by Tom Hilpert
“I was pushing buttons, trying to get them to screw up or something. Probably stupid.”
I couldn’t see her eyes, but I could feel them on my face. “You sure you’re just a pastor?”
For some reason, that sort of question always irritates me. “Of course I am. Pastors are just people, like everyone else. Are you sure you’re just an FBI agent, or just Italian? Quit categorizing people.”
“How did you know I was Italian?”
“Lucky guess.”
She looked at me for a long time. “You’re not telling me everything, are you?”
I returned her gaze. “No.”
She was quiet for a minute. “Jonah, I’m your ace-in-the-hole. You need me.”
“So you say – no offense.”
“I left the autopilot on. I got your rope out of the rigging. I didn’t tell Angela anything.”
“Look, Jasmine,” I said. “Nothing in our relationship up until this very night has been based on truth or reality. I just can’t trust you yet.”
She turned away abruptly. “Fine. I’m going below,” she stalked to the companionway and disappeared.
I considered the dim lights glowing dully through the cabin windows. If I let the autopilot drain the battery completely, I might have a few minutes afterwards to steer us off course and delay us. I could claim it was an accident, since I wouldn’t have the GPS any longer. But whenever the Coast Guard did show up, they’d be looking for us on the course I gave them.
I went back to the wheel and looked at the GPS unit. We were within about ten miles of the waypoint – maybe two, or two and half hours at our current speed. Once Angela and Phil were on the other boat, our lives would be forfeit. Under the circumstances, delay seemed like a good idea.
I waited under the dodger. The cabin lights looked washed out and old. I wondered when someone would notice, and what they would say. Leyla would probably figure it out, but she might not know it was deliberate. Jasmine, of course, would know. Maybe her response would give me the assurance I wanted in order to trust her.
I am not a swearing man, but I almost gave in to the impulse when I realized that a dead battery meant no more coffee. I cheered up again a moment later when I remembered that the stove was run on propane, and I could boil water and still make cowboy coffee, thick and full of grounds.
Suddenly, there was no more light coming from the cabin. In the same moment, I felt the Tiny Dancer swing to starboard, but this time she did not swing back, as she had done under the influence of the auto-pilot. I stepped quickly to the wheel and steadied her, holding her maybe ten or fifteen degrees off the original course. I punched the GPS, but to my satisfaction, it was dead.
I reached over and loosened the jib-sheet, spilling air out of the sail, and slowing us down. I tried not to do it so much that it caused a noticeable difference in the feel of the boat.
I heard muffled voices from below and some banging around. I wondered if Jasmine had taken a chance at Angela’s pistol in the dark. Even as I thought it, I hoped she hadn’t. Phil had a pistol too, and shots in the dark could hit Leyla or Stone. After a moment, I saw the gleam of a flashlight through the windows.
This time it was Phil who came up, five minutes after I saw the flashlight. “What did you do?” He said. He looked tired and even more pinched than before.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I was glad for the dark. It made it easier to pretend surprise.
“All the lights went off. We don’t have any power.”
“Did you check the fuses?” I asked.
“We just did,” he said. “Everything looks OK.”
“I don’t know much about boats,” I said.
“You must have done something. The rest of us were all just sitting there.”
“The storm probably loosened something. All this pounding can’t be good for the boat.”
He stood there for a few minutes, flinching as the spray and rain crashed onto his back.
“What did you do?”
Brightness may not have been one of Phil’s strong points. He didn’t seem to know what else to say.
“I’ve just been out here all night, keeping us on course,” I said. It was true, but of course, I was using the autopilot to do it.
He looked at me. I looked at him, and then out at the storm. The twelve foot waves were pounding the port side about halfway along, sending spray flying as high as the mast. Every third or fourth wave caught us and washed over the deck, dumping water into the cockpit at our feet, which then drained out the scuppers.
“Look at it,” I said to Phil. “And this is calm compared to earlier. Something got wet, or got shifted by the movement and shorted out.”
“Do you mean it?”
I looked at what I could see of his face in the dark and under his hood. “Mean what?”
“Do you mean it – what you said about forgiveness?”
I blinked spray out of my eyes and wiped my face with my right hand. “I do, Phil. There’s nothing I believe more.”
“Is it really true, that guy who wrote Amazing Grace?”
“It is,” I said. “He was a slave trader named John Newton. I think they made a movie about his life or something. He was abused when he was younger and forced into a kind of slavery himself. But that didn’t stop him from making slaves of others.”
“And he was forgiven?”
“I believe he was. I don’t know how you could write that hymn if you weren’t sure you were forgiven.”
Phil was quiet for a long time. Then, without a word, he turned and went below.
CHAPTER 50
The wind was strong and steady from the northwest, and I let it push us father east. I didn’t have the GPS anymore, so I wasn’t sure just how far off course we were. But the waves had moved from our port bow to our port rear quarter. That meant I started getting very wet again, because they were hitting the boat right next me, and when they washed over the deck, most of it came into the cockpit. Several times water swirled up to my knees before draining out. I was cold and sore and desperately tired. But I ran Rich Mullins’ I Am Ready for the Storm through my head, and pretended it was true.
It took them about half an hour to realize I wasn’t on course anymore. Jasmine came up, dressed in raingear and holding the portable GPS.
“They noticed you are off course. Angela was all for finishing the job on Tony as an object lesson, but Leyla pointed out that you wouldn’t know where to go, once the electronics went dead.”
My difficulty was that I had only Jasmine’s word for it. This is what I wanted to hear – that she hadn’t sold me out. But I wasn’t down there when it happened, so I couldn’t know for sure. At least no one had been shot – surely I would have heard that over the sound of the storm.
“I was hoping Angela or Phil would come up. That would leave only one against you, Tony and Leyla.”
Jasmine looked at me. “That’s a bad plan Jonah. Tony’s badly hurt, and couldn’t help. Would you really want Leyla fighting down there?”
I felt foolish. “Sorry, of course not. I was just thinking of numbers.”
“It’s just too risky – guns in small spaces with several people is a bad combination. That’s how Phil’s brother got killed.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Sorry, Jonah, but that’s the truth. Once it starts, it’s pretty hard to control what happens. That’s why Tony’s down there fighting for his life.”
I was torn with a desire to tell Jasmine about Tony. If she knew his wounds were not vital, maybe she would be willing to work with him to try and take out Phil or Angela while the other one was in the cockpit with the GPS. On the other hand, I would be literally killing Tony if I gave away his secret and Jasmine was really working with Angela.
“Screw it,” I said. It was a phrase I had picked up at seminary. “Tony isn’t going die. He wasn’t hit in the lung.”
Jasmine’s black eyes glittered under her hood. She swore softly. “That fox. He’s good;
freaking good. So how bad is it?”
“He’s not hit anywhere vital,” I said. “But his shoulder looks like raw hamburger. I don’t know how much action he’s capable of. Certainly, I would guess his right arm is basically out of commission. And whatever else he does is going to hurt him like the blazes.”
“What’re you, from 1955? No one says ‘hurt like the blazes.’”
“I just did.”
Jasmine surprised me by reaching up and kissing me gently on the cheek. “You’re good too, Jonah Borden. I never would have guessed.”
I still wasn’t sure if I had made the right decision, but at least I had got a sweet kiss on the cheek for my trouble. That was something to feel good about.
“So now what?” I said. “Do we try to get one of them up here with me, while you guys take out the other one down there?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied. “If what you say is true, it doesn’t change too much. Tony is still gonna have a hard time helping. I would guess he’s probably only got enough energy and pain-resistance for one try, and we don’t want to waste it.”
“On the other hand,” I said, deciding to at least proceed as if I was sure of Jasmine, “we’ve got two of the good guys in one place here. What can we do? Can we get Angela up here by herself while you and I are both down there? That would help our odds.”
“We could try,” she said. “Maybe I could send you back down. You could tell Angela that I said I didn’t see the point in having one of the hostages up here when one of us has to be here anyway. Maybe eventually she’d send Phil, or come up herself to relieve me.”
“A lot of ‘maybe’s and ‘ifs’ there.”
“Got anything better?”
“Well, we’re both here – the fox is watching the henhouse, so to speak. Why don’t we keep veering off course? It’ll buy us time and maybe options.”
She thought about it. “But if we get too far off, they’ll realize that I had to be letting you do it. That blows my cover, for no purpose.”
“Give me ten more minutes on this course. They probably won’t know exactly how far off we were or how long it will take to get back. After ten minutes, we’ll start coming back to the right course, but we’ll take another ten or fifteen to do it. I’ve already been doing this for a half hour so, that wins us almost an hour, total.”
“Why are you so concerned about time?” asked Jasmine. “I thought you said the Coast Guard was on the way.”
“They are, but who knows when they’ll get here.”
“They aren’t close?”
I shrugged. “It’s a big lake, bad weather – a lot of things could go wrong.”
“You have the makings of a fine agent.”
“I don’t think so. I’m allergic to hierarchy and authority.”
“Jonah, you’re a clergyman, for Pete’s sake!”
I laughed. It was pleasant to talk about something besides impending doom. “I’m not part of that kind of church. There are a lot of churches and denominations, like mine, that use minimal, streamlined leadership and bow to local congregational authority.”
“You don’t have bishops and such, telling you what to do?”
I shook my head. “Nope. I couldn’t function like that. I truly have faith. But I recognize that over the years, a lot of nonsense has been said and done by church hierarchies. Thankfully, it’s easy enough to demonstrate that they weren’t following Jesus when they did those things.”
“Huh.”
We stopped talking for a bit while we rolled on through the unsettled darkness. After another wave had crashed over the edge of the cockpit and soaked us up to the knees, Jasmine said, “That’s a lot of water.”
“We’d be in trouble if the companionway was open when that came in,” I agreed. “Leyla says she’d fill up and drop like a rock.”
“The Tiny Dancer, not Leyla, right?”
“Right.”
I was tired right through to my teeth. I was so used to being cold that it felt more like an aching numbness. A sudden heave of the great lake pushed me off my feet. I fell to the starboard and ended up sitting on the cockpit bench. While the wheel spun, the wind pushed our bow further to the east and we turned our stern to the waves and wind. The sail, out of sync with the new direction, flapped and shuddered.
I got up and grabbed the wheel just as Jasmine got there.
“Angela’s gonna come up and check. She had to feel that,” she said.
“Should we jump her?”
She grabbed my arm. “No. Phil’s still down there with Leyla and Tony. The best we get is a stalemate. But one of us could end up dead.”
It was Phil who burst through the companionway door. “What’s going on?”
“A big waved knocked Borden off his feet and us off course,” said Jasmine, tapping the GPS.
A sudden inspiration hit me. “We’ll need to tack to get back on course,” I said. “We need Leyla.” A wall of rain and spray showered us all. Phil shivered. “OK,” he said, and went below.
A few minutes later, Leyla came up. She looked at Jasmine and at me. I reached out and pulled her to me, holding her with my right arm, and the wheel with my left. After a moment we broke apart.
“What’s going on?”
“We’re pretending that we need to tack in order to get back on course. Maybe we can fool around and delay things a bit.”
Leyla looked meaningfully at me. “Jonah,” she whispered, cutting her eyes at Jasmine.
“Apparently, Jasmine is with us still,” I said. “She is double undercover.”
“Double undercover?” Leyla’s eyes were puzzled.
“Under two covers?” I suggested. “Under double-cover?”
“Never mind,” said Jasmine. “Just say, I have always been on the side of truth and justice, that is, on your side.”
Leyla looked at her doubtfully.
“It’s a long explanation,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, taking a breath. I loved how quickly she was able to adapt. “What did you want to do here?”
“Instead of coming back toward the wind, let’s go all the way around in a circle to get back on course. Maybe we can sort of take our time doing it.”
“Can’t we do anything else?”
“They’ve still got Tony,” said Jasmine. “This is a hostage situation. As long as they have the ability to kill someone if we misbehave, we have to play along, or at least, appear to play along.”
I wanted to hit something. Three of the four of us were at liberty. But we couldn’t do anything. It struck me that often, this is how evil holds Good captive. Good refuses to sacrifice the innocent; it always tries to save those who might be saved. But in so doing, Good must often let evil run free, at least for a time. People often ask why a good God would allow evil to continue in this world. He was doing it for the same reason that we didn’t stop Angela and Phil at this moment – there was still someone that might be saved. But God also promised us a day of reckoning, when evil will be called to account, when crimes left unchecked will be finally and irrevocably served with justice. I surrendered myself once more to trust that Good and Just God, and found in that trust, the strength to face whatever was to come.
CHAPTER 5 1
We managed to waste the better part of an hour turning to starboard and coming almost in a complete circle to get back on the GPS course. Leyla estimated that in that hour we made little, if any, forward progress along the course.
The weather settled into what she called a “fresh gale.” The wind ripped across the water, tearing white streaks into the dark waves, throwing rain and spray at us in sheets. The waves seemed content to heave up to twelve or fifteen feet or so, with occasional specimens both lower and higher. But at least it wasn’t getting any worse.
The night was old. It was too wet for my eyes to feel gritty, but my body knew I had been awake for most of the last twenty-four hours. I could sense the change before I could actually see it. Slowly, dawn struggled into the thick a
tmosphere like a drunk waking up the morning after a binge. The light grew sullenly, and when it reached a dark-gray, reminiscent of a stormy late-afternoon, it seemed to give up, like that was the best it could do today. With all the low light and flying water, visibility was less than half a mile.
“Take the wheel?” I said to Jasmine.
She nodded, and I moved over to where Leyla was tightening the jib sheet after our final adjustment. Leyla straightened and turned to me.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said to her.
She stepped over and embraced me. She held me tight. “I thought you were dead more than once during the past twenty-four hours.”
“I thought I lost you once tonight too,” I said. “I don’t want to have that feeling again.”
The storm was probably loud enough to keep Jasmine from understanding our low voices, but she politely looked away from us as we stood there, balancing together against the roll and sway of the boat.
“Ever read the Chronicles of Narnia?” I asked. “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader?”
“I think I saw the movie,” she said.
“Aslan came to Lucy in her darkest hour and spoke. He said, ‘courage, dear heart.’”
We were quiet, holding each other while the boat rocked us both.
“Courage, dear heart,” she said at last.
“Yes,” I said.
The hug was sweet, but after all, kind of wet. We let go of each other at last, shortly before Angela came up the companionway.
“Let me see the GPS,” she said to Jasmine.
Jasmine took it out of her jacket pocket.
“Not much of a morning, is it?” said Angela to no one in particular. She checked the unit as Jasmine handed it to her.
“Shouldn’t we be farther along?” she asked sharply.
“I’m no GPS expert,” said Jasmine. “These guys said the weather has been working against us.”
Angela glared at me. I shrugged. “I want to be done with this and go home as soon as possible. Delay doesn’t help me.”
She held my gaze a moment longer. “Fine,” she snapped. “Leyla, you get below.”
Leyla gave me a soft look, and then turned and went down the companionway. After a minute of simply staring out into the gauzy gray of the storm, Angela turned back to me. “Now you,” she said. “Don’t be thinking of trying anything on Philip – I’ll be right behind you.”