Point of Honor

by Maurice Medland

  “Lieutenant, look there.” Kelly lifted the binoculars from her neck and handed them to Blake.

  “We’ve got to get under way,” Blake said.

  “Just look.”

  Blake brought the binoculars up to his eyes and felt the warmth of the eyepieces against his face. He adjusted the focus on the spot where Kelly and Maria were pointing and saw a limp figure in a life jacket, drifting with the swells, three points off the starboard bow.

  “It’s got to be Doc,” Kelly said, almost in a whisper.

  Blake estimated the figure to be 700 or 800 yards off, barely visible to the naked eye. He wondered how Maria had even seen it. The combination of a calm sea and the sharp eyes of a child. He swept the binoculars in both directions and saw movement circling the figure, gray dorsal fins breaking intermittently through the swells.

  He brought the binoculars into a finer focus and faintly saw the burnished skin, the black hair glistening with drops of water on the nodding head. A chill went through him. My God, it is Doc. He felt Kelly’s eyes on him and tried not to react. There was no way to tell from this distance whether he was dead or alive. If he was dead, they would have to leave him, as distasteful as that was. But if he was alive . . .

  They had to try to recover him. Without a boat, they’d have to maneuver the ship as close as they could get without drawing him into the propeller. They still had the Jacob’s ladder. Blake was a strong swimmer. He could tie a line around his waist and swim for him, have someone stand by with a pistol to keep the sharks at bay.

  But he was standing on the deck of a ship that was sinking. The recovery could take hours, hours they didn’t have. How could he jeopardize the ship and everyone on it by taking the time to recover what might be a dead body? More to the point, how could he live with himself if he didn’t?

  Suddenly, Doc disappeared from sight, pulled down like a lure that had taken a hit from a large bass. After a few moments, the life jacket popped to the surface. The top half of Doc Jones’s body hung limply in the harness, drifting on the gentle swells, a dark stain clouding the water around it. Within seconds, a great white mouth burst up out of the sea and closed around the figure, shaking it like a doll. There was a rush of water, then an empty life jacket floating on the surface.

  Blake felt his stomach begin to rise. He forced it back down and lowered the binoculars, feeling guilty at the sense of relief he felt.

  “It’s not Doc,” he said.

  “It has to be,” Kelly said. “Who else would be out there in a U.S. Navy life jacket?”

  “It’s just an empty life jacket. It’s easy to mistake things at sea.”

  Kelly looked at him with disbelief. “You’re not just going to leave him there?” She snatched the binoculars from Blake’s hand and focused on the remnants of the life jacket swirling listlessly around, rising and falling with the swells. She swept the binoculars slightly to widen her field of vision and Blake saw her jaw go slack.

  Kelly lowered the binoculars and handed them back. Her face was pale, drawn up into a tight smile. She glanced at Maria. “I guess you’re right, Lieutenant. It was just a life jacket.”

  “Let’s get under way,” Blake said. “Kelly you take the helm. Maria, you’re on the engine-order telegraph.” He led the girl into the pilothouse and rang up Half Ahead. “Comprende?”

  The ship vibrated and moved forward through the glasslike sea. Maria nodded and looked up at him with her bright, brown eyes.

  Kelly grinned. “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish, Lieutenant.”

  “That’s one of about three words I know.”

  “What are the other two?”

  “Taco and cerveza.”

  Kelly laughed. “That’s probably all you needed, growing up in San Diego.” She looked at Blake and smiled. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Maria speaks very good English.”

  “I’ve heard her,” Blake said.

  “She only speaks it around people she likes, don’t you, honey?”

  Maria smiled at Blake. “I will speak English for you.”

  “Good,” Blake said, patting her thin arm. “Kelly, our course is due west until I give you another.”

  “Where are we going?” Kelly asked, turning the mahogany wheel, eyeing the magnetic compass. “I thought we were just going to drop anchor and wait for that Colombian frigate to pick us up.”

  “We’ve had a little change in plans,” Blake said. “Full Ahead.”

  Maria instantly pulled the telegraph lever into position. “Full Ahead,” she piped, her eyes shining at Blake.

  Blake laughed. “You’re an old hand at this post.”

  “I have sailed with mi pa-, my father, since I was a little girl,” Maria said. “He taught me many things.”

  “I can see that,” Blake said. “Let’s see how you are on the helm.”

  Blake ushered her over to the ship’s wheel, showed her the course he wanted her to maintain and nodded for Kelly to follow him out on the port bridge wing, the one that still had a door.

  Kelly followed Blake out and closed the door behind her. She stood in the early-morning sun looking at him with a puzzled expression, the sea wind gently lifting her hair. “What is it?”

  “A little change in plans,” Blake said. “I don’t want Maria to know. We’re going to make a run for that island.”

  “The one we talked about? Why? Why shouldn’t Maria know?”

  “We’re going down,” Blake said. “A seam in the hull broke open during the storm, and we can’t get it shored up completely. The pumps can’t keep up with it. It’s only a matter of time. We can’t risk waiting around for a frigate that may never show up. And you just saw why I don’t want to put us off in a raft.”

  “My God. How much time do we have?”

  “We can’t be sure. The chief thinks ten or twelve hours. The island is fifty, sixty miles away. If we can make it in time, we’ll beach her, run her aground.”

  Kelly let out a long breath. “You had me worried there for a minute. That doesn’t sound as bad as I thought. If we’ve got enough time, it’s just a matter of going there, right?”

  “It’s a little bigger problem than that,” Blake said. He tugged at his earlobe. “You may as well know. I’ve never really done any navigating before.”

  Kelly looked at him. “Let me see if I understand. We’re going to head for an island and beach the ship before it sinks, except you don’t know how to navigate? Gee, what a great plan.”

  “I’ve studied theory. I’ve just never done it before.”

  “You really think you can do it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to get a book and figure it out.”

  “A book? It’ll have to be in English, if I have to translate, we’re liable to lose something-”

  “They are. Both Dutton and Bowditch.”

  Kelly nodded. “That’s right. Maria said the owners of the shipping company insisted everything be done in English. Used to grate on her father.”

  “A lot of international companies do, it’s pretty much the standard language for commerce,” Blake said. “Can you keep Maria occupied?”

  “Well, sure, but she knows a lot about that stuff. She told me that her father wanted a son and taught her everything. She knows how to shoot sun lines, whatever that means.”

  “Getting a fix on latitude’s not that difficult,” Blake said. “It’s longitude that has me stumped.”

  “Maybe Maria can help.”

  “No, I don’t want her to know any more than she has to. I can figure it out.” Blake turned to go back into the pilothouse, and Kelly touched his arm.

  “By the way, that was a nice thing you did back there.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t want Maria to see,” Kelly said. “Or me. Did you?”

  Kelly’s eyes locked in on him, looking at him as though he were a casual acquaintance who had suddenly sent flowers. Her brown eyes were bemused, questioning.

  Blake returned the look and felt
the familiar pleasant electricity ripple through his body. He resisted it, tried to break her down into individual components, tried to break the image. He focused on her dirty, oversized life jacket hanging loosely from her slender frame, at her smudged hands dangling at her sides, at her baggy dungarees whipping against her long legs. He looked at her matted brown hair falling across her forehead, at her smoky brown eyes, at the sun spots across her nose.

  There was nothing about the individual parts of her that would attract any attention, but the totality of her made him feel the exquisite pain of wanting something he knew he couldn’t have. He looked into her eyes, into the smoky depths of this woman who had been a stranger only two days ago, and to his amazement, wanted her.

  He broke free of her gaze and glanced in through the window to the pilothouse. Maria stood with her legs apart, her tongue visible in the corner of her mouth, conscientiously gripping the wheel, working to keep the ship on course. He smiled at the absurdity of a twelve-year-old girl at the helm of a 5,000-ton freighter.

  “She’s a good kid.”

  “She adores you,” Kelly said. “She has no one left except an elderly aunt in Buenos Aires. She was quite serious about wanting you to be her father.”

  Blake looked through the window at Maria and smiled at the thought. It was a ludicrous notion, but somehow it pleased him to hear it. “If we don’t find that rock, it’s going to be a moot point,” he said. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”

  The wall separating the pilothouse from the chart room was gone, washed away by the cyclone. Blake cleaned out the debris, rigged up a makeshift table near the ship’s wheel and gathered up the charts that had been scattered in the storm. He opened a watertight cabinet along the bulkhead and retrieved a heavy, black book with white letters along the spine that read, Dutton’s Navigation and Piloting, Thirteenth Edition. He hefted the book, which seemed to weigh ten pounds, and flipped it open to the table of contents. The book contained forty-one chapters, a half dozen appendices and various charts and tables in over 900 pages. He turned it over in his hand, wondering how the simple practice of finding two lines on the surface of the ocean could possibly be this complex. To a novice, this much information was almost worse than none at all.

  He pitched the book on the table, wishing he’d paid more attention when he’d traded navigation lessons for engineering lessons with his sea partner. He’d done it as a lark and had promptly forgotten most of what he’d learned. He knew he needed some tables. Something to do with the angular position of the sun, or some damn thing. It was all so long ago. He poked around in the cabinet and found a copy of the Nautical Almanac, a hardcover, orange-colored book containing tables showing the angular position of the sun, the moon, and the stars.

  There was something else he needed. Another book of tables of some kind. Looking through the cabinet, he found a blood-red hardcover book that read, Hydrographic Office, Publication 214. He flipped through it and saw Sight Reduction Tables, and it started to come back to him in bits and pieces. He threw the book on the pile.

  “Does it have to be that complex?” Kelly asked, watching him from the helm.

  “The legacy of the Brits,” Blake said.

  “The British? Why?”

  “They were always worried about mutiny,” Blake said, scanning the table of contents of Dutton. “Treated their people like animals on the old sailing ships. The only thing that kept the crew from cutting their throats was the fact that there were only two guys on board who knew how to navigate. The captain and the first mate.”

  Maria said, “My father was a first mate.”

  Blake smiled at her. “I’m sure he was a good one, honey, not like those guys. They were always in line for a command of their own, so they were completely loyal. The crew was usually illiterate, so the captain and the first mate would make a big deal out of navigation, make it seem as complicated as possible, try to convince the crew they couldn’t possibly understand it. They knew they’d have to get the first mate in bed with them to pull off a mutiny, and there wasn’t much chance of that.”

  “So how did they make it seem so complicated?” Kelly asked.

  “It became a ritual of survival,” Blake said. “Every day at noon the captain and the first mate would show up on deck in full view of the crew, and shoot the sun with a mysterious-looking device called a sextant while the cabin boy swung an hour glass in circles at the end of a string, their equivalent of a stopwatch. It evolved into a black art, something the crew couldn’t hope to master.”

  He closed the weighty book and threw it on the table with disgust.

  “Well, if you know how to do latitude,” Kelly said, “can’t you use the same technique to figure out longitude?”

  “That’s a whole different animal,” Blake said, picking up the Nautical Almanac. “That’s why Columbus missed the Indies by about 8,000 miles.” He skimmed the orange-colored book, then tossed it down. “And if I can’t figure out how to do longitude, we may not come any closer to our target.”

  “I hate to sound stupid,” Kelly said, “but why is it so different, what exactly is longitude, anyway?”

  “Time,” Blake said, rubbing his chin. “Just time.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Picture the earth as a peeled orange,” Blake said, “with the vertical lines of the segments representing lines of longitude.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if the orange revolved around the sun once every twenty-four hours, that’s just a measurement of time isn’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So it follows that time can be converted into longitude, doesn’t it?”

  “How?”

  “Think about it. If the earth makes a full revolution of 360 degrees in a twenty-four-hour period, you can just as easily say there are twenty-four hours to a circle as you can say there are 360 degrees to a circle. Right?”

  “Yeah?”

  “And if you divide 360 degrees by twenty-four hours, it would follow that fifteen degrees of longitude equals one hour of time, right?”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  Blake grabbed a pencil and piece of paper and started scribbling furiously. It was coming back to him now. “And if that were true, then one minute of time equals fifteen minutes of arc. And conversely, one minute of arc equals four seconds of time.”

  “I knew you’d figure it out,” Kelly said.

  Blake tossed his pencil on the table. “Just knowing that doesn’t do us any good.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the earth is moving.”

  “Now I really don’t get it.”

  Blake leaned across the table with a pad and pencil, making calculations and thinking out loud. “If the earth spins 360 degrees in a twenty-four-hour period, and each degree of longitude is equal to sixty nautical miles, then the earth is turning at the rate of 21,600 nautical miles at the equator, which is . . . 900 miles per hour.”

  “So the earth is moving. So what?”

  “So, if you want to get an accurate line of position, you’ve got to take a sight on something that isn’t moving, something that’s constant, like the sun.”

  “Because?”

  “Because if the earth were moving away from the sun at a speed of 900 miles per hour, then four seconds of time would make a difference of one mile in your line of position.”

  “So you’re saying a slight error in time would make a huge difference in position,” Kelly said. “There must be a way to adjust for it, the effect of the earth moving.”

  “There is. It’s called a chronometer,” Blake said. “Something we don’t have.” He puffed out his cheeks. “And without an accurate chronometer, taking a sight at the sun isn’t going to buy us much.”

  Blake leaned across the chart table and rubbed his eyes, fighting the feeling of hopelessness. Without a chronometer, they were no better off than the earliest sailing ships, as far as the ability to navigate was concerned. The chief was right.

>   He felt a small hand on his. He opened his eyes and saw Maria standing in front of him. She pushed the sleeve of his khaki shirt back, exposing his digital watch.

  “You can use this watch,” she said. “My father showed me.”

  “I know, honey. I’ve already thought of that. A quartz watch might be accurate enough, but we’d have to know Greenwich Mean Time. And without a radio, there’s no way to know that.”

  “You could figure it out,” Maria said. “You are very smart.”

  Blake smiled at her and cupped her face in his hand. “And you’re very sweet, but I don’t see how.”

  He stared at the Timex strapped to his wrist, at the buttons emerging from the case. The watch contained a function for two separate time zones. He kept one on California time and the other on local time, wherever he happened to be. It also had a stopwatch. A regular watch wouldn’t do it, but with the accuracy of a quartz watch, and especially one with a built-in stopwatch, he had something that could pass for a chronometer.

  The old Timex had taken its share of hard knocks but he’d always been careful about keeping accurate time. He was sure it wasn’t off by more than thirty seconds. And if four seconds of time equaled one nautical mile, he knew he could get them to within seven miles or so of their destination, accurate enough to bring them to a point somewhere within sight of land.

  He could make it work if he had a way to set one of the time zones on Greenwich Mean Time. If he’d had a radio, he could just set it on the WWV time signal from Fort Collins, Colorado. He’d heard it before, fooling around with his Zenith Trans-Oceanic. It was the sound of a ticking clock that gave Greenwich Mean Time in five-minute intervals, reachable anywhere in the world on several frequencies. But without a radio, how could he possibly know what time it was in Greenwich, England? Maria and Kelly were looking at him hopefully, expectantly.

  He told himself there was no problem that couldn’t be solved if he would just think it through. He went back to the concept of the earth as a peeled orange, 360 degrees around, with the vertical lines of the segments as meridians of longitude. It stood to reason that one of those lines, or meridians, had to be the starting point, circling the globe north to south at zero degrees, then fanning out 180 degrees in both directions, east and west. The prime meridian ran through Greenwich, England by international agreement; therefore, the longitude in Greenwich had to be zero degrees. He knew what their last reported position was, ninety degrees west longitude. So, if fifteen degrees of longitude was equal to one hour of time, it was obvious that ninety degrees of longitude was equal to six hours of time. Therefore, the time in Greenwich was six hours different.