by David Poyer
* * *
The salon was empty. They found both men in the forepeak, scowling as they listened to excited chatter from a speaker. “Hy, come listen to this,” Madsen said. “What’s going on?”
The Japanese cocked his head as gear swayed and stirred around them in the narrow tunnel. “The factory ship. It has caught fire.”
“Really,” Auer said from the doorway. She rubbed her arms. “From whatever it was you shot at them?”
Madsen said, “They don’t say.”
“I thought you said the radio was broken,” Sara pointed out.
“The antenna, not the radio,” Lars snapped. “He’s got a stub up. We can’t transmit, but we can receive.”
“Just a sec.” Bodine turned up the speaker. This transmission was in English. “Maritime New Zealand, this is Ishinomaki Maru. We have two casualties from smoke inhalation. We will advise again in two hours, advise again in two hours this frequency. Ishinomaki Maru, out.”
“These are not safe ships,” Kimura said. “Very unregulated. There were two fires on our way down from Japan. There are many accidents, with the machinery. It may not have been—us.”
“We put it right into their engine room,” Bodine noted. “If we hit a fuel tank, or even just a fuel line, that’d sure as hell start a fire.”
Sara knelt on a coil of line, feeling lightheaded. Then almost panicked; who was on lookout? What if they hit ice? But when she gazed back along the twisting length of the forepeak she glimpsed Auer’s legs ascending into the dome.
“Well, we wanted to fuck them up,” Madsen said. “Are they still whaling? Or are they headed for port? Japan? New Zealand? Australia?”
“That I am not sure of,” Kimura said. “I heard no one say they were doing anything other than fighting the fire. It sounds like the kill ships are nearby the Ishinomaki.”
“The transmissions are fading,” Bodine said.
“We could still pursue,” Madsen said. “Replace the forward stay, and—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Sara. “Dru and Tehiyah—haven’t we paid enough? Eddi thinks so. Hy too. Hy?”
“I think it would probably be wise to call an end to your expedition,” Kimura said, looking down. “But I do not really have a—”
Sara lost her patience. “Oh, for—! You’re a grown-up. You’re got as much of a vote as any of us.”
Bodine looked resigned. Spread his hands. “I guess the girls have got it right this time, Lars. If we didn’t have all this damage … maybe. But we do. So, yeah—time for a strategic retreat.”
Sara blinked, taken aback. She’d expected him to agree with Madsen, as he had every time so far. “Well—about damn time. Okay. Northeast. That’s the course for Australia—isn’t it?” No one answered. “Lars? So?”
“That might not be possible,” he said, after a moment.
She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The stay. We can run before the wind, because that presses forward on the mast. But the farther north we head up, with the wind the way it is, the more strain we put on that jury-rigged shit.” He shrugged. “I’m not sure how to address that. But there it is. We sure don’t want the mast to come down. Right now, we’re probably safe. If the wind changes—”
“So meanwhile, we just sail east?” Sara put in.
“Got a better idea?”
“Drop the sails. Run the engines.”
“Not enough fuel. Land’s thousands of miles away.”
“But we can run north, out of the ice. We might see a freighter, or a military ship. Get help repairing the keel, the mast, the radio.”
“The antenna,” Mick corrected absent-mindedly, glued to the earphones again.
Sara shrugged him off. “So we’re going back? On the motor?”
“I guess,” Lars said. She looked at him a moment longer, then reached for a handhold and pulled herself to her feet. Staggered aft, barking her shin on the jamb, and passed the decision up to Eddi. Shortly after, the motor coughed, but didn’t start. Coughed again, a shaky, disgruntled noise. But no reassuring purr came, much less the banshee howl. They exchanged looks.
“It’s not catching,” Auer called down.
“Did you set the throttle to Start?” Madsen yelled back.
“Yeah.”
“It should crank right up,” Bodine said. Then got a funny look. “Or, wait a minute—”
“The strainers.” Sara gripped her forehead. “Oh, fuck. Remember, they froze—”
The starter ground again and they both shouted, “Stop. Stop!”
“It’s not like starting a car,” Sara added. “We need to go back there and see what’s wrong. Mick…”
Bodine winced. Started to hoist himself, then winced again. Sweat broke on his forehead. “You all right?” Madsen asked him.
“Could use … a hand.” He snorted. “Or better yet, two fucking legs.” He grimaced as he lurched up. Sara walked behind him, and waited as he let himself down the half ladder into the engine room.
* * *
This time it took even longer to get the ice chipped and melted out of the strainer and the hoses. There were actually two strainers, one for each engine, but Bodine said once one was running the space would warm up enough to melt the ice in the other. Still, it meant hours of lying on a freezing deck, taking turns chipping until their hands bled and their faces stung from flying chips.
She said, “You know, if we’d put antifreeze or alcohol or something in these, after we shut down, they wouldn’t be frozen like this.”
“Yeah, if one of us had remembered. After Tehiyah—”
“I’m only saying.”
They lay full length, facing each other as he chipped away. He kept avoiding her eyes. At last, as if making a decision, he sighed. “All right, Sara.”
“All right, what?”
“You’re mad at me. Guess you have a right to be, but—”
“Fucking correct, I do. Keeping secrets. Treating Eddi and me like children. Then head-butting me. Not to mention, firing some kind of illegal weapon—”
The hammer clanged. “I butted you because you were stomping on my hand,” he reminded her. “And those whalers had already tried to kill us. Run us down. And damn near succeeded. Or did you forget that?”
They glared at each other, but she had to admit, he was right about the whalers. She shuddered. The sheer terror of those moments when the prow had loomed over her, and she’d expected to die … Maybe it was war. Violence for violence. This man had given his legs in battle. She couldn’t call him a coward, or someone who evaded the consequences of his beliefs.
“But for what it’s worth,” he muttered, looking past her, “I’m sorry I dragged you into it. And about Tehiyah. I didn’t intend that.”
She drew a deep breath, suddenly shaky, as if her feelings were only now catching up to everything that had happened. Who the fuck was she to point fingers and act sanctimonious? The disgraced Dr. Pollard. The failure. The outcast. “Well. As long as we’re apologizing. That time, up in the forepeak—”
He let the hammer sag, and looked away. “Don’t worry about it.”
“I just wanted to say. It wasn’t what you think. Not—your legs.”
His gaze came back. Dwelt on her face. “No?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I had some silly notion it would be … unprofessional.” A sharp corner of the engine was digging into her back; she wriggled away. The cold air was still and icy down here, and the sea sounded very close, sloshing beneath the thin hull only inches below. She took a deep breath. “But I was wrong. What did Quill used to say? ‘South of sixty, there’s no law’?”
“Actually, the saying is, ‘no God.’”
“Uh-huh. So … what I wanted to say is … I was wrong.”
His mouth was sour on hers. His breath was not so great and his stubble grated on her skin. But none of this stilled the hunger to feel someone’s arms around her, or to keep kissing
him. And she probably smelled just as bad.
But you didn’t have to smell great to want a man.
She glanced back once, up the ladderway, to make sure no one was coming. Then stripped off jacket and sweater and bra. His gaze followed the swing of her breasts as he unzipped his own clothes, then cursed as he couldn’t get his pants off.
“Turn over, on your back,” she told him, and straddled him, shivering, naked legs and shoulders instantly goosefleshed in the frigid air, yet with an interior heat igniting. She left her boots on and pushed her pants down onto them, careful not to dislodge the scab on her thigh, so that when she knelt her knees weren’t on the cold deck but on the folds of cloth. Their smells mingled, and she bent to his cock springing up from a nest of kinky black hair but before she took it into her mouth decided against it and just brushed it lightly with her cheek.
She forked her body over him and guided him in, to a place that was exactly where she’d wanted someone for so long, and gasped and arched her back. Then whispered “Fuck” as the back of her head slammed into an arch of hollow steel tubing.
He half rolled and they crawled and pushed deeper into the embrace of the engine and the muffler and heavy thick black rubber hoses strapped with shining stainless connectors and extruded metal tubes bent and twisted in among one another. Here they were boxed in on all sides but she had room to straighten. She reached up to grasp an icy cold thick stem of metal with both hands. She used that leverage to lift and then plunge, him grunting beneath her, his face turning blotchy and red. An iron stem seemed to be reciprocating inside her, hard and thick but hot instead of icy cold. For a few seconds it felt like a hard yoga workout. Then the pleasure fired like electricity deep in her belly, and he reached up and grasped her breasts. She arched her back and opened her mouth and he closed his eyes and bared his teeth and they hung there, welded like hot-running machines, as the energy and lust they’d brought out of the sea so long before came again into both of them and they moved together, together, straining at the boundaries of self and space.
She lifted herself and collapsed beside him. Suddenly she was cold again, and her knees hurt where she’d knelt, and soreness chafed her thighs. But she didn’t care. He pulled her sweater down and covered her with his arm. “Incredible,” he said into her ear, and for a few minutes they snuggled, drowsy, spent. Until her legs began to cramp. So at last they moved apart, rearranged themselves. She crept out from between the engines and searched around on the deck and found the hammer and the screwdriver they’d been using to chisel out the ice and set to work again.
* * *
But when they tried the engine again it still didn’t start. This time Bodine traced the line and found more ice in the hoses to the saltwater cooling pump. He took off the connectors, leaving the through-hull closed, and she carried the heavy black hose up into the galley. Her legs were still quivering as she poured the boiling water Hy had going for the dinner spaghetti into it. Meanwhile he took the pump apart and blowtorched the ice out. When they reinstalled the hose and pump the engine turned over and kept running. A weak cheer rang out in the salon as Eddi brought the wheel around. The thrum wormed through the hull. Madsen said to keep it down to a thousand rpm, to stretch their fuel. But they were headed north.
“Next stop, Capetown. But we’re taking on a lot of ice,” he added, peering out through the portlight. “That sleet’s freezing. We should probably knock some off before it gets dark.”
“We have to do that now?” Eddi called from the dome. She’d been steering for hours, but refused every time Sara offered to take a turn.
“You know how Jamie used to nag us to not let it build up. Said we could turn over. And then, if you go in the water—”
“Helpless in sixty seconds.”
“Dead in five minutes.”
Kimura looked from one to the other as they doubled, howling. Sara wiped laugh-tears and sniffled. Suddenly she felt giggly. Maybe it was getting laid after so long, or maybe, more likely, it was just being headed home.
Home … there was a little science center on Nantucket. It was named after Maria Mitchell, the first female American astronomer. Maybe she could teach there. With her degree, it would be a step down. Maybe a couple of steps. But she could get an apartment. Take fourth-graders out to the Moors to bird-watch.
For a moment something like a question, or even like a vision, hung between her and the sea: Mick Bodine working his way up a handrail toward the door of a cottage in Coatue, or maybe Madaket. There might be something like contentment. Stalking the marshes again, in the winter silence—
She shook herself. What was she thinking? They might not make it back. Even if they did, they’d probably be looking at criminal charges. Piracy. A jail sentence. They were so far beyond the pale it was ridiculous to think of any life after this.
Lars handed her one of the baseball bats. It was dented, beaten up, they’d used them so often and so abusively. She took a swing, grinning at Kimura’s boggled expression. “You too,” she told him, and jaundiced daylight slid in slanting as they pulled on their suits and the companionway hatch slammed open.
* * *
Topside the light was machined steel. A bank of clouds lay on the starboard hand, solid as icebergs. The sleet had stopped but she guessed only for the moment. A squall trailed its skirts into the sea. Anemone rolled. The halyards clanged. The mast creaked. Ice fell from aloft, clattering on the icy decks. Sara looked away from the bundle strapped to the forward stay. Tehiyah was going home too, but not as she’d probably hoped: in triumph, to television specials and celebrity fund-raisers.
She clipped on her safety line, made sure Hy’s was on too. Then led him forward, stepping carefully as Lars began flailing at the boom. “Like this,” she told Kimura, and wound up and took a solid whack at the inches of rime atop the coach roof. The pale carapace resisted, but gradually cracks spiderwebbed it. At her third swing it burst apart like dropped crystal. She kicked it over the side. The green sea walked past, bubbles whirling in their wake. She squatted and hammered with the butt of the bat until the ice split and clattered apart like supercooled diamonds. Kimura’s first clumsy swing glanced off without making a scratch. “Didn’t you have to do this on the whaler?” she asked him, sitting back on her heels.
“No. We had steam lances.”
“How nice. Well, here we have to, every couple days. I guess until we get far enough north.” She shivered, visualizing how cold it would be here in another month. She’d always remember this sere beauty. But even more, this sea’s paralyzing terror. It was a place apart, inviolable, touched by man but not yet tamed. She didn’t condone what Mick and Lars had done. But now she understood it. If the whales could be saved, perhaps there was hope.
They worked forward, whacking and cracking until the ice delaminated and slid overboard in pearlescent sheets. Kimura whooped and struck a samurai pose, then flailed at the lifelines, knocking off frosted tubes that shattered like glass straws. She worked until her arms were leaden, then rested, feeling a looseness, a trickle between her thighs, as she squatted on her haunches.
The squall brushed over them and snow began to fall, heavy wet flakes that cut off vision. She got up and tapped ice off the shrouded form lashed to the forward brace, loosening the silvery shell until it crashed to the deck. The snow whirled down, speckling the sea with millions of dimples that spread with a hiss so faint it could barely be heard above the motor’s hum, the ripple as the prow parted the dull green.
She kicked the ice from the corpse over the bow and was turning when she half glimpsed something far off behind them, only dimly visible in the falling snow. She shaded her eyes and looked again, blinking flakes from her lashes. Another barely distinguishable glimpse of some disturbance against the unillumined sea. A small boat? She edged aft, clearing her safety line as she went, peering in that direction. But she didn’t see it again. If it had been there at all.
“Looking for something?” Lars was hanging off the stern,
suit unfastened, one arm around the after stay. Obviously pissing, though his lower body was turned away. From next to him Mick looked up from the cockpit seat.
“You’re going to freeze that thing off.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t such a good idea. Instant frostbite.” He shook and tucked.
“See something?” Mick said. He kept looking at her, as if he’d never really seen her before. A smile lurked in his eyes. She smoothed her hair and looked aside. For just a moment, she saw the cottage again. The winter marsh behind it, reeds and cattails blowing in the wind, and in the distance, the far distance, the surf white as an old woman’s hair toward Smith’s Point.
“Thought I did. Like an inflatable.”
The Dane said, “Out here? Hundreds of miles from anything?” He looked at the wheel, which was unattended; Auer was still steering from the enclosed station. “I’ll take my trick up here. It’s snowing and the radar’s out; I can see better than from the dome.”
“I’ll take it, since I’m up here,” Bodine said. “Been a while since I’ve steered.”
When she looked back again the snowy curtain wavered. For a moment she saw the sea clear; black jagged waves; utterly empty, save for the vee of their wake. Void, like the thousands of miles all around.
She tried not to think of how casually this icy sea had eaten Perrault. Her breath caught in her throat; a band of dread oppressed her chest, tightening around her lungs. She coughed. Courage, she thought. “Just my imagination, I guess.”
She slid open the companionway hatch, and set a boot on the first step. Then glanced aft as she started to lower herself down the ladder.
And froze, throat locked. From the blowing snow and mist and twisting steam from the exhaust, something unimaginable was taking shape.
17
The Rogue
The yell had barely left her throat, pulling everyone in the cockpit around, when the whale crashed into the sloping stern, jerking them off their feet and tumbling them over one another. Madsen grabbed the wheel. Kimura slammed down into the winch, yelping as something snapped audibly. Sara lost her balance, flailing in the companionway, then toppling over the coaming. Only at the last moment did she catch herself as the blunt head, bigger than a tractor-trailer, descended on the dinghy and its ramp with a shearing crunch that shook the whole boat.