by Alex Gilly
“Take the wheel,” he shouted.
She looked up at him, nodded, her mouth open, and felt her way over to him. They swapped places.
“Head straight into that,” he shouted, pointing at the black wall of cloud ahead before bolting for the door. The gale almost knocked him flat the moment he opened it. Legs spread wide, leaning forward into the wind, he made his way over to the port rail, got down on his knees, rested the AR-15 on it, and started firing in the general direction of the go-fast, just letting it rip in full automatic mode. He wasn’t hitting anything and he knew it: the gun wasn’t known for its accuracy on firm ground and he was firing from a heaving, rolling platform at another through fierce wind. The only upside was that it was the same for them. He emptied an entire clip. While he was reaching for another, he kept his eyes on the two gunboats. One pulled ahead and disappeared from sight. A moment later, he heard a clang and saw another grenade rolling along the deck toward him. His heart banged like a kettle drum. He dived for cover behind the elevated fish-hold hatch.
The explosion was tremendous—Finn worried that his eardrums had burst. Something sharp cut his cheek and he thought he’d caught some shrapnel. Only when he opened his eyes did he realize that it was glass from the wheelhouse rear window, knocked out by the shockwave. He checked himself: apart from the cut on his cheek, he was unscathed. The Belle’s solid construction had saved him—the shrapnel hadn’t made it through the raised steel sides of the fish-hold hatch. He got to his feet and looked over the starboard rail at one of the go-fasts—the guy in the passenger seat was working the pin out of a third grenade.
Finn set the barrel of the AR-15 on the rail, tilted it down to compensate for the Belle’s upward heave, peered down the sight, and pulled the trigger, firing at least twenty rounds. He stopped and looked over the go-fast. He hadn’t hit a damn thing.
But he had made the two men in the boat duck for cover. The one handling the grenades was crouched down in an awkward position, his elbows tight against his ribs. He pulled the pin and held the grenade for a second, cooking it off. Then both boats hit a big wave. The impact was bigger for the lightweight go-fast. It knocked the grenade from the man’s hand. Finn watched him scramble on the floor between the boat’s bucket seats. Too late, he thought. He ducked his head beneath the rail. The blast was tremendous. He popped his head up over the rail again. The go-fast’s hull was careening ahead with no one at the helm, its windshield gone and its fiberglass superstructure blasted to pieces. The hull kept going till it hit an oncoming wave, pitchpoled, and came to a rest upside down, propeller shafts poking up, blades spinning to a stop. Finn scanned back over its track and saw with savage pleasure a man’s torso being tossed about on the stormy sea, the foam around it crimson.
He heard more gunfire from the other side of the Belle, more bullets zinging off her hull. The second go-fast. He was scrambling across the deck to deal it, clasping the AR-15 in both hands, when everything went eerily dark.
He’d forgotten about the storm. The colossal bank of clouds was right on them now. Colossal was an inadequate word to describe the size of the thing; from where he was, the cloud mass was on a cosmic scale—like the annihilating face of a hammer belonging to some merciless, Aztec god. Towering cracks of lightning shattered the sky, their terrific thunder deafeningly close and making the grenade’s explosion seem like the sound of a bubble popping. Finn’s senses were working at their highest level, the way a prey animal, sensing movement in the grass, watches not just with its eyes but with every hair on its vulnerable body. It had been dark before, but only in the southern half the sky; now they were enveloped in darkness, and through it Finn could barely make out the candy red–hulled go-fast still tracking along their starboard side. Hailstones started crashing into the Belle, hitting rather than falling on her at an almost horizontal angle. Stones the size of baseballs rolled around the deck. Finn ran for cover in the wheelhouse. He found Linda at the wheel, the wind and water blasting through the missing windows, the hailstones jackhammering into the wheelhouse roof, the uproar interrupted only by the frequent, terrifying cracks of thunder.
She didn’t answer when he called her name and asked if she was okay. At first he thought she hadn’t heard him through the din, but when he followed her frozen gaze, he understood.
“Oh my god,” he said.
Coming at them was a wave.
More accurately, coming at them was a towering wall of water the size of a warship traveling at the speed of sports car.
The Belle began to yaw. Linda, paralyzed at the wheel, did nothing. They were losing steerage. If they didn’t take the wave head-on, they would broach, no question. Even a boat as solid as the Belle, a wave that size on her quarter would flip her like a toy.
Finn threw his gun onto the bench, shoved Linda aside, and grabbed the wheel. He had only one job now: to keep the wave from destroying them. Out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the go-fast right alongside the Belle, scudding along the crests of the waves that preceded the monster. They’d stopped firing. Finn figured they had seen the wave by now. They must’ve realized their fate.
He focused on bringing the Belle’s head back on track. So far, the rogue wave had held its shape, but it appeared impossibly top-heavy. Finn turned the wheel to full-lock and the Belle slowly came up again, regained steerage, and even picked up a little speed, crashing over the front waves of the set. He kept his eyes fixed on the monster’s crest, his whole body tense as a mainstay, his forearms aching from holding the wheel so tightly. Then, to his horror, he saw the top of the wall of water lurch forward, saw the crest curl and break, foam flying off it like snow being whipped from a mountain.
Linda started to scream. The Pacific Belle started falling away, exposing her beam to the breaking monster. Finn heaved on the wheel with everything he had, locking the rudder all the way over, but still she kept falling away. When he looked up, instead of seeing sky, he saw nothing but seawater and realized there was nothing more he could do.
“Hold on!” he screamed.
For three long seconds, the Pacific Belle heaved up the side of the wave. Then there was an eerie, standstill moment, and Finn allowed himself to believe, to hope, that the wave was going to pass beneath her keel. The din died down, leaving Finn and Linda in an uncanny quiet, as though they could speak at normal conversational volume.
Then the stillness gave way to a world of indescribable violence.
Through the space where the rear window had been, Finn saw the top half of the wave collapse under its own weight, and then the starboard side of the Belle disappeared underwater and she began to roll. Everything inside the wheelhouse that wasn’t bolted down—plastic water bottles, charts, pens, sunglasses, coffee mugs, the electric kettle on its power cord, the radio mic on its coil, the AR-15—fell through the air toward the water rushing in the starboard window. Finn held on to the wheel, his right leg dangling free, his left one jammed against the base of the high chair. The whole cabin rolled past ninety degrees. He thought of Mona, of never seeing her again. He thought of his father, of seeing him soon. He heard a scream and watched in horror as Linda slid away from the table, her hands grasping at nothing, and fell through the hole where the starboard window had been. He reached out for her with one hand, but missed, and she disappeared into the torrent of water rushing along the inside of the gunwale. Finn clung for his life, unable to do anything except wait, wait, wait. Water filled the cabin.
And then, unbelievably, he felt it: the Pacific Belle slowly, wearily started coming right again, like an old automobile struggling up a hill. The noise was deafening—not just the deep and loud thump of the wave collapsing, but the torrential rush of water flooding over the rails and through the scuppers. Somehow, they had survived; somehow, Finn had managed to give the Belle just enough way to get her over the crest, and now, instead of being rolled under its breaking face, they were heaving down its back.
* * *
With the Belle returned to more or l
ess level (a relative term), Finn turned his attention to the inundated stern deck. Linda was nowhere to be seen. He thought she’d been swept over with the receding water. He called out her name—nothing.
Then he saw an arm sticking out of the water. He half ran, half swam across the shifting deck, clawing his way against the buffeting wind, seawater up to his thighs, rain stinging his face. His soaked-through clothes weighed him down. He found her wrapped around one of the steel legs of the cable drum. She wasn’t moving at all. He reached under her arms and pulled her up. The wind thrust her into his arms. He shepherded her to the wheelhouse, holding her shivering body against his.
He brought her in, sat her on the bench, held her face cupped in one hand and slapped it hard with the other, and shouted her name in her ear. She coughed, opened her eyes, vomited water, swallowed great gulps of air, and grabbed hold of his arms with bruising strength. Suddenly she peeled back from him and stared into his eyes in horror.
“My girl!” she shouted. She tore herself away from him and before he could stop her dashed outside and opened the door to the below-deck cabin.
“Wait!” he said, but she was gone.
He made his way back to the wheel. The main thing was that Linda was alive and still aboard. They had survived the rogue wave, and the sea was smaller now—waves no taller than twice the height of the boat—but he knew there could be more monsters in the wake of the one that had nearly ended them. What was more, the sea had turned them all the way around, so the storm-driven waves were slamming into the Belle’s stern, making her yaw again. He was soaked to the bone, the wound on his arm smarted, blood was streaming from his cheek, and he felt a huge bruise growing on his shin where he’d hit the edge of something. But none of that mattered. What mattered was keeping the Belle afloat in this watery hell.
Finn checked the dials—the engine, miraculously, was still running. He put his hands on the wheel, closed his eyes, and took a long breath. He felt what the Belle was doing through his hands and through the soles of his feet. She was jerking this way and that, like a fly trying to find its way through a windowpane. He filtered out the storm’s raging shrieks and listened through his hands to where she wanted to go. She felt heavy by the stern, and he realized that the weight of all the water still caught on the stern deck and rushing from the scuppers had pressed her down a fraction, pushing her screw deeper into the sea, giving her traction. They had way. He opened his eyes and pushed the throttle forward.
But then a following wave raised her stern, tilting her forward at an angle so steep that Finn had to lock his arms to stop from falling into the instruments. His stomach lurched, and he felt her bow start to come around. Hand over hand, he counterturned the wheel and set her right again. The wave passed beneath her and now she tilted over the crest, and instead of roiling water, he found himself staring through the rain-whipped window at the blackened sky, so close that he felt he could almost touch it.
He realized, exhilarated, that this heavy boat was actually surfing the waves and that as long as he kept her moving, he had a degree of control over her heading. The Belle careened down the slope and slammed into the trough with a jarring shock. Finn lunged forward and caught the wheel painfully in his ribs. The Belle’s bow disappeared into the water, her stern lifted, and her blades cleared the water. He had lost traction again, and again her head started turning to port, her starboard side dipping. He glanced back, saw another huge wave approaching. He pushed the throttle to full speed and desperately counter-steered, his hands flying over each other until at last she obeyed, tilted back to center, and started bearing back to where Finn wanted her to go.
The next wave lifted her at an astonishing speed from the eerie quiet of the hollow to the crest, where the shriek of the wind was at its most fierce. And then the wave moved on, and they slid down toward the next trough. Finn screamed for joy and told the Belle he loved her. He was elated; he wasn’t beating the storm, exactly, but he felt as if the Belle were rewarding his commitment, and that together they were colluding against the chaos engulfing them. All he had to do was stay with her and give her his full attention through the gale, no matter how long it lasted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
For forty eight hours and six hundred and fifty nautical miles, Finn didn’t leave the wheelhouse or the deck—not to eat, not to sleep, not to piss, not to throw up. When he had to piss or throw up, he did it over the side. Linda brought him food and drink but otherwise stayed sheltered below with the girl. The Caballeros had shot out both the stern and starboard windows of the wheelhouse, and the rain and cold swept into Finn’s bones.
At some point during the ordeal—the relentlessly pelting rain so distended the passage of time that he lost any useful sense of it—he changed into dry clothes and wet-weather gear that Linda brought him. She also brought him oatmeal cookies, and once, when the raging swell seemed to have lulled a little, she brought him a mug of something hot, which he never got to taste—a wave hit the moment she walked through the door, and the mug’s contents ended up all over the floor.
Forty eight hours had passed, but he knew this only from the clock in the corner of the display screen; the quantity and quality of light in the world surrounding him no longer followed the logic of the Earth’s rotation. The storm had engulfed them on the morning of November 3, and by noon it had been so dark that it could’ve been night. Then, by late afternoon, he had become so used to the darkness that when a hole appeared in the clouds and everything was bright again, it took him by surprise. And then the real night fell and plunged them into real darkness. The storm clouds blanketed out the stars and the moon, and the only lights visible from the Belle, apart from her own, were the cracks of lightning ahead of them, for the storm had overtaken them and they were in its tail now. It was the morning of November 5. It had taken everything he had, but his gamble had paid off. They were heading for Two Harbors. He was six hundred and fifty nautical miles closer to setting everything right.
Linda appeared with a Thermos and more cookies.
“Thank you,” he said, reaching for the coffee.
She flipped off her waterproof hoodie, shook out her hair, and leaned against the chart table. She seemed lively and alert—fired up, he presumed, at the prospect of being reunited with her daughter.
“How’s the kid?” he mumbled through a mouthful of cookie.
“She looks green.”
“Understandable.”
“She hasn’t complained once.”
“Well, she’ll learn how to do that in America.”
No response from Linda.
The sea had dropped. The swell was getting closer to a normal size, without the confusing and dangerous cross sea that Finn had spent so many hours tackling. At long last, he could let himself relax. His head drooped and he could barely keep his eyes open.
“That was a joke,” he said.
“I know,” said Linda’s silhouette.
“You think she’ll be a match for Lucy?” he said.
It took a moment for Linda to answer. “I hope so,” she said, her voice so soft that he barely heard her.
“Me too,” said Finn, “I like her.”
“Who?”
The question surprised him. He reached for another cookie. “Both of them. Navidad and Lucy.”
Linda fell silent and Finn, too tired to push the conversation, did, too.
“You need to sleep, Finn,” she said finally. “I can take it in from here.”
He shook his head. “I’m fine. Got to keep an eye out for patrols.”
“I’ll wake you if anything shows up on the radar. You’re dead on your feet.”
Finn yawned. “Maybe I will sit down for a bit.”
“Go below. It’s warm and dry down there,” said Linda.
“No. I’ll just stay here. I’m fine, really.”
He stumbled over to the bench by the chart table, sat down, tucked his hands into his armpits, and closed his eyes. He planned to rest with his eyes clo
sed, keeping his ears open for the radar alarm.
But within a minute he was fast asleep.
* * *
He dreamed he was in bed with Mona. She smiled and said, “Cinq à sept?” and gently put her hands over his eyes. When she took them away, he found himself staring at walls made of dirt and a rectangle of blue sky, like he was lying in a hole. Diego’s face appeared cut out against the sky.
“Hey. Get out of my grave,” he said. He reached an impossibly long arm down to Finn and pulled him out. Now Finn saw that they were in the cemetery and Diego was in full dress uniform. In the center of a row of mourners sat Mona in black, holding a folded Stars and Stripes on her lap.
“I want my pipes and drums,” said Diego. There was a black-edged entry wound in his forehead. Finn, frightened, turned away in time to see the honor guard lowering their rifles at him.
“Please, no,” he said.
He heard the order to fire, and all twenty-one guns erupted.
* * *
He woke to the sound of insistent beeping and instinctively jumped to his feet. The dream evaporated and the military part of his mind noted that it was night—he’d slept through the entire day. Linda was staring at the electronic display. Finn hustled over and looked over her shoulder. The weather was throwing up a lot of clutter, but there was nothing ambiguous about the green dot traveling in a straight line at twenty knots directly toward them from San Diego. His heart sank. A boat that fast, at this time of night, heading in that direction, could only be a CBP Interceptor.
“You think they’re coming for us?” said Linda.