Noble Chase

by Michael Rudolph

  “I already thought of that. I’ll go below in a second and get it.”

  The sight was ghostly, bizarre, painted by a surrealist in monochromatic shades of black and white. They could do nothing but stare at the yacht, hypnotized by the stroboscopic effect of the brilliant white light from the parachute flare flickering a thousand feet overhead.

  Beth stood in the cockpit, the flare pistol still in her hand, Andi by her side, Max at the wheel. In the aftermath of the storm, the sky was pitch black, covered by clouds, and moonless. The wind had calmed down to 20 knots, but the waves, slower to react, were still cresting at nearly six feet. Beth was the first to break out of her mesmerized state. She stuck the flare pistol in the pocket of her yellow parka and took out the small camera she carried around. She brought it up to her eyes and quickly snapped off several frames as her mother picked up the binoculars she had hung over the binnacle.

  The vessel was about half a mile away, dark and invisible in the night except for the flare’s reflected light. She was a single-masted sailboat, but the mast looked like it had been snapped in two by some monstrous wave. Like a broken matchstick, the top half was lying in a tangle of stainless-steel cable on the deck. From this distance through the binoculars, nobody could be seen topside. By the time the flare went out, Andi had the spotlight on, its powerful beam reaching out through the darkness to illuminate the boat.

  “I want to approach them under power,” Max said, “so let’s start up the engine and furl the genoa up the rest of the way. We’ll leave the main up. It’ll help keep us steady.”

  Beth reached down to the engine controls by her left leg and started the engine, shifting into forward gear. “Mom, did you ever raise anybody on the radio?”

  “Nobody,” Andi replied as she rolled up the rest of the genoa around the forestay, using the winch to crank in the furling line. “I tried Atrophy. I tried calling her Sindicator. I tried the Coast Guard. I tried any damn boat that would answer my call….Raising the dead would be easier.”

  “Their batteries are probably dead,” Beth said. “That homing device stopped beeping an hour ago.”

  “I also saw another blip on the radar screen,” Andi said.

  “Besides Atrophy? I didn’t notice anything.”

  “It was smaller. South, southwest of us. I entered the latitude and longitude in the log. It’s not moving at all.”

  “We’ll run it down after we’re finished with Atrophy,” Max said. “Where did you put the flare pistol, Beth?”

  “It’s in my pocket.”

  She opened the Velcro flap and handed the gun to him. He took it and loaded a white star shell into the chamber. “Tell you what I’d like to do. Let’s get the portable loud-hailer out. We’re going to circle them first a few times from about a hundred and fifty yards out. Identify the boat, take a safe look around, and see if anybody comes up on deck in response to our call.”

  Beth turned off the autopilot and began to manually steer Red Sky the rest of the way toward the other vessel. When she approached to within a quarter mile, she started a slow circle. Andi kept the spotlight fixed on the boat, all three of them looking for any sign of life on board.

  When they passed by the stern of the boat, Max pointed the flare gun in the air over his head and fired. The shell arced high into the air, hesitated at its apogee, and then burst, illuminating the boat below. Looking through the glasses, Beth was finally able to see that the name on the transom was indeed Atrophy. She handed the binoculars to her mother while Max used the hailer for the first time. Its strident amplification shattered the night air. “Ahoy there on Atrophy. Is anybody on board?”

  There was no response, nor was any forthcoming as Red Sky continued to slowly circle the boat. Beth took more photographs of the eerie hulk, thinking to establish salvage rights. Max hailed her repeatedly, but to no avail. Apprehensive as to what he would do if anybody answered, he was relieved by the lack of response and felt some of the accumulated tension ease out of his body.

  Atrophy was incapable of making any progress under sail. Her boom had been bent like a pretzel and was now shaped like an inverted V, with its top half protruding off the deck like a bowsprit. Beth could see now where one of the spreaders on the broken mast had smashed a hole through the hull on its way down, although the hole appeared to be above the waterline.

  “She’s very low in the water,” Andi observed, her eyes pressed into the binoculars. “Her cabin must be flooded. What do we do now? Prepare to board?”

  “Not as long as it’s dark out,” Max answered. “We’re not going to risk it in this rough water. Too dangerous for us and the boat.”

  “What if someone on board is hurt?” Beth asked. “The wait could kill them.”

  “That someone is Sloane and Erica Crossland, and yes, I’m putting our safety before theirs. If they’re on board, they might decide we’re not welcome. We’re not going to deal with that on a night like this.”

  “He’s right, Beth. It’s two o’clock already. Whatever happened on board has already happened. On top of it all, they really could be dangerous. They’re crooks, remember: bad guys.”

  “I know,” she replied, “but we have another three hours until it’s light. We need to board her now!”

  “No. We’ll stay in the area, keep our eyes open for survivors, and if the Coast Guard doesn’t show up by dawn, then we’ll board.”

  “Dad, listen to me,” she insisted. “We’re here now. They’re here now. We need to handle it now. We can’t let this opportunity pass.” She looked at her stepfather imploringly and reached out to touch him on the arm. She saw the indecision etched on his face. “Dad, I know it would be easier to wait for daylight, but we can’t postpone this confrontation.”

  Max stared at her for the longest time and then simply nodded. “Okay, baby,” he finally said, “let’s beard the damn lion and be done with it. You and I will go over to Atrophy in the dinghy and I’ll board her. Andi, you’ll stay on Red Sky and keep circling around.”

  “Max,” Andi asked, “are you sure we shouldn’t just hang around until the Coast Guard shows up? They’re better prepared to handle these kinds of things.”

  “Look, there’s no sign we ever reached the Coast Guard on the radio. No, Beth is right. This is our problem and we’re going to handle it, now.”

  “We’re alone out here, Mom.”

  Together, they unfastened the dinghy from on top of the cabin and wrestled it over the double lifeline railing and into the water, still connected to Red Sky by her painter.

  “Hold on a second, Dad. I’ll be right back,” Beth said, having made another decision. “There’s something else we need from the cabin.” She went below and reappeared a minute later carrying the 12-gauge shotgun in one hand and a handful of shells in the other. She didn’t know the rules of this new game yet, but she knew how to shoot straight and fast.

  As she loaded the shells into the magazine, there was no sound or protest from Max or Andi, only the same unspoken resolve they all shared. Max, waiting for her by the transom, nodded in resigned agreement. “We’re a team, Dad,” she said. “I’m going to board with you. You’ll cover me with the shotgun.”

  Max dropped the swim ladder and climbed down into the dinghy. Beth detached the small outboard engine from its mount on the transom and handed it down to him. He attached it to the dinghy and gave three tentative pulls to the starter cord. Nothing, followed by three more pulls, then an adjustment to the choke, three more pulls, and still nothing. He looked up at Beth. “Better do your magic before she really floods.”

  She handed the shotgun down to him and got into the small boat. As usual, the outboard started right up for her. Max pumped the shotgun once to chamber a round and put on the safety. Andi untied the line and threw it into the dinghy as Beth advanced the throttle and shifted into gear.

  The water was choppy, making the crossing treacherous. Beth had her hands full. She skillfully brought the dinghy up to Atrophy’s stern and held
it firmly against the swim ladder while Max waited for a break in the wave action and then climbed on board.

  Beth handed him the shotgun, tied the dinghy to the ladder, and scrambled up behind him. She went over to the hatch and looked down into the flooded main cabin, following the flashlight beam with her eyes, but saw nothing in it except for a floating clutter of personal effects, oily towels, and plastic bottles.

  Max walked around the deck with the shotgun cradled in his arm, pausing only to examine the open canister that had once contained Atrophy’s emergency life raft.

  Beth climbed down the companionway ladder and sloshed her way into the aft cabin, but it was also empty. Suddenly the boat rolled into a deep trough, and she heard a loud thud come from up forward. Lulled into complacency at finding the first two cabins empty, she was startled by the sound from the third cabin. She went back into the main salon and stood by the galley, sensing the presence of her stepfather right above her, watching from the cockpit, shotgun in a ready position. Its safety was now off.

  “Who’s there?” he challenged, pointing the shotgun at the closed door to the forward cabin, certain he would pull the trigger if Beth’s life was endangered.

  “Whoever’s in there, this is the Coast Guard. Come out now with your hands up!” Beth’s demand sounded hollow to her ears. There was no response from the cabin, only another thud as the boat continued to roll precipitously.

  Beth walked back across the main salon and over to the forward cabin. Max stood off to one side, aiming the shotgun at the cabin door. She opened the door slowly, her heart pounding, and looked inside. Then she saw Vincent. The moan started low in her throat and reached a crescendo of pure horror in the second it took Max to reach her. When he saw the teenager’s gimballed body swinging naked in leather shackles over the bunk, he turned Beth away, took her into his arms, and silently held her there until she regained control of herself. Then he brought her back over to the hatch and made her wait for him in the cockpit. There was no protest from Beth.

  It was obvious the boy had drowned, imprisoned by the heavy leather bracelets binding his wrists and ankles to the massive steel chain plates bolted to the hull. In his last desperation, perhaps, he had managed to kick out the bunk he had been strapped to, but the futility of the effort had left him swinging helplessly in space. In death, his youthful face was frozen in terror; he had been abandoned by Sloane and Erica, unable to affect his fate.

  Max, outraged by the tragedy, was determined to photograph the entire scene for the police in Aruba. He took out his camera and took pictures until nausea overwhelmed him. Then he and Beth returned to Red Sky.

  —

  “The life raft has to be that blip we saw on the radar a couple of hours ago,” Andi said.

  “Can you give us a course for it?” Beth asked.

  “I can try.”

  “Any luck with the Coast Guard?” Max asked.

  “No, but I did raise a Dutch oil tanker heading out from the Panama Canal. I gave them Atrophy’s location and asked them to pass it on to the Venezuelan Coast Guard. They promised they would.”

  “Let’s locate the blip you and your mother noticed.”

  “I’ll go get a course from the GPS,” Andi said. “Be right back.” She went below and sat down at the navigation table, punched a few numbers into the GPS, and brought up the original location of the blip she had entered earlier. She then punched in a drift factor based upon the current flow outlined on a chart of the area. The GPS was constantly updating their own position, so with a few additional entries, it gave her a projected course toward the present location of the blip.

  “Steer southwest, 217 degrees,” Andi said on her return to the cockpit. “It should be twelve, maybe fifteen miles.”

  “You got it. Southwest, 217 degrees,” Beth repeated.

  “The weather’s improving. Let’s shake the reef out of the main, unfurl the genoa, and sail her,” Max said. “Head her up into the wind.”

  With Beth behind the wheel, he reached up to the boom and untied the wraps they had used to secure the shortened mainsail. After raising the sail back up to its full height on the mast, he unfurled the genoa and winched it in until satisfied with the trim. Beth steered Red Sky onto the desired course and turned off the engine. Sail power took over, and the rushing wind and waves filled the void.

  For the first forty-five minutes on the course, they saw nothing, despite the appearance of the sun now rising behind them in a mostly cloudy sky. Then, when Max went below, he noticed a small blip on the radar screen. “Andi,” he shouted up to the deck, “can you come down here a second? There’s something on the radar screen—”

  Andi was down the ladder and in the cabin beside him before he finished the sentence. She started plotting the information from the screen. “It could be a raft,” she suggested. “It’s small enough and hardly moving at all.”

  “What’s its relative bearing from us?”

  “Southeast, about 125 degrees.”

  “How far?”

  “Maybe six, eight miles.”

  “Come around to 125 degrees,” he said up to Beth, who was watching them from outside, sitting on top of the cabin.

  “We’ll have to jibe,” she said.

  “I know. We’re coming right up.”

  Beth went back to the steering wheel and turned off the autopilot, while Andi and Max climbed the ladder. Andi went to the leeward side of the boat and uncleated the genoa sheet so that she could release it when the boat jibed. Max uncleated the mainsheet and hauled in the boom until it was taut along the center line of the boat. While the genoa would swing harmlessly over to the other side of the boat during the jibe, the massive boom would cross like an aluminum scythe, giving instant headache or worse to anybody unfortunate enough to be in its path.

  “Everybody set?” Beth asked.

  “All set,” Andi responded.

  “Heads down and let her rip,” Max said.

  “Prepare to jibe,” Beth announced, followed immediately by, “Jibe ho!” as she turned the steering wheel to the left, taking the boat’s stern through the eye of the wind, putting Red Sky on her new heading.

  With the jibe, the boom slammed violently over their heads to its new tack. As soon as it did, Max released the mainsheet partway, permitting the boom to swing out safely over the boat. Andi released the genoa sheet, crossed to the other side of the cockpit, and cranked in the genoa. The big sail ballooned with air as Red Sky settled down on her new course.

  It wasn’t long before Beth shouted and pointed excitedly off the port bow. “I see something in the water at ten o’clock.”

  Andi was closest to the binoculars and grabbed them before Max could. She peered out over the water in the direction Beth had indicated. “I can’t see anything,” she complained.

  “I can’t see it anymore either,” Beth said.

  Andi relinquished the glasses to Max’s grabbing hands. He quickly had them up to his eyes, adjusting the focus. “There it is!” he said, pointing with one hand while keeping the glasses glued to his eyes with the other hand. “Over there….A raft. It’s got a canopy on top. Steer a little more to the left.”

  Beth turned the wheel slightly to port.

  “A little more,” Max said. Red Sky reacted perceptibly to the adjustment. “There, that’s fine now,” he said. “Stay right on that course.”

  In a minute, Beth spotted the raft again with her naked eye, and soon it was readily visible to all of them. She wanted to approach under power, so while Max furled up the genoa, she started the engine, throttling up to 2,500 rpm. Andi lifted the port seat in the cockpit, dug into the lazaret, and brought out two twenty-foot lines for use if needed.

  Max then opened the starboard lazaret, took out the shotgun, and handed it to Beth. “It’s still loaded and the safety is on. If Sloane or anybody else is alive on that raft, they may be troublesome after abandoning that kid. Let’s be ready.”

  Beth nodded in assent. She put the shotgun dow
n on the seat behind her while she continued steering Red Sky toward the raft. As the distance narrowed, her anticipation of the confrontation increased. One way or the other, the chase was about to be over. The conclusion was unknown, but its revelation wasn’t more than a few hundred yards away and closing.

  She dropped the throttle down to 1,500 rpm so the wake from Red Sky wouldn’t create additional problems for any survivors on the life raft. Red Sky slowed to 5 knots, approaching the raft from the rear. Beth made a pass around to the front and shifted into neutral, but the entrance in the front of the canopy had been zippered shut. “Ahoy on board the raft!” she shouted through her cupped hands. “Is anybody there?”

  There was no answer, but the entrance to the canopy opened slowly when Beth repeated the call a third time. Max grabbed the shotgun as a hand appeared first from inside the raft, followed by the bearded countenance, bald head, and upper torso of Leonard Sloane, a laceration on his forehead caked with blood, his other arm dangling uselessly at his side. He stared silently at them, passively, without any sign of recognition.

  Hardly a formidable adversary, Beth thought as she stared back at him, trying to visualize the man who had nearly destroyed her. Where was the satisfaction she had been seeking, the payback for the wrongs? The elements had cut Sloane down to a pitiful wretch. Beth had had nothing to do with it.

  Beth replaced her jacket with a life vest, secured herself with a safety line, and jumped into the water. Andi threw her another line, which she tied to the raft before climbing on to help Sloane. He was unable to help himself and too beaten to talk. Max rigged a block and tackle from the boom, attached a sling, and swung it out over the water. Beth grabbed the sling and managed to get it around Sloane. Then, with Max using the winch, they hoisted Sloane’s dead weight out of the raft and into the cockpit of the sailboat, where he collapsed from exhaustion on the seat, a yellow canvas bag clutched in his grasp.

  Andi brought the medical kit up from the cabin. Sloane’s right arm was obviously broken, and he had to be in intense pain. It was hard for her to manifest much overt support for the anger she still felt toward him. Despite what he had done to Beth, he presented no immediate threat and she couldn’t let him sit around in the cockpit without doing something to help. She made a sling to relieve some of the pressure and gently eased it over his neck while putting his arm through it. The head wound wasn’t bleeding, so she decided to leave it alone.