Close Reach

by Jonathan Moore

  She switched it off. Dean hadn’t said what the jamming equipment’s range might be, but she couldn’t imagine that it cast too wide a circle. If it jammed a wider area than that, surely someone would notice the dead airspace and report it. Patrol boats or airplanes could triangulate the source and track it down. So they’d limit the range of their jamming equipment, and that meant they were nearby. La Araña was probably within twenty miles of her.

  Twenty miles was a long way in a rough sea. The waves weren’t as bad as before but were still too high for the radar to pick out anything but sea clutter. If it were dark, she’d take any odds on getting to Cape Horn without La Araña finding and catching her. Nothing was harder to see than an unlit boat in a storming sea at night. The more pressing concern would be hitting rocks while running blind downwind at twenty knots.

  But it wasn’t dark and wouldn’t be for at least another week.

  If the crab boat was still jamming her, it was still looking for her. It had run her down once before on a straight-line test of speed, and now she was out of fuel. Besides, she was exhausted and had never been able to steer for speed the way Dean could. She realized then that it had been at least eight hours since she’d gone into the cabin to get a drink or use the head. She’d had a thermos of tea when Dean was on his last watch and nothing since then. She was exhausted and needed to pee, and her mouth was dry as old paint. Even with the exposure suit, she was shivering.

  As the cold had gotten worse, so had the auditory hallucinations.

  These were common enough on long watches in strong weather. The wind carried whirs and chirps, and singing voices, and screams. Voices she recognized, moans of things that might not have come from this world. Any sailor on a solo watch learns to ignore them or at least keep them separate from the sounds that matter. Usually she could. But twice she’d jerked around at the sound of a voice speaking in low Spanish, and more times than she could count she’d heard her name in the crash of the sea. The low beat of an engine that wasn’t hers.

  She could set the autopilot and go down below for five minutes.

  It wouldn’t take any longer than that to peel off her one-piece exposure suit, pee, make a thermos of soup, put the suit back on, and come back to the pilothouse. Once she thought it out and saw herself doing it, a need that had been merely pressing for the last hour became an imperative.

  Kelly was able to hold out only another minute—just long enough to know Freefall would pass to the north of the ice ahead. Then she set the autopilot, unclipped her harness tether, and went below. In the galley, she braced herself against the stove and shimmied out of her exposure suit, then hurried to the aft head. She’d held her bladder for so long that she was almost sick with the pressure, and the relief when she finally sat down and held on to the bulkhead grab rail embraced her like a morphine drip. Then she was back in the galley, upending a can of tomato soup into a saucepan and heating it over the gimbaled stove burner. While it came to a simmer, she put her exposure suit back on and cinched her chest harness tight again. She found an energy drink in the cupboard, then poured the hot soup into her tea thermos and climbed back into the pilothouse.

  Freefall was passing two miles to the north of the ice. As she’d guessed, there was a thick bank of fog in the lee, pressing heavily against the flat gray sea where the ice gave shelter from the wind and waves. The fog stretched half a mile, then thinned where the wind picked up again and blew it clear.

  It was a scene of eerie calm. The light filtered through the fog, gray and green like the cold atmosphere of some outer planet. Kelly punched off the autopilot and took the wheel, steering the boat toward the line of calmer water ahead. The ice would break up the waves and create a long V-shaped patch of smoother water beyond it. She could steer along the soft edge, one foot in the calm and one foot in the storm, ready to dodge either way if she saw a growler in her path.

  As she sailed out of the bigger waves and into the calmer sea with the berg behind her, the radar set began to beep with a high-pitched pulse. She’d left the proximity alarm on. It was probably just picking up the back side of the iceberg. She’d cut in close; the ice was only half a mile away. Kelly glanced down at the screen to confirm it.

  But it wasn’t the ice.

  There was a hard target coming at her fast from her starboard quarter. She jerked around and stared into the dismal gray fog until she saw La Araña emerge from it like a ghost passing through a wall. Its bridge-top rack of yellow spotlights was lit up; the naked corpse still swung from the bow on an ice-crusted rope. The body and the ship each shimmered and glittered beneath a diamond-dust coating of frost. It had just been loitering in the freezing, fog-bound shadows behind the iceberg, waiting to pick her out with its radar when she finally turned downwind again.

  “Fuck!” Kelly screamed. At herself, at La Araña.

  She’d lost the laser. The flare gun shot 12-gauge potassium perchlorate signaling flares, but they’d be no good at any kind of distance. Just holding the orange plastic gun in her hand would announce to La Araña that she was out of ideas.

  It was one hundred yards away.

  A rusty steel door opened, and two men stepped onto the deck. The second one slammed the door and spun the wheel to seal it. They had long coils of rope draped bandolier-style across their foul weather gear. One of them had a ten-pound grapnel anchor in his hand, and the other had a pair of meat hooks and a length of chain. They went to the rail and walked along it to the bow, taking positions on either side. Their hoods were up and pulled low, and their clothes were as foul and bloodied as the other man’s had been. The only difference this time was that both men wore welding masks. They didn’t know she’d lost the laser, but they’d figure it out soon enough.

  They meant to board her this time.

  Fifty yards.

  Kelly steered Freefall north again, back toward the bigger waves. If they wanted to try snaring her like a fly and sliding down ropes to come aboard, they’d have to do it in thirty-foot waves, not in the relative calm behind the berg.

  If she could get there in time.

  Freefall hit a growler the size of a small car. She heard it crash and scrape its way down the aluminum hull. During her residency in New York, she’d been on an A train under Washington Square when a man jumped onto the tracks and derailed the first three cars. The sound of the ice against the hull was like that: a drawn-out grinding torture. But the boat never slowed and she could still steer, so the ice hadn’t hit either rudder. Twenty seconds passed and she didn’t hear the bilge alarms go off to announce rising water, so maybe she hadn’t put a hole in the hull.

  Twenty-five yards.

  The man with the meat hooks was tying the length of chain to the end of his rope. The other man was on his knees, tying his rope to a deck cleat. The rope was flaked out on the deck so that it would fly freely when he tossed the grapnel. Kelly left the wheel and went to the same locker where she’d found the laser, kneeling and getting the fillet knife from the fishing kit. This was a serious knife, meant for billfish. The blade was two feet long, and Dean kept it sharp enough to cut a soup can in half. She tucked the sheathed knife under her harness and went back to the wheel.

  Fifteen yards.

  The man on the left was standing again, swinging the grapnel in a circle over his head. The other man stood clear to let him work. Kelly reached for the winch station and used the furling gear to roll out the entire jib. Freefall shuddered under the force of the wind, and the bow plowed through a wave. She could see the current line where the calmer water was swirling backward into the troughs of the waves ahead, foam and broken bits of ice moving in giant fields against the background of the raging waves to the north. She’d be there in thirty seconds, and she had a plan for when the men jumped to the deck. She checked her harness and pulled on the tether to make sure it was fastened to the eyebolt.

  La Araña’s bow was ten feet from Freefall’s stern.

  Kelly cut due north so that she was sailing at a ni
nety-degree angle to the wind. The crab boat followed her in the turn, and when it caught up to her again, it was on her starboard side. The wind and waves were coming out of the west. La Araña was to the east, and that was how Kelly wanted it: when the men landed on her deck, they’d be on the lee side, closer to the water.

  She cut to starboard, bringing the boat into a downwind run again. La Araña followed but not as sharply, so that when she straightened from the turn, the crab boat was ten feet off the starboard rail.

  The waves were big now, in the thirty-foot range.

  The man with the grapnel sped his swing and let the hook fly. It sailed across the space between the two boats and tangled in Freefall’s lower mast spreader. The man pulled the rope tight and tested it once, and then he stepped over the rail and swung. When his boots left the rail, Kelly spun the wheel hard to port and simultaneously began to grind in the jib sheet with the electric winch. The man from La Araña swung on the narrow ambit of the rope and crashed into the mast. He lost his footing on the cabin top and swung back out when the boat rolled on a wave, dangling and flailing far over the water. The second swing brought him into the boom, where he hit the triple-reefed mainsail. He let go and dropped to a crouch on the cabin trunk just aft of the mast.

  Now Freefall was sailing beam to the wind and the seas—exactly what Kelly had always tried to avoid.

  She kept her hand on the power winch button, bringing the sail tight so that it presented its maximum area to the wind. Freefall was already heeling badly, the starboard toe rail deep in the water. But the wind was gusting at forty knots, and when Freefall started sideways up the face of the next steep wave, the wind and the wave worked together and knocked the big yacht down.

  Kelly had never been in a knockdown. Not on Freefall, not on any boat.

  This wasn’t at all like a tree falling after someone yells “Timber,” the tree’s fall slow at first and doubtful, its momentum gathering only after the first branches are already brushing the ground. This was fast and hard. The sea simply reached up and heaved Freefall over, and the wind laid her flat on her side.

  Kelly fell into the windows of the pilothouse and saw the mast slap the ocean with a blow like someone had tossed a stick of dynamite. She saw the wave wash straight over the vertical deck, carrying off the man in his yellow foul weather gear in a torrent of foam and green water that fell away like a flooding river into the swirling trough below. The pilothouse and cockpit were both awash, and Kelly struggled against the suction that wanted to pull her out and into the sea. She felt her harness tether pull taut, and then she was underwater.

  Bubbles and green light and the pounding throb of diesel-driven propellers.

  She surfaced and retched seawater and fought her way up to the wheel by pulling hand over hand on her tether. By then Freefall’s mast was coming up from the water. Ten degrees, then thirty.

  The lead keel was doing its work, righting the boat.

  As Freefall came up, she rounded toward the wind and waves and stalled with the big jib backwinded and the staysail on the right tack but flapping madly in the lee of the larger sail. Kelly scanned the sea around her for the man but couldn’t see him anywhere.

  He hadn’t been wearing an exposure suit or a life jacket.

  He was gone.

  She knew she’d killed him as surely and as deliberately as the man she’d blinded, but she could think about that later: La Araña was bucking in the waves less than a boat length in front of her, not moving. Kelly took the wheel, ready to wrestle her boat back into motion, but even before she turned it, Freefall jerked hard to starboard.

  It hadn’t been ice; it wasn’t a wave.

  She looked past the bow and saw La Araña motoring back toward the iceberg and its shadow of calm water, and she saw the tow rope pull tight and whip out of the ocean in a line of spray. The other man on La Araña’s bow had gotten the hooks and chain around Freefall’s forestay while she was on her side and Kelly was underwater. He’d known better than to swing across in these seas. They were simply going to tow her back to the calm, where they could deal with her at their leisure. The man was standing now at La Araña’s stern, just in front of Lena in her crab trap. He raised his hand and waved.

  “Son of a bitch!” she screamed.

  La Araña answered her with a black cloud of exhaust from its stacks as it throttled up to muscle its prey forward.

  Freefall continued to swing around, moving at five knots now. Kelly unclipped her harness tether and went into the cockpit. She grabbed the yellow safety jackline on the side deck, clipped the tether to it, and worked up to the bow. She could see one of the heavy hooks caught around the cable forestay that supported the mast and the main jib. The other was wedged in the steel turnbuckle that secured the jib’s roller furling drum to the bow.

  If she could just unhook them, she’d be free. She unsheathed the knife when she got to the bow and dropped to her knees, ready to cut the rope.

  But the man on the crab boat was either smart or lucky, because he’d shackled his hooks to ten feet of rusty steel chain. The rope was tied to the other end of the chain, and the knot was ten feet out of her reach, out over the freezing waves. She held to the bow pulpit as Freefall careened off a wave and fell into the trough. Freezing spray pelted her in the face and stung her eyes. She spit her hair out of her mouth and grabbed on to one of the hooks, trying to pull it free and untangle the loop of chain around the furling drum. But the chain was too tight. She couldn’t budge the hook. If there had been any slack, she could have gotten it. The chain and rope were straining almost to the breaking point under the force of the tow. She felt her fingernails bend backward and snap inside her gloves as she struggled to pry the hook free. Her fingers were too numb with cold and her blood too loaded with adrenaline to feel any pain. She kept fighting against the hook even after her left hand grew slick and warm and she was certain her glove was full of blood.

  They were into calmer water now.

  She could smell the wisps of fog mixed with the diesel fumes from the crab boat’s exhaust. They were coming back toward the iceberg, where the fog was thickest and the water was smooth and calm. She looked up and saw Dean in his cage. He was less than a hundred feet away. He was alive, and his hands were gripped tightly into the wire bars of the trap. Though she couldn’t hear what he was yelling, suddenly she knew what she needed to do.

  She stood and ran back along the side deck, pulling the tether along the jackline so that it wouldn’t trip her. In the cockpit she got the boat hook from its mount on the stern. This was a five-foot aluminum pole that could extend like a curtain rod to ten feet. It had a plastic hook at one end and a plastic grip handle at the other. They used it for picking up lines from mooring balls or retrieving floating things that had fallen overboard.

  Now it might save her life if she could be fast enough.

  She ran to the pilothouse and lifted the top of the chart table. Gallons of seawater poured out. She reached into the cubby space among the ruined journals and floating pencils and grabbed the roll of duct tape. Then she pulled the fillet knife from its sheath, held the handle against the end of the boat hook, and wound the roll of tape around until the knife handle was secure. She ripped the tape with her teeth, tossed the roll aside, and turned to go back into the cockpit.

  Kelly stopped dead on the side deck when she looked up to the bow. While she’d been taping the knife to the boat hook, La Araña had slowed its engines to a crawl and allowed Freefall to drift up to its stern.

  A man from La Araña was standing on Freefall’s bow, holding a three-foot length of steel pipe. This time, the boats were close enough and the sea was calm enough this close to the iceberg that Kelly could hear Dean screaming.

  “Kill him, Kelly! Kill him!”

  She looked at the boat hook in her hands, the long knife taped there, its blade pointed out. Her plan had been to lean over the bow pulpit and reach past the chain to slice the tow rope. It had been a pretty good plan. But it
had just gone overboard. The boat hook could still save her life, though. She’d just have to use it like an eighteenth-century boarding pike. She felt along the aluminum rod for the joint between the two sliding pieces, found it, and twisted it. She never took her eyes off the man at the bow as she extended the rod to about seven feet and twisted it again to lock it.

  The man at the bow hefted the pipe and let it slap twice against the fingers of his gloved left hand. Then he started toward her, still holding the pipe one-handed. He’d taken off his welding mask, and when he got close enough, she could see his brown eyes behind the filthy fleece-lined balaclava that covered his face. She’d have given anything to have the laser back. Or a shotgun.

  When the man got within reach of her makeshift pike, she feigned a jab at his face, and while he was bringing the pipe around to block it, she slashed downward and sliced at his ankle. She saw the knife cut through the cheap plastic fabric of his foul weather pants and felt it go deep. The man screamed and stepped back, leaving a long smear of blood on the white deck. She’d been hoping to sever his Achilles tendon, but he was still on his feet. She’d missed. She jabbed again at his face, not wanting to let him collect himself. But this time his pipe connected squarely with the knife blade, and he charged past it and closed on her before she could draw back.

  He was screaming when he tackled her.

  They went down together, and he landed heavily on top of her, holding the pipe in both hands and using it to crush her throat. She fought him, but he was too heavy and too strong. Her last idea before she blacked out was to roll with him over the side. She was tethered to the boat; he wasn’t. It might work. She got one arm around his back, clamped down on him and rolled, but he’d already anticipated the move and kept her pinned, pressing harder with the pipe.

  They stayed put on the deck.

  She felt the trapped blood rush in her brain and knew she was going. But she also knew he wouldn’t kill her. Not yet. They had Dean and Lena and the others in cages on the crab boat’s aft deck. For what purpose she had no idea, but they wouldn’t keep them like that without some reason. And she’d killed two of the men, so they wouldn’t simply murder her on the side of her boat with a pipe.