as empty as the plains of Mars, the boat little more than a pinprick on a vast seascape.
After catching enough fish to start a seafood restaurant, hunger was not an anxiety. Their water supply, if conserved, was good for at least another six or seven days. It was the fatigue and lack of sleep caused by the constant bailing to keep the boat afloat that was taking a toll. Every hour was misery. Without a bowl or a bottle of any kind, they were forced to splash the incoming water overboard with their cupped hands until Pitt devised a container from the waterproof packet that held the accessories he had smuggled past the Dorsetts. When tied to a pair of wrenches to form a concave receptacle, it could expel a liter of seawater with one scoop.
At first they labored in four-hour shifts, because Maeve demanded she carry her share of the exertion. She worked gamely, fighting the stiffness that soon attacked the joints of her arms and wrists, followed by agonizing muscle aches. The grit and guts were there, but she did not have the natural strength of either man. The shifts soon were divided and allocated by stamina. Maeve bailed for three hours before being spelled by Pitt, who struggled for five. Giordino then took over and refused any relief until he had put in a full eight hours.
As the seam split farther and farther apart, the water no longer seeped, but rather spurted like a long fountain. The sea pried its way in faster than it could be cast out. With their backs against the wall and no trace of relief in sight, they slowly began to lose their steadfastness.
“Damn Arthur Dorsett,” Pitt shouted in his mind. “Damn Boudicca, damn Deirdre!” The murderous waste, the uselessness of it all made no sense. He and Maeve were no major threat to Dorsett’s fanatical dreams of empire. Alone, they never could have stopped him, or even slowed him down. It was a pure act of sadism to set them adrift.
Maeve stirred in her sleep, murmuring to herself, then lifted her head and stared, semiconscious, at Pitt. “Is it my turn to bail?”
“Not for another five hours,” he lied with a smile. “Go back to sleep.”
Giordino paused from bailing for a moment and stared at Pitt, sickness in his heart from knowing without question that Maeve would soon be torn limb from limb and devoured by the murder machines of the deep. Grimly, he went back to his work, laboring ceaselessly, throwing a thousand and more containerfuls of water over the side.
God only knew how Giordino could keep going. His back and arms must have been screaming in protest. The steel willpower to endure went far beyond the limits of comprehension. Pitt was stronger than most men, but alongside Giordino, he felt like a child watching an Olympic weight lifter. When Pitt had yielded the container in total exhaustion, Giordino took it up as if he could go on forever. Giordino, he knew, would never accept defeat. The tough, stocky Italian would probably die trying to get a stranglehold on a hammerhead.
Their peril sharpened Pitt’s mind. In a final desperate attempt, he lowered the sail, laid it flat in the water, then slipped it under the hull and tied the lines to the buoyancy tubes. The nylon sheet, pressed against the crack by the pressure of the water, slowed the advance of the leakage by a good fifty percent, but at best it was only a stopgap measure that bought them a few extra hours of life. Unless the sea became perfectly calm, the physical breakdown of the crew and the splitting apart of the boat, Pitt figured, would occur shortly after darkness fell. He glanced at his watch and saw that sunset was only four and a half hours away.
Pitt gently grabbed Giordino’s wrist and removed the container from his hand. “My turn,” he said firmly. Giordino did not resist. He nodded in appreciation and fell back against a buoyancy tube, too exhausted to sleep.
The sail held back the flow of water enough so that Pitt actually stayed even for a short time. He bailed into the afternoon, mechanically, losing all sense of time, barely noting the passage of the brutal sun, never wilting under its punishing rays. He bailed like a robot, not feeling the pain in his back and arms, his senses completely numbed, going on and on as if he were caught in a narcotic stupor.
Maeve had roused herself out of a state of lethargy. She sat up and peered dully at the horizon behind Pitt ’s back. “Don’t you think palm trees are pretty,” she murmured softly.
“Yes, very pretty,” Pitt agreed, giving her a tight smile, believing her to be hallucinating. “You shouldn’t stand under them. People have been killed by falling coconuts.”
“I was in Fiji once,” she said, shaking her hair loose. “I saw one drop through the windshield of a parked car.”
To Pitt, Maeve looked like a little girl, lost and wandering aimlessly in a forest, who had given up all hope of ever finding her way home. He wished there was something he could do or say that would comfort her. But there was nothing on God’s sea that anyone could do. His sense of compassion and utter inadequacy left him embittered.
“Don’t you think you should steer more to starboard?” she said listlessly.
“Starboard?”
She stared as if in a trance. “Yes. You don’t want to miss the island by sailing past it.”
Pitt’s eyes narrowed. Slowly, he turned and peered over his shoulder. After nearly sixteen days of taking position sightings from the sun and suffering from the glare on the water, his eyes were so strained that he could only focus in the distance for a few seconds before closing them. He cast his eyes briefly across the bow but saw only blue-green swells.
He turned back. “We can no longer control the boat,” he explained softly. “I’ve taken down the sail and placed it under the hull to slow the leakage.”
“Oh, please,” she pleaded. “It’s so close. Can’t we land and walk around on dry ground if only for a few minutes?”
She said it so calmly, so rationally in her Australian twang, that Pitt felt his spine tingle. Could she actually be seeing something? Reason dictated that Maeve’s mind was playing tricks on her. But a still-glo
wing spark of hope mixed with desperation made him rise to his knees while clutching a buoyancy tube for stability. At that moment the boat rose on the crest of the next swell and he had a brief view of the horizon.
But there were no hills with palm trees rising above the sea.
Pitt circled his arm around Maeve’s shoulders. He remembered her as robust and spirited. Now she looked small and frail, and yet her face glowed with an intensity that wasn’t there before. Then he saw that she was not staring across the sea but into the sky.
For the first time he noticed the bird above the boat, wings outspread, hovering in the breeze. He cupped his hands over his eyes and gazed at the winged intruder. The wingspan was about a meter, the feathers a mottled green with specks of brown. The upper beak curled and came to a sharp point. To Pitt the bird appeared to be an ugly cousin of the more colorful parrot family.
“You see it too,” said Maeve excitedly. “A kea, the same one that led my ancestors to Gladiator Island. Sailors shipwrecked in southern waters swear the kea shows the way to safe harbors.”
Giordino peered upward, regarding the parrot more as a meal than a divine messenger sent by ghosts to guide them toward dry land. “Ask Polly to recommend a good restaurant,” he muttered wearily. “Preferably one that doesn’t have fish dishes on the menu.”
Pitt did not reply to Giordino’s survivalist humor. He studied the kea’s movements. The bird hovered as if resting and made no attempt at aimlessly circling the boat. Then, apparently catching its second breath, it began to wing away in a southeasterly direction. Pitt immediately took a compass bearing on the bird’s course, keeping it in sight until it became a speck and disappeared.
Parrots are not water birds like the gulls and petrels that range far over the seas. Perhaps it was lost, Pitt thought. But that didn’t play well. For a bird that preferred to sink its claws on something solid, it made no attempt to land on the only floating object within sight. That meant that it was not tired of flying on instinct toward some unknown mating ground. This bird knew exactly where it was and where it was going. It flew with a plan. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was in the midst of flying from one island to another. Pitt was certain it could see something from a higher altitude that the miserable people in the dilapidated boat below could not.
He moved to the control console and pulled himself to his feet, clutching the stand with both hands to keep from being pitched overboard. Again he squinted through swollen eyes toward the southeast.
He had become all too familiar with clouds on the horizon that gave the illusion of land rising from the sea. He was too used to seeing white tufts of cotton drifting over the outer edge of the sea, their uneven shapes and dark gray colors raising false hopes before altering form and gliding onward, driven by winds out of the west.
This time it was different. One solitary cloud on the horizon remained stationary while the others moved past it. It rose from the sea faintly but without any signature of mass. There was no indication of green vegetation because the cloud itself was not a piece of an island. It was formed by vapor rising from sun-baked sand before condensing in a colder level of air.
Pitt restrained any feelings of excitement and delight when he realized the island was still a good five hours’ sail away. There wasn’t a prayer of reaching it, even with the sail spread once more on the mast while the sea poured into the boat. Then his dashed hopes began to reassemble as he recognized it not as the top of an undersea mount that had thrust above the sea after a million years of volcanic activity and then nurtured lush green hills and valleys. This was a low, flat rock that supported a few unidentifiable trees that somehow survived the colder climate this far south of the tropic zone.
The trees, clearly visible, were clustered on the small areas of sand that filled the cracks of the rocks. Pitt now realized the island was much closer than it had seemed at first view. It lay no more than eight or nine kilometers away, the tops of the trees giving the impression of a shaggy rug being pulled over the horizon.
Pitt took a bearing on the island, noting that it precisely matched the kea’s course. Next he checked the wind direction and drift, and determined that the current would carry them around the northern tip. They would have to sail southeast on a starboard tack as Maeve had, amazingly, pictured in her imagination.
“The little lady wins a prize,” Pitt announced. “We’re within sight of land.”
Both Maeve and Giordino struggled to their feet, clung to Pitt and gazed at their distant hope of refuge. “She’s no mirage,” said Giordino with a big grin.
“I told you the kea would lead us to a safe harbor,” Maeve whispered softly in Pitt’s ear.
Pitt did not allow himself to be carried away by elation. “We’re not there yet. We’ll have to replace the sail and bail like hell if we’re to land on its shore.”
Giordino judged the distance separating them from the island, and his expression sobered considerably. “Our home-away-from-home won’t make it,” he predicted. “She’ll split in two before we’re halfway.”
The sail was raised, and any length of line that could he spared was used to tie the splitting hull together. With Maeve at the rudder, Giordino bailing like a crazy man and Pitt sloshing the water in sheets over the side with his bare hands, the ruptured boat set its bow directly toward the small, low-lying island a few kilometers distant. At long last they had visible proof that Pitt’s navigation had paid off.
The mind-drugging fatigue, the overwhelming exhaustion had dropped from Pitt and Giordino like a heavy rock. They entered a zone where they were no longer themselves, a psychological zone where another world of stress and suffering had no meaning. It didn’t matter that their bodies would pay heavily in agony later, as long as their sheer determination and refusal to accept defeat carried them across the gap separating the boat from the beckoning shore. They were aware of the pain screaming from their shoulders and backs, but the awareness was little more than an abstract protest from the mind. It was as if the torment belonged elsewhere.
The wind filled the sail, shoving the boat on a course for the solitary outcrop on the horizon. But the heartless sea was not about to release them from its grip. The current fought them, forking as it ran up against the shore and flowing in a loop past the outer limits of the island, threatening to push them back into the vast nothingness of the Pacific.
“I think we’re being swept around it,” Maeve said fearfully.
Facing forward as he frantically scooped the surging water out of the boat, Pitt seldom took his eyes off the nearing island. At first he thought they were seeing only one island, but as they approached within two kilometers he saw it was two. An arm of the sea, about a hundred meters in width, separated one from the other. He could also make out what appeared to be a tidal current running through the gap between the islands.
By the wind streaks on the surface and the spraying foam, Pitt could tell that the following breeze had shifted even more in their favor, blowing the boat on a sharper angle across the unfriendly current. That was a plus, he thought optimistically. The fact that the water this far south was too cold for coral reefs to form and wait in ambush to tear them to shreds didn’t hurt either.
As he and Giordino fought the incoming water, they became conscious of a sullen thunder that seemed to grow louder. A quick pause, and their eyes locked as they realized that it was the unique sound of surf pounding against rock cliffs. The waves had turned murderous and were drawing the boat ever closer into a fatal embrace. The castaways’ happy anticipation of setting foot on dry land again suddenly turned to a fear of being crushed in a thrashing sea.
Instead of a safe haven, what Pitt saw was a forbidding pair of rocks jutting abruptly from the sea, surrounded and struck by the onslaught of massive breakers. These were not tropical atolls with inviting white sand beaches and waving friendly natives, the stuff of Bali Hai, blessed by heaven and lush plant life. There was no sign of habitation on either island, no smoke, no structures of any kind
to be seen. Barren, windswept and desolate they seemed a mysterious outpost of lava rock, their only vegetation a few clusters of low nonflowering plants and strange-looking trees whose growth appeared stunted.
He could not believe that he was in a war with unyielding stone and water for the third time since he had found and rescued Maeve on the Antarctic Peninsula. For a brief instant his thoughts raced back to the near escape of the Polar Queen and the flight from Kunghit Island with Mason Broadmoor. Both times he had mechanical power to carry him clear. Now he was fighting a watery burial on a little waterlogged boat with a sail not much bigger than a blanket.
The master seaman’s first consideration when encountering rough seas, he recalled reading somewhere, was the preservation of the stability of his boat. The good sailor should not allow his boat to take on water, which would affect her buoyancy. He wished that whoever wrote that was sitting beside him.
“Unless you see a stretch of beach to land on,” Pitt shouted at Maeve, “steer for the breach between the islands.”
Maeve’s lovely features, drawn and burned from the sun, became set and tense. She nodded silently, tightly gripped the rudder lines and focused every bit of her strength on the task.
The jagged walls that climbed above the crashing surf looked more menacing with each passing minute. Water was pouring alarmingly into the boat. Giordino ignored the approaching upheaval and concentrated on keeping the boat from sinking under them. To stop bailing now could have fatal consequences. Ten seconds of uninterrupted flow of seawater through the damaged boat and they would sink five hundred meters from shore. Struggling helpless in the water, if the sharks didn’t get them, the surge and rocks would. He kept bailing, never missing a beat, his faith and trust entirely in the hands of Pitt and Maeve.
Pitt studied the cadence of the waves as friction with the bottom slope caused them to rise and slow down, measuring the break of the crests ahead and astern and timing their speed. The wave period shortened to roughly nine seconds and was moving at approximately twenty-two knots. The swells were beating in on an oblique angle to that of the rugged shoreline, causing the waves to break sharply as they refracted in a wide turn. Pitt did not need an old clipper ship captain to tell him that with their extremely limited sail power, there was little opportunity for maneuvering their way into the slot. His other fear was that of backwash swinging off the shoreline of both islands and turning the channel entrance into a maelstrom.
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