Fogbound

by Joseph T. Klempner

  No charges were filed against the operator of the powerboat, Ekud Redneisch. According to a Coast Guard spokesman, Redneisch, a Lithuanian national who is visiting family in Charleston and had chartered the boat out of Hilton Head Island, never saw the sailboat because of severely limited visibility. “It’s a tragedy,” said Major Harper Griswold, “but the old guy should never have been out there in those conditions. He was a sitting duck.”

  Judge Jorgensen leaves no known family. His wife, Marjorie Redding, died in 1992. Plans for a memorial service honoring Judge Jorgensen have not been disclosed at this time.

  Jesus, she thought. She hoped it had been an accident; it had to have been an accident. All she’d told the Duke was to go pay the judge a visit, make sure he was under control. But this . . .

  Her eyes scanned the article for a fifth time. A director and occasional anchorwoman? How about senior director and prime-time anchorwoman, if you don’t mind? God, how she hated print journalists. But, she was forced to admit, she did like the bit about legal scholars giving the appeal little chance of success. That was good; it lowered expectations. When she’d been back in the D.A.’s office, trying cases for Bob Morgenthau, she’d hated it whenever they gave her a strong case to try. “I want long-shots,” she used to tell her bureau chief, “cases that no one expects me to win.” And Jim Burke would always give her some lame answer, like, “We try not to indict those cases, Jessica.” Which was why she was out of there, the day after her four-year commitment was up.

  She hadn’t heard from the Duke yet, but everyone else had checked in. Brandon Davidson had reached her at home, likening Jorgensen’s death to a deus ex machina, some modern-day god suddenly reaching down and plucking the troublemaker out of their hair. Ray Gilbert had heard the news down in New Orleans. He’d promptly canceled his trip, and was instead flying up to New York, to help prepare Jessica for the argument. Someone from the Virginia Attorney General’s Office had left a message, offering to consent to a postponement if Jessica felt she needed one. She’d phoned back immediately to say thanks, but no thanks. She wanted to do this, and do it quickly, before her presence in the case blew it up into something they couldn’t control.

  She swung around in her swivel chair so that she faced the window. Standing up, she leaned forward and peered out over the building tops at the city beneath her. She had to squint a bit, in order to block out the afternoon sun. On the fiftieth floor, she’d noticed some time ago, the offices had special glass, designed to filter out the heat and glare.

  Hiroshi Matsumoto stood at the port rail of his fishing trawler, squinting into the distance. After several hours of limping through fog so thick it had eventually brought him to a complete standstill, he and his crew were finally moving again. Which was a good thing, because to Matsumoto, time meant fish, and fish meant money.

  In the fishing industry, Matsumoto’s boat, the Katie II, was known as a long-liner, taking its name from the mile-long line it dragged up and down the outer banks. All along the line were hooks, baited at this time of year to attract the spring run of swordfish heading north for colder waters. The line was so heavy, even when empty, that it had to be fed out and hauled in by giant power winches. It took a crew of twelve, often working eighteen-hour shifts, to bait the hooks, man the winches, boat the catch, and ice it down. It was grueling, back-breaking work, almost as dangerous to the men as it was to the fish. But there was big money to be made in long-line fishing, with a full catch often bringing upwards of $200,000. Even after the owners had taken their share and expenses had been deducted, a deckhand could pocket $10,000 for two weeks of work, if he was lucky enough to survive it.

  Matsumoto and his crew had been at sea for eleven days now. Still, they were coming in early, with their ice chests only three-quarters full, something they hated to do. But Felippe Garcia, the cook, was sick, running a fever and complaining of pain in the lower-right side of his abdomen. Appendicitis was suspected, and it was felt that Garcia needed urgent medical attention. Even more to the point, there was no one else on board who could cook a decent meal.

  When you’re doing backbreaking work eighteen hours a day, food tends to take on something of an added importance.

  Matsumoto had radioed the Coast Guard, to see if they could send a helicopter to lift Garcia off. But they told him it would be impossible: The entire coast, from Savannah on up to Myrtle Beach, was fogged in so thickly they couldn’t get off the ground, much less attempt a rescue. Matsumoto tried raising other boats in the area, but the few that responded were either too far away to help, or having their own difficulties with the fog. Out of options, he’d made the decision to pull the line and head for shore.

  The Katie II was equipped with state-of-the-art radar, a GPS navigational system, and a highly calibrated electronic compass. Even when Matsumoto couldn’t see the tip of his own bow, his control panel told him where he was, what direction he was heading, and what - if anything - lay in front of him. As he inched eastward, his five-knot speed no more than a jogger’s pace, his eyes darted from one instrument to the next. At the moment, he was watching a big vessel south-southeast of him. From the size of the image she made on the radar screen, she had to be a tanker, a freighter, or a cruise ship. She was moving north, but was going fast enough that she would cross safely in front of the Katie II’s path. There was another, smaller image in front of them, suggesting a boat in the thirty- to forty-five-foot range, heading east at what seemed to Matsumoto to be an unsafe speed, considering the conditions. But since it was on pretty much the same course as they were, it posed no problem.

  What had caught Matsumoto’s attention was an even smaller blip, showing up so small that it could be a buoy, or something floating in the water. The only thing was, according to his charts, there wasn’t supposed to be a buoy there. And anything floating would have to be good-sized or metal in order to show up on the screen at all.

  Just in case it was a small boat, Matsumoto tried raising it on his radio, identifying it by its position, but he got no response. That left him two choices: He could give it a wide berth, in order to avoid hitting it, whatever it was; or he could head toward it, to investigate.

  Men who earn their keep on the ocean are, by all accounts, a breed apart. Not all of them are misfits, unable to adapt to shore life and hard-drinking when forced to abide it; but those credentials seem to apply to a good number of them. They work unimaginably hard, under conditions most humans wouldn’t, couldn’t put up with for an hour. Yet they go back to sea, over and over again. And each day out, they quite literally place themselves at the mercy of Nature, and in the hands of Providence. It is little wonder, then, that they form bonds that stretch from boat to boat, season to season, year to year, generation to generation - bonds seldom understood by non-seafarers, save perhaps those whose lot it is to share foxholes, police cruisers, or fire trucks. The rule is that when one of them gets into trouble, the rest respond, no questions asked.

  Hiroshi Matsumoto turned the wheel slightly to port, straightening it as soon as the tiny blip on his screen lined up dead ahead of them.

  In the seconds after August Jorgensen had leaped clear of his boat to avoid the impact of the oncoming cabin cruiser, he’d come about as close to dying as a living thing can, without quite getting there. As he hit the water and went under, only some combination of icy temperature and pure reflex had prevented him from gulping in huge quantities of sea water. Disoriented and unable to fight his way to the surface, he’d blacked out and - with little body fat and no life jacket to provide buoyancy - had already begun slipping toward the bottom. With nearly 300 feet of ocean beneath him, it would have been a long slip, indeed.

  But Jorgensen’s number must not have been up that day. Some force - unseen, unfelt, and entirely unbeckoned by him - took hold of him, somehow arrested his descent, and brought him to the surface. Nor did it loosen its grip on him there, at least not until the old man had coughed and sputtered and flailed and gasped, and finally discovered ho
w to breathe again. Only then did the force open its mouth - a long, streamlined contraption, insulated with cold- and water-repellent materials and controlled by powerful jaw muscles - the end product of thousands of years devoted to breeding the perfect amphibious retrieving machine.

  “Good boy,” Jorgensen told Jake, though he had no idea just how good he’d actually been. Jorgensen looked around now, trying to assess the situation. Jake paddled nearby; except for him, there was nothing in sight. The water was flat, so they were in no danger of being swamped by waves. And ocean water has enough salt in it to allow a body (whether human or canine) to stay afloat with a minimum of effort. Their immediate problem, he knew, was the cold. He guessed the water temperature had to be 60 degrees, 65 at most. Maybe that didn’t sound cold, but since the exterior of the human body was somewhere in the neighborhood of 93 degrees, it wouldn’t take long for them to begin losing heat. From there, hypothermia would become a problem, leading to fatigue, disorientation, and loss of will. He figured they had an hour or two, maybe three if they were lucky.

  “Good boy,” he said again. His thought was to calm Jake down, to keep him from panicking. But the truth was, the dog seemed to be having a pretty good time, swimming around in circles, far less bothered by the cold than Jorgensen himself was, and far less apt to panic.

  Just as they had been in the boat, they were in a hole in the fog, a small clearing bordered by a circle of opaque white. Somewhere beyond that border, Jorgensen knew, was their boat - or what remained of it. The catboat was wood; if it had been splintered, there had to be debris, flotsam they could hold onto, maybe even pull themselves up on, and get at least partially out of the water.

  On the other hand, there was the possibility the boat had been swamped, completely filled with water, without breaking up. He didn’t know whether she’d continue to float under those circumstances. She had a leaded keel, after all, and some metal fittings. But even then, in salt water, he doubted she’d go under.

  The problem was, he had absolutely no idea which direction she lay off to. There were as many possibilities as there were degrees on a compass. So unless she turned out to be just out of sight, their chances of finding her would soon climb to one in 360. Talk about sucker odds! Furthermore, if they started swimming, they’d be losing energy, and body warmth, at an accelerated rate.

  Jorgensen slowed his arm movements, using his legs to tread water and keep afloat. Without the splashing, it was quieter. He cocked his head, listening for engine sounds. The boat that had hit them - or maybe veered away at the last instant - should be looking for them, crisscrossing the area, knowing they had to be there. But there was no sound to be heard, not through the fog and over the sounds of their own breathing.

  The hardest thing was doing nothing. Once, years ago, Jorgensen had been walking in the woods with Marge, and they’d come within a foot of a good-sized rattlesnake. Jorgensen’s impulse had been to jump back, but Marge had put a hand on his forearm, holding him still. Next, he’d looked around for a rock or a branch, but again she’d stopped him. And afterward, once the rattier had retreated, she’d told him that sometimes the best advice you could give a person in a crisis was, “Don’t just do something; stand there!”

  But how were you supposed to stand there when there was the middle of the ocean? Or might just as well have been. That was the question Jorgensen was pondering when suddenly, out of nowhere, Jake barked.

  Jorgensen’s first thought was that a fish might have gotten the dog’s attention. His second thought was more specific, and far more ominous.

  Sharks.

  They were certainly out far enough, and he knew from first-hand experience that the water was cold enough. And although sharks were said not to care much for the taste of human flesh (they tended to swim off after the first bite or two), who could say what they thought of dog meat?

  Jake barked again, and now it was clear that he was barking at something, something Jorgensen couldn’t see, but had to be off to their right.

  “What is it?” he asked, as though the dog were fully capable of answering. Jake responded by looking at Jorgensen, then back to whatever it was he was reacting to, and barked a third time.

  Well, Jorgensen decided, there had to be worse ways to die than at the mercy of a great white, though none came to mind at the moment. Whatever it was, they were going to find out, one way or another. “Go get it, boy!” he said. And as though suddenly released from a leash, Jake stopped circling and began paddling purposefully in one of those 360 directions, Jorgensen following closely in his wake.

  They continued for five minutes like that, maybe ten, and it occurred to Jorgensen that his dog may have been hallucinating. But then, just when he’d been ready to call a halt to their efforts, there, right at the edge of the fog bank, something came into view. All he could see at first was that it was long and thin and slightly tapered, and rising out of the water at a low angle. Its body looked brownish, but its head was round and shiny and irregular, suggesting hollow eyes and a jagged mouth. A giant sea snake? He’d heard tell of such things, but had always thought of them as up there with UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster.

  “Easy, boy,” he whispered to Jake, but there was no stopping the retriever’s instincts now. Whatever terrible sea serpent lurked ahead of them, whatever strange denizen of the deep lay salivating for its next meal, they were about to do battle with it.

  Hiroshi Matsumoto was having difficulty homing in on the blip on his radar screen. The thing was, it kept appearing and disappearing, making it hard for him to keep track of. To Matsumoto, that suggested it was something riding so low in the water that each wave or swell obscured it from the radar’s eye. But there were no waves, and no swells to speak of, at least not where Matsumoto was.

  He figured he was maybe a quarter of a mile from it, and as far as he could tell, it wasn’t moving. That meant he could continue at his present speed until he was almost on top of it, then throttle back to avoid running into it, or over it, or whatever. Craig Lanahan, the first mate, had joined Matsumoto at the controls, and they were taking bets on what it was.

  “A buoy of some sort,” guessed Lanahan, “even if it’s not marked on the charts.”

  “Probably some kind of flotsam,” suggested Matsumoto. “Like the tip of a cargo container, with a hundred Chinese stowaways trapped inside.”

  The Duke reached Jessica at home that night, as she was looking over her wardrobe, trying to figure out what might be most appropriate for a Supreme Court appearance.

  “Didja hear what happened?” he asked.

  “Hear? It made The New York Times. Was that you?”

  “Naaahhh,” he said. “That was some commie mowed him down. Still, it woiks out for us, don’t it?”

  “I guess so,” said Jennifer. “How about the other guy?”

  “Safe and sound,” said the Duke, “safe and sound.”

  “Good,” she said. “Make sure he stays that way, okay?”

  “You got it, Babe.”

  She hung up, not knowing what to think. As hard as it was to believe that Jorgensen’s death had been an accident, she was eager to accept the notion. People died every day in accidents, didn’t they? They built a bridge or put up a skyscraper; somebody always died in the process. They made one of those big-budget movies; somebody was bound to die, falling off a horse or trying to pull off some stupid stunt. It happened all the time. Even the insurance companies accepted it, chalked it up to the price of doing business.

  Besides which, he’d been an old man. How long had he had to live, under the best of circumstances? Five years? Ten, tops. Still, she found herself feeling bad. The truth was, she’d rather liked the old geezer. Sure, he could be a royal pain in the ass at times. But that didn’t mean he deserved to get run over by a boat. She was glad it hadn’t been the Duke’s doing; she didn’t need to be part of something like that.

  She took a deep breath, tried hard to get past it, to put it out of her mind. She wondered if a pant
s suit might be a bit too informal.

  It was only as they drew close to the sea serpent, Jake paddling in the lead and Jorgensen struggling to keep up, that the true nature of the beast revealed itself. It was the catboat’s mast, snapped clean but still tied fast to the hull, which now lay just beneath the waterline. And the creature’s head - the shiny, circular thing at the tip, that from a distance had seemed to have hollow eyes and a jagged mouth - turned out to be the aluminum radar reflector, which Jorgensen had hoisted in an effort to save them, but which instead had made them the perfect target.

  The exertion of the swim had warmed Jorgensen, but he knew the sensation was only an illusion: As soon as his heart rate returned to normal, he’d feel the loss of heat. He needed to get more of his body up out of the cold water and into the warmer air. At the same time, he needed to provide Jake with some added buoyancy, before paddling became too tiring for the dog. The problem was that as soon as Jorgensen leaned against the mast, it started going under, and he was afraid his added weight might be enough to cause the whole boat to sink. He needed to somehow free the mast from the hull, from the leaded keel that was dragging it down. But the only knife he had was on the boat - or more likely, by this time, on the bottom of the ocean. Without it, his only chance was to untie the halyards that still connected the mast to the hull.

  Scissoring his legs around the mast to grasp it, he set to work at the tip. His fingers were by this time numb, his hands badly cramped, and his whole body had begun to shiver involuntarily - the early onset, he knew, of hypothermia.

  There were three halyards connected to the mast tip, a heavy one that lifted the sail, a lighter one that raised the peak, and a third that served as a spare. The heavy one came free rather easily, simply by Jorgensen’s drawing it through the pulley. Luckily - if that could be considered the appropriate word - the cleat that held the bitter end had broken loose from the base of the mast. But the remaining two lines were still fastened at the base, and it took Jorgensen three trips underwater just to loosen and untie the first of them. On his third attempt, he inadvertently took in a mouthful of water, and he spent the next few minutes coughing and choking. But he knew he had to get back to work: Jake seemed to be paddling with ever-increasing effort, and his eyes had begun to take on a frightened, slightly wild look.