by Peter Tonkin
But then, in a heartbeat, everything changed. Pilar gave a terrible lurch. The boy and the man behind him were thrown forward so forcefully that Miguel-Angel was winded. ‘Have we collided?’ he gasped. ‘But there is nothing there! Have we run aground? Will we sink?’
‘I don’t know,’ gasped Carlos. Even before the brief conversation was done, Hernan was at the top of the companionway, hanging in the opening there as he had hung in the cabin doorway. ‘Capitan!’ he bellowed. ‘The net! The winch! You must come.’
‘Hold her steady, boy,’ ordered the capitan. ‘Head to the wind, bow to the waves and throttle at full ahead. I won’t be long!’ As he spoke, Pilar gave another lurch, as though she had been struck on the aft starboard quarter. Miguel-Angel held on to the wheel for grim death, fighting to make her forequarters behave no matter what was happening to her stern. He only released his death grip on the little wheel to reach across and push the throttle levers as far forward as they would go, which was what he believed Carlos had ordered him to do. He was so frightened that he didn’t even notice that the green light which had dully illuminated the bridge so far had changed to red.
Out on the heaving after deck in the middle of the storm, Carlos Santiago stood beside the winch, scarcely able to believe his eyes. The whole thing was threatening to tear off its mountings. The steel cables running down to the net were writhing and twisting. The whole lot was fighting to pull itself back into the black depths even as the screaming motors were trying to tear Pilar forward.
‘What is it?’ bellowed Hernan, spokesman for the panicking crew. ‘Have we snagged a submarine? Are we tangled round the propellers of some massive cruise liner? What is it, Capitan?’
‘It must be a whale,’ said Carlos, shaken.
‘A whale? What sort of whale could do that?
‘Humpbacks,’ shouted Carlos, his voice breaking as his throat began to tear. ‘We must have netted a pod of humpbacks!’
But as he realized this, two things happened in such swift succession that none of them was able to decide which happened first and which second.
The cable parted, causing the whole back section of the boat to leap out of the water, propeller screaming as it found nothing to bite on but thin air.
And the screaming engine coughed and died.
SIXTEEN
At dawn the wind suddenly died. Katapult8 slowed to a dead stop and all four crewmembers stood side by side in the cockpit and looked around at the gathering brightness. Never one to sit on her hands and complain, Liberty decided, ‘Right. This is a good opportunity to fix some food. Emma and Maya, could you do the honours there? Coffee and bacon rolls. And Florence, can you shin up the sail and see what’s up with the running light and the AIS?’
As the off-watch team of Emma and Maya went below to heat up some food and coffee, the tall Australian redhead stepped up out of the cockpit and strode down the central hull, past the huge black wing of the sail, trailing her fingers along its surface like a proud owner petting a thoroughbred. The sail was a perfect aerofoil shape. The rear edge was a little thicker than a knife blade, but the leading edge was as wide as a mast. As she reached this edge, she paused, unclipped her safety harness from the deck lines and clipped it to a toggle set into the sheer composite cliff, then paused, looking up. The toggle she was connected to was set in a shallow groove running right up to the tip of the sail. Just beside it was a ladder of indented foot and hand-holds, designed to make it easy to climb the sail itself. With no further hesitation – as she had done countless times before – she set her toecap into the lowest rung and heaved herself up off the deck. The toggle slid up easily as she climbed nimbly upward. But should she slip and fall, it was designed to hold her safe like an inertia-reel seatbelt. There was no chance of Flo falling, even though the pitching of the hull in the restless early-morning chop was magnified up here.
Five minutes of vigorous climbing took Flo to the top of the sail and she stopped there, twisting the toggle so her harness held her safe as her hands came free. There was a little compartment up here which contained the VMS locator beacon and the electrical wiring that allowed the main battery below to power that and the signal light on the topmost tip. A moment’s inspection showed that the fault was simple – and easy to fix. A connection had come unfastened and the main power wire hung loose. Florence pushed the connection together, snapped the cover home and glanced up at the signal light which was now shining brightly and steadily just above her. ‘Good job, girl,’ she said to herself, and paused to look around.
The sky behind Katapult8 remained low, black and threatening but, for the moment, the heavens immediately above her were blue and clear, as though she was sailing through the eye of a storm. The ocean beneath her triple keel was choppy and unsettled – on the rougher side of moderate and rising force five on the Beaufort scale. And for every degree of movement at surface level, the top of the mast swung ten or more degrees. But Florence was used to the movement and luxuriated for a little longer in the privacy. The day dead ahead looked bright and welcoming, she thought, even if the threatening clouds covering half of it behind were repeated in the far distance, forming a thick charcoal line right across the southern horizon.
Even as Florence, frowning, took all this in, a wind stirred against her cheek and set her red curls dancing. A new wind, from a new direction. It puffed again, feeling somehow determined, promising. Florence knew what this meant. Liberty would want to be off at once. She checked the cover over the little electrical compartment once again and started back down the sail as fast as her safety line allowed. By the time she reached the cockpit and grabbed the mug of coffee and the huge bacon roll Emma and Maya had heated in the vessel’s tiny microwave, the wind that had kissed her cheek up aloft had swung round to the north-west and settled into a steady twenty knots.
As far as Liberty was concerned, after a night of hard sailing and tacking from reach to reach across a dead northerly, the new wind meant freedom and a renewed chance to win her bet with Richard. During the hours of darkness the sleek multihull had covered many miles at a steady twenty knots. But most of those miles had been along courses to the south-west or the south-east as she tacked across the following breeze – far too few for comfort had been dead south. But the crew pulled together, working through fatigue to that plateau where a mixture of exhaustion and adrenaline worked on their systems like a potent drug. This was the level they wanted to attain for their most testing competitions. Every woman there felt utterly at one with the sea, the wind, the multihull and her crewmates. The fact that they had hardly slept in twenty-four hours, that they had loosened their watertight clothing only to relieve themselves, that nothing chafed any longer – not even the long emergency blade that each one wore down her right calf or the safety harness they all wore beneath the life preservers – all became nothing in comparison to the possibilities unleashed by the clear dawn sky, the steady new wind and the broad blue ocean ahead. Not to mention the enhancing effect as mugs of coffee strong enough to dissolve coffee spoons and thick, hot bacon rolls hit their systems. The fiercely competitive Liberty had begun to suspect that her father in Maxima, powered by those two big Caterpillar motors, must be breathing down her neck. Especially now that the AIS was back online and he would be able to pinpoint their precise location every moment of every day and night during the next twenty hours or so it would take them to reach Puerto Banderas. ‘Right,’ she ordered, ‘let’s do some serious sailing while we can.’
If Florence, Emma or Maya had had any second thoughts about the height of the waves, the reliability of the wind, the weather surrounding them or the wisdom of pushing their vessel to the limit when they were further from land than they had planned – for dawn broke and the wind shifted at the outer jibe point of a south-western reach – it never occurred to them to say anything. They were a widely experienced team, used to working together, at that euphoric pitch which comes only once or twice in a lifetime. And although they planned to split up soon
and each go their individual ways, preparing to battle the others during the waterborne heats of the Tokyo Olympics – they knew better than to question Liberty. In matters such as mutiny, she made Bligh of the Bounty look like Anne of Green Gables. Without a second thought, therefore, they drained their coffee, stuffed the last of the food in their mouths and fell to working their beautiful multihull. Under Liberty’s steady hand, the huge black composite sail soon grabbed the wind and the multiple hulls sat up on the surface and were skimming from wave-top to wave-top as Katapult8 pulled twenty-five, then thirty knots on a south-south-easterly course across the wind towards Puerto Banderas.
This was exhilarating sailing, and the whole crew was as entranced as their breathless captain, for it was exactly what the cutting-edge machine was designed for. And one of Katapult8’s more wonderful attributes came into play. The hand and foot holes down each surface of the huge wing of her sail designed to allow crewmembers, like Florence, access to the electronics and lights at the very top had a strange effect. When the wind was right, these indentations would begin to make sounds like an Aeolian harp – and the sail would sing. The sail was singing now and the wind was working its magic against it most powerfully. But all of them knew Katapult8 could do better still.
‘Flo,’ bellowed Liberty over the rush of the wind, the hiss of the foam, the thunder of the hulls through the surf and the keening song of the sail, ‘do you think we can risk the J’s?’ On either side of the multihull’s outer hulls were tall walls of black composite, like the sail, that stood perhaps a third as high as it did. Each outrigger boasted a pair of them – with anchor points in-between so that Katapult8’s crew could still swing out on their safety lines and hold her down against the wind. And equally tall, lean blades of rudders stood high behind Liberty’s shoulders. The bottom section of each sidewall curled round into the shape of a capital J. The uprights were robust, thick, made of composite and polymer stronger than steel. The hook sections, equally robust, were the same thickness as the uprights at the after edge, but the leading edges were razor-sharp so that they could – literally – cut through the water at amazing speeds. Each hook bedded into a cavity that made the whole hull perfectly aquadynamic. But the walls were designed to slide down once Katapult8 reached a certain speed. The hook sections on the bottom were so perfectly designed and placed that when this was done the whole multihull rose out of the water and aquaplaned.
With her J hooks deployed, Katapult8 was capable of another ten knots – perhaps more under the right circumstances – controlled by the tall rudders that were designed to lower themselves in unison until only the hooks and slim rudder-blades were in the water and all resistance was effectively gone. So that Katapult8 not only sang like a bird, she flew like one as well. It was a system designed by ‘Doc’ Weary, Flo’s father, and she knew more than any others on Liberty’s crew about what stresses the J hooks and the rudder blades could withstand. ‘Go for it,’ she advised. ‘Let’s see what she can do.’
‘Right!’ ordered Liberty. ‘Get ready to deploy J hooks and rudder blades.’
Five minutes later, Katapult8 was running across the wind at forty knots. Her whole hull was more than a metre clear of the choppy water, balanced perfectly on the pairs of J hooks that seemed merely to kiss the surface as it sped beneath at breathtaking speed. The rudder, too, seemed only just to reach deep enough to keep the whole thing under control. Liberty had never experienced anything like it. She had ridden up on the J hooks before, but always in placid harbours or calm seas. This was the difference between boating on Central Park Lake and rafting the Colorado. She was so overcome that there were tears mixed with the spray whipping into her face. When she called to Florence, who was on the radio, her voice didn’t work at first.
‘F-F-FLO! Call up Maxima on the radio and tell my dad “goodbye”, would you? And tell him and Richard Mariner that we’ll see them in Puerto Banderas this time tomorrow!’
‘Aye, aye, Captain,’ answered Florence.
Ninety minutes after Florence broke contact with Liberty’s father, Katapult8 hit the humpback whale.
SEVENTEEN
The weather got worse between Ensenada and Tijuana. Biddy took the Bell down as low as she dared and loudly considered setting down on at least three occasions. Richard kept quiet – never one to try and outguess the captain of a vessel or the pilot of an aircraft. He craned sideways instead so he could keep the line of highway one in as clear view as possible beneath the worsening downpour and the battering wind. He could see why the bridges might be at risk, though the ones up here seemed to be holding on more successfully than the man at Cielito Lindo airfield had supposed or than the guys at San Quintin had warned. The highway ran as straight as a Roman road through Molino Viejo, Lazaro Gardinas and San Quintin itself, all of which showed as webs of blurry brightness on the ground and as names on Biddy’s rolling locator map. Then, after twenty or so kilometres of occasionally lit highway with precious few vehicles coming or going through the deluge, they arrived over Vicente Guerrero, which looked to be a much larger settlement. But the brightness of the streetlights and the ant-like scurrying of all sorts of vehicles soon made it clear that the warnings from their friends at Cielito Lindo and San Quintin had not been exaggerated after all. The town was built astride a sizeable arroyo. In summer – and most recent winters, Richard supposed – this was little more than a dry valley bridged by a single span. But the arroyo was anything but dry now. Even under the current conditions of darkness, wind and rain, Richard could see the raging torrent that was pouring down from the western slopes of the San Pedro Martir mountains. The centre of the town had been torn away by the violent flow, and where there had been a bridge – as suggested by the disposition of the highway – there was now the kind of cataract that Richard remembered seeing where the Colorado River rushed through the Grand Canyon.
The next town, Camalu, seemed to be faring a little better, but the bridge over the Arroyo Colonet, twenty kliks further north again was down as well, just as the men from San Quintin Airfield had feared. Biddy swooped down over the raging wreck, then followed the roadway inland. Almost immediately the mountains of the Cordillera loomed, their presence mostly subliminal – just a massive threat of deep darkness on Richard’s right. It was an unsettling conjunction of rising ground and falling water, where the north-westerly flow of the saturated air was forced up so violently that it bled its precipitation in great pulses, as though it was a throat passing over a razor blade.
During the next half hour, however, things began to quieten, especially after they eased back towards the coast once more, and by the time the Bell was powering over Ensenada the wind had fallen lighter and the rain was beginning to ease. ‘I think we’re going to make it,’ observed Biddy. ‘Looks like things are easier up here after all.’ Richard didn’t answer, because he agreed. And he suddenly realized that that was worrying. Biddy took them out over All Saints Bay and followed the coastal highway up past San Miguel Bay and Salsipuedes Bay. Within the hour they were over Rosario, immediately to the south-west of Tijuana, then over the western outskirts of Tijuana itself, and suddenly Biddy was negotiating them into US airspace as the bright bustle of the border swept beneath them, looking like a treasure trove of yellow diamonds in the brightness of the downpour. Then San Diego appeared, and in less than an hour they had followed the brightness of the coastal highway along the one hundred and eighty kliks or so that separated San Diego from Long Beach.
‘Made it,’ announced Biddy with enormous satisfaction as she began her short descent into the Island Express landing area.
‘And I can’t thank you enough,’ said Richard. ‘What will you do now?’
‘Drop you off, refuel and fly out to the Greenbaum International helipad up in Glendale. There’s accommodation there. I’ll grab some food and some shut-eye then wait for further orders, as they say.’
Richard ran up the gangplank and went back aboard Sulu Queen halfway through the morning watch, just as a
sullen, stormy dawn was beginning to threaten. He ran round the foot of the great square gantry immediately in front of the bridge with only the briefest pang of frustration that the massive mechanism could not lower containers on to the dockside – merely rearrange them on the deck. Then he swung through the A-deck door into the bridge house and pounded straight up to the command bridge, where he found the youthful first officer keeping watch himself. The young man turned round as Richard strode on to the bridge, and Richard recognized the badges of rank on his uniform before he registered the almost elfin youthfulness of the face above them. ‘I am Cheng, Captain,’ said the young man. ‘I am the first officer. Welcome aboard.’
‘Thank you, Mr Cheng. Tell me, are the National Guard soldiers and Mr Prudhomme still aboard?’
‘Yes, Captain. They went back to bed after you informed us that you planned to take command yourself. I can have them woken …’
‘Not yet. Any updates on Captain Sin’s condition?’
‘He is resting comfortably.’
‘Good. You said he had toured the ship, checked for damage after the lightning strike yesterday morning and everything was OK?’
‘Yes, Captain. And he had also ensured that our supplies and bunkerage were full, as I said. Apart from the situation with the cargo and the National Guard containers, we are ready to sail at a moment’s notice.’