by Peter Tonkin
Hood glanced across at her, a pretty girl oiling herself up to sunbathe. And he froze. He had been looking at her out of the corner of his eye since they had first met. There was something disturbingly familiar about her. And now the memory clicked into place. A memory he had hoped was gone forever.
Back home in Detroit one last time before joining Weary in Sydney, he had attended the wedding of one of the members of his old platoon. It was a typical wedding, he supposed, except for the bachelor party. The best man had taken his duties far too seriously. There had been three strippers, oceans of alcohol, and stag movies galore. Most of the evening had passed in a thickening haze. None of the college-boy highjinks had appealed to him, but he had followed along rather than break things up. After a few hours, in a motel room out on the interstate partway to Grand Rapids, he had gratefully fallen asleep.
Some hours later he had woken again to find himself still in that crowded hotel room facing the TV set. On the screen in front of him, clear as crystal, writhed a maze of naked bodies. A hollow maze. A circle of bodies, at whose center lay a bed. On the bed, alone, a girl lay, stretched out and tied down with ropes. And as Hood had watched, something leaped over the writhing bodies and up onto the bed with the girl. The girl’s face had reared up and he had reared up in answer to destroy the screen and spoil the party after all. But he had acted too late. For he would never forget that face beyond the rapist’s shoulder, nor its expression. Try as he might. For the rapist had not been a man.
Like many seafaring men, he liked reading sea stories and he had started one last year. It had turned out to be less about sailing than he had hoped but he had enjoyed it well enough. One of the characters in the book had been a pornographic film star and a line of hers had been the last thing to trigger that most unwelcome memory. “If you’re fucking people, you’re still okay,” she had said in this book. “But if you’re fucking animals, then you’re dead.”
And glancing back, up out of the cockpit he saw again, but in real life this time, the face he had seen on the screen that night in the hotel room. The girl from the pornographic video.
He looked away at once, simply too stunned to know how to react. Then he heard her move. How carefully he must have been listening to hear anything at all over the sound of the wind in the sails and the rigging. The thought twisted his face with self-disgust. And that was the expression he was still wearing when he turned suddenly to find her standing immediately behind him. Her expression was impossible to gauge. Hood, normally supremely confident with women, felt out of his depth now. He schooled his face and tried to control his eyes. But the cool lotion had brought her honey skin out in gooseflesh. The points of her breasts showed plainly through the silken bikini top.
“You’ve seen some of my early work, I think?” The dry tone, so formal, so chilly, so Four Hundred, Vassar, Bryn Mawr. And what was she talking about? Pornography. Filth.
“Yes, ma’am, I believe I have.” He kept his tone as dead as hers. As though he were talking to the Queen of England. But the atmosphere crackled around them.
“Magazines? Movies?”
Lord above! Did she really want to know? But there was a ritual air about the inquiries and he suddenly saw the hand of a psychiatrist here. Confrontation. It would be a good way to go, if you had the strength. Every time you saw that expression on someone’s face, ask the questions. Bring it out into the open. Deal with it.
“I saw it on a video, ma’am. At a bachelor party. I smashed the set and then I left.”
A fractional movement of her head. Almost a nod. She turned and went below. Her back was long beneath broad shoulders and her skin so pale as to allow the down of fine hair that covered her thighs to gleam like gold dust. He watched the way her bottom moved as she swayed slowly down the steps.
And then he felt dirty.
And then he asked himself how he would have felt if he hadn’t seen the video. He would still have watched her, probably, enjoying the sight of her. As though she were a centerfold. But then the fact that she had been a centerfold of the most degraded sort came and smacked him in the face. Made him feel even more dirty. And he began to wonder how much of this was his fault—and how much of it was hers.
Doc didn’t need much sleep. He could get through a full, active day on two hours’ shut-eye if he had to, but he preferred four. It was when he slept too deeply or for too long—or woke up suddenly—that his memory went. This morning he still knew who he was when he awoke and strolled into the cockpit just after nine.
“You alone?” he asked as soon as he saw Hood standing morosely by the helm.
“Looks like it.”
“Where’s the sheila?”
Hood was so preoccupied that for a moment he wondered what Weary was talking about—there was no one called Sheila aboard. Then he remembered the name was Australian slang for any young woman. “Gone below.”
Weary’s wide eyes narrowed. He picked up on the atmosphere at once and he didn’t like it. “Anything I should know about?”
The confrontational method again, thought Hood, unable to get Christine out of his mind, discovering the unwelcome fact that everything seemed to revolve around her now. But he couldn’t bring himself to tell Doc the truth. It wasn’t actually his secret. Nothing to do with him at all, really. “No,” he said. “Nothing.”
Weary nodded, his bright eyes still speculative. He knew his friend well enough to trust his judgment. If Hood wanted to let it lie, then that was okay. He forgot about it and went to take the wheel, checking the feel of her through his fingertips as she self-steered toward the top of the tack. She was running gleefully across a steady breeze, every line of her alert. Not stretched yet, it took quite a wind to stretch her, but she was tail-up, and running like a hound to a strong scent. And as sometimes happened, Doc was overcome by an enormous sense of love for his creation. It overwhelmed him, and he enjoyed the feeling too much even to try to control it. He stood like a child awed by the strength of his creation and the emotion she brought up in him. He did not know it, but he was transfigured in that moment. The natural good looks of his open, cheerful face attained a kind of masculine beauty as though lit from within. He seemed to gain stature. The sun glinted off the wind-tumbled profusion of his hair and his dazzling eyes became luminescent.
When he looked down, unaware of how much time had elapsed as he stood in his reverie, he met the eyes of the girl he had just been discussing with Hood. She was standing in the companionway looking up at him. She had pulled her hair back and tied it in a ponytail. She was wearing an old pair of jeans and a baggy plaid shirt. Her face was devoid of makeup and looked as though it had just been scrubbed. He couldn’t read the expression in her eyes but he was so overcome with a feeling of the goodness of life that he simply beamed at her and said, “G’dday.”
And she smiled back. Against her will and better judgment by the look of things, but a smile nevertheless. “Good morning,” she almost whispered, as though she couldn’t trust her voice.
“I would’ve thought you’d have brought a bikini. To catch a bit of sun.”
“No.” Her voice was stronger. She came up into the cockpit. Beneath the rolled cuffs of her jeans she wore a well-used pair of topsiders, the same as the brand he had on himself. Sensible girl, he thought. “You want some coffee?” he asked. “Sam’s getting some from the smell of things.”
She shook her head and went over to the weather side of the cockpit where she perched on the coaming, looking away forward toward Queshm. The wind made her ponytail frisk about her shoulders and molded the shirt to her body, but Weary didn’t notice. Twenty knots! He was thinking. With this rig. In this breeze. Christ! What’ll she do in a decent blow. With the spinnaker up.
But this thought darkened his mood a little. They still hadn’t had time to repair the top of the mast. If they were going to put a spinnaker up at the moment, he’d have to climb up there with a block and tackle first.
“Coffee, Doc,” said Hood, coming up i
nto the cockpit beside him. And as he did so, that strange, unsettling atmosphere returned. Weary looked earnestly down at his friend. But Hood had eyes only for the girl.
So that was it! thought Doc: old Sam had fallen in love.
“Hey!” he said, good humor returning to his voice. “You’d better get onto our nice new Navy radio and tell Rass al Kaimah that we’re just about to come back out!”
They rounded the Quoins soon after midday, having come out faster than they went in, but here their progress slowed dramatically. They had been slicing across that unseasonal southerly, but now they had no choice but to run straight into the teeth of it. The afternoon was horrifically hot. The temperature in the desert of Iran immediately to the north of them spiraled past one hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit in the shade and the air there superheated and began to rise as quickly as the temperature, sucking more air up the narrow channel of the Gulf of Oman. So the south wind intensified, blowing into their faces with almost storm-force pressure, unremittingly, as though physically trying to keep them back.
It was a gloomy, dangerous wind bringing no relief from the heat, merely moving northward the parched intensities of the Ar-rab al Khali, that great sand sea to the south of Saudi. Such cooler air as might have been tempted north out of the Indian Ocean was turned aside by the cliffs of Oman and kept well away to the south. But before it crossed the furnace of the Al Khali, that south wind had once been over the Gulf of Aden, and so it brought with it just enough moisture to cause a high scud of cloud. The cloud danced mockingly around the unforgiving, shapeless blaze of the sun and then began to thicken as that indescribable afternoon wore on, causing Hood, and even the cheerful Weary, to become narrow-eyed and worried.
In the face of that foul wind, they had no choice but to zigzag across the gulf from east to west, clawing their way a little farther south with every tack. But this procedure, hardly one unknown to yachtsmen, was complicated immeasurably by the fact that they were crossing and recrossing the tanker lanes. “Steam gives way to sail” says the old adage of the sea, but in the unlikely event of any tanker captain feeling like obeying it, there were too many pressures forbidding him to do so. The great ships were too unwieldy to turn quickly or easily. The progression of them, a seaborne caravan, was so closely packed here that to attempt any variation of course or speed would be criminally dangerous. Even to try to stop was a process that would take five miles to complete, such was the power of the forces acting on those gigantic bodies. No: Weary never expected to be given an inch. From side to side of the Omani gulf they skipped, therefore, in the teeth of the wind, close hauled as the broiling blast of it intensified, slipping between those great black hulks like Argo between the Clashing Rocks.
The atmosphere aboard reflected the atmosphere in the air. Chris said nothing to her father about her conversation with Sam. Indeed, she was still unsure how best to interpret it. Martyr could see clearly the way Sam Hood looked at his daughter, however, and he did not like it. Sam himself felt almost adrift, powerless in the grip of forces he could not comprehend, let alone control. He was repulsed by what he had seen the girl do and yet he could not keep his eyes off her. In the stultifying heat of the afternoon, the three men were wearing as little as possible but Christine remained fully dressed, armored against Hood’s gaze, which seemed to her to be hotter than the wind.
At four they were off Rass al Kuh, a low, sandy point backed by depressing-looking mangroves and the helpless shrug of the Kuh i Mubarak rising three hundred feet behind. Jarshak Bay lay before them as the Iranian coast turned almost due east. “Helm alee,” called Weary and spun her onto the new tack. Sailing upwind like this, he preferred to keep the con himself. The configuration of the sails moved smoothly as the computer followed his orders. The foresail and main thundered onto new curves as the blade of the mast swung round on the joint at its foot, and everything clicked into place. Katapult leaned the opposite way. The coastline, dead ahead, wheeled majestically and began to fall away behind. At once they were back among the tankers and as they gathered speed down the new leg, so one of the monsters gathered itself out of the wind haze and began to ooze across their bows. Weary narrowed his eyes, judging the convergence of their courses, not wishing to let her head fall off even by as little as a point toward the north. Quite the reverse, in fact. So they clawed across and up the wind, pulling over fifteen knots, directly toward that black iron wall nearly a quarter of a mile long, low and formidable in the water ahead of them.
The tanker was fully laden and sat nearly twenty feet lower in the water than the empty Prometheus. Her decks were less than twenty feet above the sluggish water, therefore. Katapult’s damaged mast would be level with the rust-yellowed bridge-wings when they got close enough. Nor would they have to wait long before measuring the comparison. Weary, still in the midst of calculation, brought her head up one more degree to the south, putting more speed on her but bringing her course dangerously convergent with the tanker’s. The rest of them gathered automatically to windward. Katapult had no trapezes, indeed her whole design was calculated to minimize the need for acrobatics from the crew—but her weather outrigger showed alarming signs of lifting out of the water, so it was natural that they should try to lend support. Christine, indeed, every bit as intrepid a sailor as her friend Robin Heritage, jumped out onto the outrigger itself. There she stood, holding on to the singing shroud while her father surreptitiously strengthened his hold upon her lifeline. The steady pressure of the gale whipped her hair loose from its ponytail. It tugged at her shirt, ballooning it one minute, molding it to her torso the next. The calculated danger excited her, taking her mind off Hood for a moment.
The supertanker’s massive hull was moving south past their course incredibly slowly while at the same time closing with them dangerously fast. Chris watched it dreamily, her mind lazily echoing the calculations Weary had already made. Most of her consciousness, however, was simply overwhelmed by the sensation of speed derived from being up here, reading the strain of Katapult’s movement through the wide-spread soles of her feet and the vibrato of the shroud in her hand. In spite of the fact that Katapult was nowhere near full speed, the tension formed between herself and the conflicting forces around her gave Chris the most exhilarating sensation she had ever experienced.
The raucous bellowing of the men’s voices spoiled it. Her eyes sprang open to discover the rear of the tanker’s bridge-wing sweeping by. Weary had judged the line to a nicety, but at the cost of bringing them almost within touching distance of the tanker’s stern. And it seemed that all the crew were there, pressed up against the after-railings, leaning over, many with binoculars, looking at Christine’s erect, romantic, eminently feminine figure. Yelling incomprehensible but clearly pointed messages to her.
It was too much. The weight of her memory crashed back down upon her and she reacted, as she had trained herself to do, with anger. With a rage as powerful as the sensation they had just defiled. “Bastards!” she yelled up at them. She leaped easily inboard, her hands busy with her lifeline. As she tore it off, she found herself confronted by Hood, his hand half extended to steady her. “Don’t you touch me!” she spat, far beyond rational control. “Don’t you even look at me again.” The strength of the emotion on her face made that gentle man fall back, and she was gone, pushing past him, down the companionway.
“What’ve you done to her?” bellowed Martyr, replacing his daughter, dangerously close to Hood.
“Nothing!” But somehow the word didn’t seem true even as he said it. What he had seen made him feel guilty and that guilt colored the denial, making it a lie.
Without another word, C. J. Martyr reached for him. The huge New Englander would have taken him by the collar but neither man was wearing a shirt so he took him by the throat instead. Hood hesitated for a split second, tricked by the possibility that the old man had a right. What they had been through probably gave the Martyrs the right to punch the lights out of one guy in every five. But not him, he re
alized at last. Not Sam Hood. He brought his hands up between Martyr’s forearms, knocking them aside. The gesture of resistance, slight though it was, drove Martyr wild. He hurled himself forward.
The whole sequence of events from the moment Martyr first attacked had taken up scant seconds. Sam was preoccupied by his part in the action. Weary, caught off guard by the whole matter, was still trying to balance what was happening in the cockpit with what was happening to Katapult as a whole. And the latter still demanded his attention, for the multihull was creaming at eighteen knots straight under the massive stern of the tanker, less than fifty feet from the churning maelstrom above its single screw. But then rational thought stopped altogether as the forces that controlled them all took over.
Just as they hit the first high swell of the tanker’s wake, newborn in that restless cavern below her overhanging counter, the twisting bodies of Hood and Martyr hit Doc and knocked him across the cockpit. As he fell, he tried to keep hold of the wheel and so he tumbled awkwardly and struck his massive head upon a stanchion. He fell back into the cockpit beside the two writhing bodies, rolled over, and lay still.
Katapult pirouetted madly out of control. She spun into the tanker’s wake, outriggers threatening to tear themselves out of the water. The blade of the mainsail swung this way and that, threatening to rip its boom out of the mast. And, with a sound like a whiplash, the foresail tore free and flew overboard until brought up short by the last ten feet still firmly attached to the far end of the forward telescopic boom. The whole mast shivered to come down and only the steel shrouds held it together.
The bulk of the tanker, less than forty feet away now, began to suck at the helpless craft. It had created a vacuum in both wind and water because of its massiveness, and already Katapult was slewing over toward the suction of the thrashing propeller blade, preceded by the billowing dacron of the foresail. In all too few mo- ments, it seemed, first the sail and then the craft herself would be sucked in and pulled under and chopped to bits.