Close Reach
Page 3
For fifteen minutes it followed them at that distance, close enough that even when they were down in the troughs between the waves, they could see its superstructure. With the wind coming from astern they could smell the greasy stench of its exhaust and hear the thrum of its diesels.
“It’s not passing us,” Kelly said.
“Want me to hail it on the VHF?” Dean picked up the mike, his thumb over the transmit button.
“To say what?”
“I’ll ask if they want to pass to port or to starboard. So we can get out of their way.”
“Okay.”
He keyed the mike and brought it to his lips.
“La Araña, La Araña, this is the sailing yacht Freefall, one hundred meters off your bow. Come in.”
Dean let his thumb off the button, and they both looked at the VHF where it was mounted in the instrument console. They sailed for a minute, long enough for three of the big waves to overtake Freefall from behind, and the radio was silent.
“Maybe they’re not scanning channel 16,” Dean said.
“Try 20.”
Dean switched the channel and repeated his transmission, and again they waited. Kelly watched the crab boat off their stern, watching the white wall of water pushed ahead of its bow. If anything, it was a little closer now.
“I’ll try 22,” Dean said.
She shook her head. “It’s not going to answer.”
Dean turned and looked at her and then at the filthy crab boat that was coming up on them. And that was when their cockpit radio came alive with a crash of high-gain static that dropped away into a pounding scream of guitars.
Dean scanned through the VHF channels, but it was the same as when Lena had made her last cry for help. The music spanned the spectrum. Kelly looked back at the crab boat and saw black smoke coming from the twin stacks just aft of the bridge. It had throttled up the diesels and was coming for them.
“Dean?”
“I see it.”
He was already moving to the winch station. They were flying a tiny storm sail, but Dean could unfurl a piece of the big genoa and increase their speed in twenty seconds.
That was about all the time they had.
Kelly turned from Dean and looked astern, seeing the crab boat come up over a wave, the bulb under its bow showing briefly in the air before the rest of the boat tipped past the wave crest and buried the bow into the trough with an enormous explosion of white water. Kelly turned back to Dean and stood at his side, ready to help trim the genoa sheet as the sail unfurled. When the sail was halfway out, Dean cleated the furling line and Kelly winched in the sheet. With their sail area doubled Freefall heeled to starboard as if she were shouldering through a locked door. Kelly felt it beneath her feet: a battle between weight and force, between heeling moment and speed. Then the door burst open, and Freefall charged through it and down the next wave face, racing with the wave for half a mile before finally pulling ahead into the trough and mounting the back of the wave at her bow.
Dean and Kelly had sailed Freefall around the world one and a half times, but they had never outsailed a wave. Kelly stood with mouth agape at the sight of it, the seventy-foot boat standing on its feet and surfing, leaning into the gusts, the wind screaming past the taut wire rigging. She put her hand on the helm wheel and through it could feel the rudders hum as they handled the rush of the water and the load of the boat at speed.
The log showed twenty-one knots. A quarter of a knot faster than the crab boat.
Dean switched off the autopilot and was hand steering, weaving the boat in shallow S curves to build up their speed by surfing the wave faces and then curving to the north to catch more air on the sails as they left one wave behind and raced up the back of the next. Kelly watched him a moment, then found her breath again.
“You knew she’d sail like this?”
“Yes.”
If anyone knew, it would be Dean. He’d drawn Freefall in his drafting office at Sikorsky during the year she didn’t like to think about. They’d both let their minds wander that year; that much was clear. But Dean’s straying had had a useful purpose. He’d supervised Freefall’s construction at a Norfolk shipyard and had done the fitting out and sea trials himself offshore of Mystic. Now he stood at the helm and watched his creation fly into the green-gray blur of the Drake Passage, and Kelly saw that he was smiling.
“Tell me what’s going on with the radio,” she said. “You had me start the engine when we heard it before. You knew something was wrong, and you wanted to get out of there.”
Dean’s smile vanished, and he looked astern, measuring the growing distance from the crab boat. He nodded.
“When the U.S. government jams your radio signals right before it bombs you off the map, you don’t hear anything. You think your radio’s fine, that the airwaves are clear. That’s because we’ve got the best equipment, stuff most people couldn’t even imagine. You know?”
She followed him. When they were still working in Connecticut, they talked to each other about what they did. Dean designed helicopters, and he knew the kinds of things they put inside them when he was done.
“When some third-rate military jams your radio, you know it’s happening. You hear clicking or static—or music.”
“So they’re jamming us,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“So we won’t be able to call for help.”
He nodded.
“You said third-rate military. You think it’s a military ship?”
Dean looked back at it, the rusted crab boat rolling at the crest of a thirty-foot wave. Five hundred yards away now.
“No. I don’t think they’re military. You can buy a lot of that old equipment on the black market. A lot of it’s probably ours, from back in the sixties or seventies. Stuff that’s supposed to get scrapped has a way of disappearing out the back door.”
“Then what is it?”
“They’re trying to cut us off so we can’t call out. We’re already cut off geographically. Just us and them, and whatever happens, no one else will know. What do you think we’ve put into Freefall? Three million? Three and a half? Even if they chopped her up and sold the parts at a discount, they could probably get seven, maybe eight hundred thousand.”
Kelly felt her insides loosen.
“There’s never been a report of that kind of thing down here. I thought it was all in Somalia, off the Horn of Africa.”
“They’re jamming us,” Dean said. “If we could call out, there’d be a report. But then somebody might do something about them.”
“And what about us? What happens to us?”
The VHF was still on, but the volume was low. Guitars and hoarse screaming.
Dean didn’t answer, but he didn’t really have to. If she didn’t like asking questions he couldn’t answer, he didn’t like saying what she already knew. But knowing didn’t make her feel any better.
* * *
“Something’s going on with them,” she said. She handed Dean the binoculars and took the helm for him while he braced himself to watch astern. The crab boat was five hundred yards back. Dean raised the binoculars to his eyes and brought them into focus.
“Lot of smoke,” he said.
“It was white before,” Kelly said. “The smoke from the port exhaust. Then all of a sudden it got thick and black.”
The first plume of black smoke was blowing toward them, snakelike, over the stretch of sea between Freefall and the crab boat.
“It’s thinning,” Dean said. “Same color as the starboard exhaust. They had someone working on the port engine.”
“And he fixed it.”
“Yeah.”
Dean put the binoculars back into their box and took the helm again. He was better at steering for speed.
“Watch it on the radar and see if that did anything to its speed.”
She leaned over the radar controls and adjusted the range to a thousand yards. The crab boat was just inside the five-hundred-yard ring. She wa
tched its green glow, waiting for the sweep of the antenna to pass and refresh the screen.
“It’s closing on us.”
“How much time we got?”
She did the math in her head and looked up at him. “About three minutes.”
With Dean coaxing every bit of speed he could, La Araña was off their starboard quarter inside of two minutes. It was a hundred feet away, its bow even with Freefall’s transom.
“Get on your exposure suit,” Dean said to her. “And bring up mine.”
She didn’t need Dean to tell her twice. If the crab boat rammed them and opened a seam in Freefall’s hull, they’d have no time to get on their suits before they went in the water. Kelly tore open the companionway doors and jumped into the cabin, crashing onto the wooden floor so that she somersaulted over her left shoulder and landed on her knees in the galley. She clambered up, ripped open the hanging locker, and pulled out her exposure suit. She pulled it on without thinking, yanking and zipping, and then she was carrying Dean’s suit up the steps and into the pilothouse.
La Araña was turning to port, charging at their starboard quarter. As it swung past, the tip of its overhanging bow passed inches from Freefall’s backstay. Then La Araña was to Freefall’s port side, so that Kelly saw the starboard side of its bow for the first time.
“Dean!”
“I saw it,” he said.
The naked corpse hung upside down from the starboard rail. It was Jim from Arcturus.
Jim’s feet were tied together with a length of yellow rope, and his arms hung down so that his hands trailed in the sea. His skin was blue except for the deep red lacerations across his back, as though he’d been beaten with a chain. He was either frozen solid or in deep rigor because he was board-stiff as he swung violently at the end of his rope.
“Take the wheel,” Dean said.
She turned from the horror at their stern and took Dean’s place. Behind her, Dean was pulling on his exposure suit. When he had it on, he moved beside her and resumed steering. He’d put the suit on over his harness so that he couldn’t tether himself to the boat. He reached past the instrument panel to the fluorescent green emergency position indicating radio beacon mounted to the bulkhead and activated it. The beacon would send their boat’s registration information and position to search and rescue satellites.
At least it was supposed to do that.
They watched the EPIRB’s tiny blue-lit screen as it scrolled a message past, one word at a time: NO … GPS … RECEPTION … IS … YOUR … SKY … VIEW … OBSTRUCTED?
“Start the engine,” Dean said. “Maybe if we can get far enough ahead of their jammers, the EPIRB will work.”
She nodded and went to the engine controls, her hand on the key.
“No, you gotta open the seacock,” Dean said. He was speaking loudly enough that she could hear him over the screaming wind. But he was calm. When she didn’t immediately move, he said it again: “Open the seacock.”
Now she remembered. They’d closed the seacock that vented the engine’s exhaust and cooling water to ensure that no seawater worked its way up the exhaust loop and into the engine. But now she’d have to open it before hitting the ignition or the engine would choke on its exhaust.
She raced back into the cabin, letting the bulky exposure suit cushion her impacts against bulkheads and lockers. The seacock was under the galley sink. She fell to her knees in the galley, opened the cabinet, and tossed cleaning supplies and plastic buckets aside until she exposed the bronze handle of the seacock. It was stiff and didn’t want to move, but she yanked it with both gloved hands until the handle was parallel to the exhaust hose.
“I got it!” she yelled.
A second later she heard the engine cough and sputter and then kick into a higher rhythm as Dean gave it fuel. Then there was a grinding squeal as Dean slammed the ice-cold transmission into gear. She started up the companionway ladder, and when her head was high enough to see through the hatch, she saw La Araña break over the top of a wave and turn toward them.
This time there was a figure standing in the bow pulpit. Nothing about him looked right at all. His eyes were three-inch disks of fire floating in the black void under his hood where his face should have been. Then he turned slightly, and she saw that beneath his hood, his face was hidden by a balaclava and some kind of antiglare goggles that were catching the low sun. He wore foul weather gear that had been yellow at some point but was smeared with grease and blood and other filth so that it was almost black. He wore rubber gloves that went past his elbows. And in those yellow oversized hands he cradled an ancient-looking rifle with a harpoon fitted at its tip.
She tried to speak, and her voice was just a croak.
“Dean …”
She could only see Dean’s legs from this angle. She tried to pull herself higher, but her arms were stiff and wouldn’t budge.
“Dean.”
The crab boat crashed down the wave and hovered above Freefall’s transom, and as she watched, the man in the bow pulpit calmly shouldered the harpoon gun, aimed it at her husband, and fired. She never heard the shot, but she saw the harpoon slice across the gap between the boats, the rope whipping as it uncoiled. It hit Dean just below his left buttock. The tip ripped through the front of his exposure suit and sprayed blood across the instrument panel in front of him. Dean fell on his side with his face inches from hers. She found her voice and screamed.
“Dean!”
She took his left wrist and felt his hand clamp down hard. She leaned back with all her weight to pull him through the hatch and into the cabin. But the crab boat had backed off its throttle and was slipping behind the next wave. Freefall charged ahead at the same speed as before. The harpoon’s rope went taut, and Dean started to slide toward the stern. She meant to pull him into the cabin, but instead he pulled her out into the pilothouse.
They slid across the painted metal cockpit, and then Dean was lodged against the transom. But when Freefall started to climb the back of a wave, the transom pitched down and Dean’s legs went over the stern rail. Kelly was holding on to his wrist and scrabbling with her free hand for anything to hold on to. She finally got hold of the aft cockpit wheel and held on to it to stop their slide. The boat lurched in a new direction, veering north. Now Dean was in the air, held up on one side by the harpoon line and on the other side by Kelly’s grip on his wrist. They were both screaming and the wave was cresting and crashing around the transom, and Kelly could only make out one thing that Dean was saying.
“Run, baby. Just run!”
He let go of her wrist, and her gloved hand was too slick to hold on to his rubber sleeve. She felt his wrist slip under her grip, and then she was just holding on to his fingers, and before they slid out of her grip she felt each one of them stretch and pop as his knuckles pulled apart.
“Run, Kelly!”
Dean tumbled off the stern and disappeared into the froth.
Freefall raced ahead, so when Kelly first caught sight of Dean flailing in the wake, he was already over a hundred feet away. Then he was just an orange blur floating up a wave face that dwarfed him, the superstructure of the crab boat looming in the trough one wave back, reeling him in.
“Dean!”
Kelly was leaning over the transom, having let go of the wheel. With no one at the helm and without the autopilot, Freefall had swung past north and was now following her natural inclination to round up into the wind. But with two headsails and only the smallest scrap of main, she was too imbalanced to turn all the way into the storm. Instead she careened at a forty-five-degree angle to the wind and waves, coming diagonally back at the crab boat. Kelly slipped and fell to the slanted deck, rolling to the lee side until she slammed into a cockpit locker. She struggled onto her knees and looked over the rail.
Two men were using a long-handled fish gaff to haul Dean aboard. They’d hooked him behind his knee. Kelly knew he was still alive because she could hear him screaming even over the wind’s ceaseless shriek.
Freefall was still struggling to make headway upwind. The sails were sheeted out for a downwind run, not an upwind slog. They were flapping wildly, the sheet lines whipping and tangling. She drew them in one at a time with the electric winch until they were tight. With two headsails working again, Freefall leaned over on her side in the blasting wind, the lee rail deep in the boiling water. Kelly nearly fell out of her perch at the helm but braced herself and used the furling gear to roll up half of the jib. When she cleated the lines off, Freefall was still heeling, but the rail was out of the water and she could steer closer to the wind. More efficient, more speed. She throttled the engine to 4,000 rpm and found she could point even higher. Then she looked back for La Araña. For Dean.
The crab boat had come about, bow into the seas, and was giving chase. Jim’s naked corpse still swung from a rope off the starboard rail. But there was no second corpse yet. So maybe Dean was still alive.
The crab boat was two or three hundred yards behind her. It wouldn’t take it long to catch up to her. Freefall could give any boat a run for its money downwind; upwind was another story. But Kelly knew Freefall could pivot as if she stood on a turntable. The crab boat would take longer, especially in seas like this. Maybe she could outrun it forever by waiting for it to close in, then running as fast as she could in another direction. That wouldn’t help Dean, but she didn’t see anything she could do for him. Maybe she could lead them in closer to the Chilean coast, zigzagging the whole way to stay out of their reach, and then signal the navy or the police or whatever they had down here. There was supposed to be a Chilean naval station on Cabo de Hornos, but she didn’t have high hopes for it. From what she’d seen so far of Chile, she guessed it was probably just one guy in a clapboard shack with a pair of binoculars and a radio.