by Jim Nisbet
“A pretty fair swell was running, maybe seven feet, so there was the added plus and minus of a glimpse of her from atop a swell, then losing her in the trough. That would be cool. If I could get a gander and all looked well, I could just fall off and lie over the horizon with Charley none the wiser. But I had to be careful. Charley was good, like I say. If he was on deck, he would be sweeping the horizon, albeit likely with the naked eye unless he spotted something particular he wanted to study, like for instance the glint of a stainless tuna tower with a hank of red hair under a straw hat contrasting nicely against the blue sky. But more likely he’d be on the lookout for an official-looking vessel, or a freighter or a tanker.
“I didn’t go straight in on the eighteen-mile vector. I worked a tangent. But not a mast tip, VHF antenna, windex, not the wink of a stainless tang or halyard shackle, not a rag of sail were to be seen. Not at seventeen point seventy-five, anyway. Nor at seventeen, sixteen and a half, sixteen, fifteen and a half …
“I kept looking at my instruments like I was going crazy. But they had to be telling the truth. The instruments said Charley was right over the horizon and getting closer, just a few points off the port bow, but the horizon showed no sign of him.
“I eased off the tangent until I was headed straight in. Cautiously, but straight in.
“Then I had a dark thought. What if Charley had figured out what I was doing? What if he had found the transponder? But that was almost impossible, for it was inside this brick of cocaine which was under that zinc which was below Vellela Vellela’s waterline, and the cover plate was secured with Torx screws. Of course, he may have dived the hull. He didn’t have a good reason to do so, but suppose he had done it? Suppose Charley dove on the hull, got the hatch open with a Torx driver he’d professed not to have, retrieved the payload, and discovered the DNA and the transponder as well? That’s two surprises. What would he have done?
“The same thing I would have done. Dropped the transponder into a mayonnaise jar with an airtight lid so it would float, dropped the jar into the drink, and changed course toward any of the 359 points on the compass rose that had little or nothing to do with the one vector parallel to the Gulf Stream that the jar would follow, which current, in that vicinity, sets nearly two knots per hour to the northeast. And then I would keep on sailing until I got caught or changed oceans, whichever came first. If, indeed, that’s what Charley had been paranoid enough to do, which is what I might have done too, with a fair wind he could be a good seventy, eighty, ninety miles away, and right next to impossible to find.
“But I was fantasizing about the unthinkable. What good reason could Charley give himself for suspicioning me? Me, of all people. Me who had given him his start and staked him again after he got out of the joint, and had handed him this recent job as well? Why would he think I didn’t have his best interest at heart? It didn’t make sense that way. Maybe Charley had concluded that some third party was interested in him. So something was wrong with what was wrong—you hear what I’m saying?
“Still I crept up on him, because I just couldn’t bring myself to admit that this operation even had a chance of going sour. I was in denial. I continued to cautiously motor, closing up with the position of the transponder the while, continued to glass the horizon, and continued to see nothing. Eleven miles, ten, nine …
“An hour and a half later, I motored directly over the transponder signal, and there was not a sign of a boat. Nothing but empty ocean.
“What the fuck.
“So now the unthinkable was fully engaged, and it was one shitty feeling, I can tell you.
“There was no debris. I glassed circle after circle. Wherever that transponder signal was coming from, I couldn’t see it. I had no idea of the accuracy of my gear, a detail I should have known, but hell, I was looking for a thirty-foot boat, not a two-inch electronic gadget. Even if you’re ten miles away from the damn boat, you should be able to see it.
“Had the boat gone down and the transponder was still working? The guy I bought it from told me it might transmit through maybe half an atmosphere, or about sixteen feet of water, maximum—in which subject I was very interested, of course, because it would be stashed below the water line. But he also told me that, deeper than about a quarter of an atmosphere, its range would be severely curtailed. This led me to suppose that Vellela Vellela may have swamped and now lingered, just under the surface.
“If the transponder was still aboard, that is.
“At that point I got so annoyed by the screen that told me I was right on top of the transponder signal, I turned the damned thing off.
“Now my overworked brain was really ginning up the scenarios. I probably hadn’t expended that many neurons since I sat for my 100-ton license, forty-something years ago. I turned the engines off and listened. I randomly stabbed the binoculars at empty stretches of ocean. I looked high for flares. I looked low for debris. I tuned and studied the radar. Nothing. I fiddled with range and sensitivity, setting both at their maximum. Nothing. I went back upstairs with the binoculars, if only because all that fresh air and sunshine on the fly bridge made me feel better. Nothing. And I had no patience for any of it.
“At some point I finally admitted that I was bobbing around in an empty seascape and I had to do something, even if it was wrong.
“So I consulted the chart. I’d been plotting Charley’s course as well as my own. I’ve never been able to break the habit of a paper chart, and now it came in handy. I knew where Charley had turned north. I knew where the transponder signal had started moving at the same speed as the current in the Gulf Stream. And, in fact, I wasn’t all that far away from that point.
“I plotted the route from Charley’s course change to Boca Chica Key. I did a careful job, too. I knew how much time had elapsed since the course change, since the transponder signal had slowed. I knew that Charley would steer a westward course to allow for being set eastward by the Gulf Stream. And so forth.
“It seemed to take forever. But I worked it through, picked a course, and headed out.
“A mere half an hour later, the longest half-hour I’ve ever spent, the radar acquired a very small target. Strangely enough, it was a fifteen miles away, well within the limit of Tunacide’s radar range, which is twenty-five miles. The image came and went, it was well north and east of the course I’d set, but it was the only target I’d seen all day, so I steered for it.
“Another hour, and the unthinkable happened again. Tunacide topped a swell, and the eyepiece of the binoculars filled with the one sight I didn’t want to see: a naked stump of mast, its upper end a jagged flare of an aluminum splinter not five feet above the deck. And then it was gone.
“We were in the trough and all I could see was water. I took a bearing and passed it to the autopilot. The swell was too big for full speed ahead, but I fed her some throttle anyway. Not too much, though, because if you jam into heavy seas, the autopilot gets confused, and I needed the autopilot. While she labored for the derelict I sprang to the deck and broke out everything I could think of. A messenger line, a grappling iron, a couple of life vests, a boat hook. Flippers, mask, snorkel, tank, weight belt, buoyancy conserver. A coil of fat towing line. I put fenders over. There’s a compressor aboard Tunacide for topping off scuba tanks or running a hookah or sandblasting or painting, whatever, and I jumped on deck and fired it up.
“Then I clambered back up the ladder and glassed the bow from port to starboard and back. As we crested a swell I caught another glimpse and, I don’t mind telling you, I almost lost heart. At first I thought she was hull down, of course. The mast was stripped of rigging, except for a thickness of sail clutched in the track, below the fracture. Everything else was a tangle on deck and spilling off the starboard side. Charlie sat back of the stub facing aft, right in the thick of a snarl of rigging and canvas, and he was throwing fistfuls of paper into the air.
“What in the hell, I said aloud under the binoculars, is going on?
“A trough s
wallowed the freeboard of Tunacide, and Vellela Vellela was lost from sight. I went to manual helm, but when I gave her some more throttle the seas wouldn’t allow it. She was just digging a hole, as the sailors say. I throttled back. Four miles. Atop the next sea I brought the glass to bear again. These are high-tech binoculars I’m using, with a built-in gyroscope to steady the image. One thousand bucks. You know what “boat” stands for, don’t you? “Break Out Another Thousand.” Sure it’s not funny. It’s a context thing. I almost puked. Vellela Vellela wasn’t hull down over the horizon at all. She was decks awash. What I was seeing—the stub of mast, Charley’s head and a bit of his shoulders—was all of Vellela Vellela that remained above water.
“I gunned it. Equipment on deck, hatches and companionways open, to hell with it. Tunacide rose to the challenge and did better for herself than I expected. Old sailors always bear a prejudice against the stinkpot. We never think a stinkpot can handle a sea like a well-founded sailboat. She took green water over the foredeck but Tunacide did well until she took a tanker load down the companionway, too, and I had to back her off, bilge pumps whining. I mean, Tunacide isn’t one of those speedboats that can go from wave top to wave top, at a speed limited only by how tight you can hold on. Nothing was lost overboard except a deck chair, which I didn’t even miss until I wanted to sit down much, much later.
“Sometimes, at sea, things happen so quickly you can’t grasp the sequence of events. Other times a single event will take an eternity to happen, and this was one of them. We closed the gap at eight knots. Three miles, two, one, a half, a quarter … It took at least twenty minutes, maybe a few more, but it seemed like forever. By the time we got there only the shredded tip of the mast was above water. Charley’s head was lifting up out of the swell and dropping back under.
“A hundred yards away I forced myself to put the engine in neutral. There was a lot of stuff floating around the wreck—bottles and cans, clothing, a boat hook, books, all that paper, a blue plastic jerry can, a long spiral of yellow polypropylene line, to which was attached the deflated remains of an orange liferaft—all of that, plus mast and rigging. Not to mention that the simplest and least paranoid scenario was that Vellela Vellela had been holed by a submerged object, and, if so, where was it? The current was with us, and there was way on Tunacide. Best to drift down on Vellela Vellela. Best not to let the prop get involved with what surely was a tangle of lines and gear and canvas, not to mention a live skipper. Who knows, maybe he had a tank on, or a snorkle, or something. I couldn’t tell, but as we closed that last hundred yards at the rate of one year per yard, I could see the hair on the top of Charley’s head, right against the mast, rising and dipping, rising and dipping. Occasionally his whole head submerged, then he’d come up spouting. So he hadn’t drowned yet. His back was to me, but I couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t paid me any attention, let alone, how he’d managed to trash his own liferaft. But a lot of smart money will tell you that abandoning a vessel at sea is strictly a last ditch effort, because many’s the abandoned vessel found still afloat weeks, months or years after anyone has last heard from her crew. Of course, if you’ve holed your raft too, that’s all kinda irrelevant. And need I mention a nice big fin circling the wreck? It disappeared as Tunacide bore down, but still …
“For Charley even to be in this pickle, something had gone mighty wrong.
“Well, and maybe I was his guardian angel, although, if so, it was going to be a close thing and, anyway, I didn’t have time to be digesting details. I sprang to the after deck and hefted the single scuba tank. Put it down, donned the BC. Resumed with the tank. And then I thought, sonofabitch, what am I doing, there’s work to be done. I sprang below and dumped a whole drawer of tools onto the sole of engine room until I found the air wrench, a No. 2 Torx bit, and a goddamn half-inch to three-eighths drive adapter, and it had to be a half-inch female to three-eighths inch male adapter at that. If you haven’t gone pawing through boxes of greasy tools looking for three things without one or another of which you will fail from square one, with no time to lose, well, you haven’t really been nervous.
“A hose, too. Two hoses, I should say, for I had two fifty-foot lengths of 3/8” pneumatic hose aboard, for a total of one hundred feet, and why not? The entire damn boat is only fifty-three feet, and the compressor sits amidships, belayed to the back of the house, its thirty-gallon tank red as a new nun. Fifty feet of hose would reach anywhere on the boat, double up for backup or two tools, and break out another thousand.
“But you see what that meant. I had maybe eighty, eighty-five feet of hose and who knew how little time to dive the hull of Vellela Vellela and back out eight Torx screws on the—what was it, the port side? Hell, I didn’t even know. Port or starboard, toss the coin, but aft for sure. But there was Charley, too. I had to see to Charley as well as the payload.
“I plugged the male end of the hose into the air tank. With a hundred and ten pounds of air on it the hose went stiff as a rusted cable. I plugged the male fitting on the air-wrench into the female end of the hose and pulled the trigger twice, vroom vroom. A second time, vroom vroom, and the compressor bore down under the governor until the pop-off valve popped off. So far so good, but would it work under water? Who the fuck knew. Good question though. I sprang below and pawed through tools again until I found a No. 2 Torx driver, manual version. It looks just like a screwdriver. Sure to god I’d be down three or four atmospheres, 90 or 120 feet, with my back to the sharkosphere, before I got eight screws backed out by hand. I grabbed a roll of duct tape, too.
“Gaining the after deck once more I opened the valve on the single tank and fumbled into its harness. Nervous as a cat. Then I remembered the swim ladder. I scrambled aft and put over the swim ladder so I could climb back aboard my own goddamn boat. Don’t laugh, the swim ladder has been forgotten by better sailors than me on boats with less freeboard than Tunacide, and they did not live to tell the tale. I buckled on the weight belt, sat on the fighting chair to put on the fins, and, bethinking of it at the last minute, I strapped on the sheath of a dive knife a guy named Cedric Osawa gave me years ago. That’s right, Charley knew him too. Biggest dive knife you ever saw, a blade sharp as a serpent’s tooth and a serrated spine fit to limb oaks with. Cedric’s a fucking idiot. I laughed at it when he gave it to me but was reassured to hold it at that particular moment, on the bounding main. I left the spear gun. I had enough stuff. And there, on deck, was the duct tape. I stared at it. What the hell was the duct tape for? I ran through every move I could foresee having to make on the dive until I remembered. I tore a couple of inches off the roll and wrapped it two or three times around the Torx tip, the female-to-male adapter and the chuck, too. Those rigs fall apart all the time in thin air, you know, let alone under water.
“By then Tunacide had drifted down on the wreck, as if this were a perfect man-overboard drill. Vellela Vellela lay downwind and down current, so Tunacide covered her. A fin reappeared in the old peripheral vision. There was a rifle aboard, a shotgun too, but it’s counterproductive to have blood in the water if you’re going for a swim. Peaceful coexistence is the key. I spit in the mask, centered it on my face, cleared the regulator and fell overboard backwards, the mask clasped to my face by the ruined hand, impact wrench in the other.
“I fell right down past a maze of rigging and torn canvas, a fucking miracle I missed it. I didn’t even think about it. If I’d hit the middle of that stuff, that would have been the end of the job. Best case scenario, I might have gotten myself untangled before it took me to the bottom.
“The hull lay close aboard, just above me, and right off I spotted the zinc. A stroke of luck. Now for Charley. I flippered through a loop and exhausted the BC a little. The belt dropped me amidships, and there he was, chained to the goddamned mast.
“Charley had chained himself to the goddamned mast.
“Or had somebody else done it?
“I couldn’t believe my eyes, I didn’t know what to think, but there it was,
some kind of harness of chains. Right out of an S&M catalog with a padlock, yet.
“I floated there, incredulous. My eyes must have bugged sufficient to fill the mask. Charley was still alive and he noticed. Plus I was holding an air wrench, for chrissakes. An air wrench! I must have looked just like I was fixing to rotate his tires. It’s like that test they give you to see whether you’re dumb enough to join the army. What’s wrong with this picture? My mind was nearly blanked by the image of a big pair of red-handled bolt cutters I happen to own, red handles with black rubber grips and black jaws to hold the blades, and they were aboard Tunacide, too. I had just seen them in a cubby below the tool bench in the engine room, right next to the drawers I’d rifled for the other gear.
“Why the hell hadn’t I brought those bolt cutters! Fucking lot of good an air wrench was going to do Charley.
“But the bolt cutters wouldn’t have made any difference either. The links looked to be at least 5/8”, and case-hardened, end of story—too much for my bolt cutters, too much for most bolt cutters. Too much for one man to handle. …
“Charley pointed. Did he think the joke was on me? I glanced away, as if to work up a good curse, only to look straight into the starboard eyeball of the biggest hammerhead shark I ever saw.