by Tom Clancy
“Take the wheel,” he told Pam.
“But I don’t know what to do!”
“It’s all right. Just hold her steady and steer the way I tell you to. I have to go forward to set the anchors. ‘Kay?”
“You be careful!” she shouted over the gusting wind. The waves were about five feet now, and the bow of the boat was leaping up and down. Kelly gave her shoulder a squeeze and went forward.
He had to watch himself, of course, but his shoes had no-skid soles, and Kelly knew his business. He kept his hands on the grab rail all the way around the superstructure, and in a minute he was on the foredeck. Two anchors were clipped to the deck, a Danforth and a CQR plow-type, both slightly oversized. He tossed the Danforth over first, then signaled for Pam to ease the wheel to port. When the boat had moved perhaps fifty feet south, he dropped the CQR over the side as well. Both ropes were already set to the proper lengths, and after checking that all was secure, Kelly made his way back to the flying bridge.
Pam looked nervous until the moment that he sat back down on the vinyl bench—everything was covered with water now, and their clothes were soaked through. Kelly eased the throttles to idle, allowing the wind to push Springer back nearly a hundred feet. By that time both anchors had dug into the bottom. Kelly frowned at their placement. He ought to have set them farther apart. But only one anchor was really necessary. The second was just insurance. Satisfied, he switched off the diesels.
“I could fight the storm all the way down, but I’d prefer not to,” he explained.
“So we park here for the night?”
“That’s right. You can go down to your cabin and—”
“You want me to go away?”
“No—I mean, if you don’t like it here—” Her hand came up to his face. He barely caught her words through the wind and rain.
“I like it here.” Somehow it didn’t seem like a contradiction at all.
A moment later Kelly asked himself why it had taken so long. All the signals had been there. There was another brief discussion between emotion and reason, and reason lost again. There was nothing to be afraid of here, just a person as lonely as he. It was so easy to forget. Loneliness didn’t tell you what you had lost, only that something was missing. It took something like this to define that emptiness. Her skin was soft, dripping with rain, but warm. It was so different from the rented passion that he’d tried twice in the past month, each time coming away disgusted with himself.
But this was something else. This was real. Reason cried out one last time that it couldn’t be, that he’d picked her up at the side of the road and had known her for only a brief span of hours. Emotion said that it didn’t matter. As though observing the conflict in his mind, Pam pulled the halter over her head. Emotion won.
“They look just fine to me,” Kelly said. His hand moved to them, touching delicately. They felt just fine, too. Pam hung the halter on the steering wheel and pressed her face against his, her hands pulling him forward, taking charge in a very feminine way. Somehow her passion wasn’t animalistic. Something made it different. Kelly didn’t know what it was, but didn’t search for the reason, not now.
Both rose to their feet. Pam nearly slipped, but Kelly caught her, dropping to his knees to help remove her shorts. Then it was her turn to unbutton his shirt after placing his hands on her breasts. His shirt remained in place for a long moment because neither wanted his hands to move, but then it was done, one arm at a time, and his jeans went next. Kelly slipped out of his shoes as the rest came off. Both stood for the next embrace, weaving as the boat pitched and rocked beneath them. the rain and wind pelting them. Pam took his hand and led him just aft of the driver’s console, guiding him down to a supine position on the deck. She mounted him at once. Kelly tried to sit up. but she didn’t let him, instead leaning forward while her hips moved with gentle violence. Kelly was as unready for that as he’d been for everything else this afternoon, and his shout seemed to outscream the thunder. When his eyes opened, her face was inches from him, and the smile was like that on a stone angel in a church.
“I’m sorry, Pam, I—”
She stopped his apology with a giggle. “Are you always this good?”
Long minutes later, Kelly’s arms were wrapped around her thin form, and so they stayed until the storm passed. Kelly was afraid to let go, afraid of the possibility that this was as unreal as it had to be. Then the wind acquired a chill, and they went below. Kelly got some towels and they dried each other off. He tried to smile at her, but the hurt was back, all the more powerful from the joy of the previous hour, and it was Pam’s turn to be surprised. She sat beside him on the deck of the salon, and when she pulled his face down to her chest, he was the one who wept, until her chest was wet again. She didn’t ask. She was smart enough for that. Instead she held him tightly until he was done and his breathing came back to normal.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a while. Kelly tried to move but she wouldn’t let him.
“You don’t have to explain. But I’d like to help,” she said, knowing that she already had. She’d seen it from almost the first moment in the car: a strong man, badly hurt. So different from the others she had known. When he finally spoke, she could feel his words on her breast.
“It’s been nearly seven months. Down in Mississippi on a job. She was pregnant, we just found out. She went to the store, and—it was a truck, a big tractor-trailer rig. The linkage broke.” He couldn’t make himself say more, and he didn’t have to.
“What was her name?”
“Tish—Patricia.”
“How long were you—”
“Year and a half. Then she was just . . . gone. I never expected it. I mean, I put my time in, did some dangerous stuff, but that’s all over, and that was me. not her. I never thought—” His voice cracked again. Pam looked down at him in the muted light of the salon, seeing the scars she’d missed before and wondering what their story was. It didn’t matter. She brought her cheek down to the top of his head. He should have been a father right about now. Should have been a lot of things.
“You never let it out, did you?”
“No.”
“And why now?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered.
“Thank you.” Kelly looked up in surprise. “That’s the nicest thing a man has ever done to me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes. you do,” Pam replied. “And Tish understands, too. You let me take her place. Or maybe she did. She loved you, John. She must have loved you a lot. And she still does. Thank you for letting me help.”
He started crying again, and Pam brought his head back down, cradling him like a small child. It lasted ten minutes, though neither looked at a clock. When he was done, he kissed her in gratitude that rapidly turned to renewed passion. Pam lay back, letting him take charge as he needed to do now that he was again a man in spirit. Her reward was in keeping with the magnitude of what she had done for him, and this time it was her cries that canceled out the thunder. Later, he fell asleep at her side, and she kissed his unshaven cheek. That was when her own tears began at the wonder of what the day had brought after the terror with which it had begun.
2
Encounters
Kelly awoke at his accustomed time, thirty minutes before sunrise, to the mewing of gulls and saw the first dull glow on the eastern horizon. At first he was confused to find a slender arm across his chest, but other feelings and memories explained things in a few seconds. He extricated himself from her side and moved the blanket to cover her from the morning chill. It was time for ship’s business.
Kelly got the drip coffee machine going, then he pulled on a pair of swim trunks and headed topside. He hadn’t forgotten to set the anchor light, he was gratified to see. The sky had cleared off, and the air was cool after the thunderstorms of the previous night. He went forward and was surprised to see that one of his anchors had dragged somewhat. Kelly reproached himself for that, even though nothing had
actually gone wrong. The water was a flat, oily calm and the breeze gentle. The pink-orange glow of first light decorated the tree-spotted coastline to the east. All in all, it seemed as fine a morning as he could remember. Then he remembered that what had changed had nothing at all to do with the weather.
“Damn,” he whispered to the dawn not yet broken. Kelly was stiff, and did some stretching exercises to get the kinks out, slow to realize how fine he felt without the usual hangover. Slower still to recall how long it had been. Nine hours of sleep? he wondered. That much? No wonder he felt so good. The next part of the morning routine was to get a squeegee to dispose of the water that had pooled on the fiberglass deck.
His head turned at the low, muted rumble of marine diesels. Kelly looked west to spot it, but there was a little mist that way, being pushed his way by the breeze, and he couldn’t make anything out. He went to the control station on the flying bridge and got out his glasses, just in time to have a twelve-inch spotlight blaze through the marine 7 x 50s. Kelly was dazzled by the lights, which just as suddenly switched off, and a loud-hailer called across the water.
“Sorry, Kelly. Didn’t know it was you.” Two minutes later the familiar shape of a Coast Guard forty-one-foot patrol boat eased alongside Springer. Kelly scrambled along the portside to deploy his rubber fenders.
“You trying to kill me or something?” Kelly said in a conversational voice.
“Sorry.” Quartermaster First Class Manuel “Portagee” Oreza stepped from one gun’l to the other with practiced ease. He gestured to the fenders. “Wanna hurt my feelings?”
“Bad sea manners, too,” Kelly went on as he walked towards his visitor.
“I spoke to the young lad about that already,” Oreza assured him. He held out his hand. “Morning, Kelly.”
The outstretched hand had a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee. Kelly took it and laughed.
“Apology accepted, sir.” Oreza was famous for his coffee.
“Long night. We’re all tired, and it’s a young crew,” the coastguardsman explained wearily. Oreza was nearly twenty-eight himself, and by far the oldest man of his boat crew.
“Trouble?” Kelly asked.
Oreza nodded, looking around at the water. “Kinda. Some damned fool in a little day-sailer turned up missing after that little rainstorm we had last night, and we’ve been looking all over bejazzus for him.”
“Forty knots of wind. Fair blow, Portagee,” Kelly pointed out. “Came in right fast, too.”
“Yeah, well, we rescued six boats already, just this one still missing. You see anything unusual last night?”
“No. Came outa Baltimore around . . . oh, sixteen hundred, I suppose. Two and a half hours to get here. Anchored right after the storm hit. Visibility was pretty bad, didn’t see much of anything before we went below.”
“We,” Oreza observed, stretching. He walked over to the wheel, picked up the rain-soaked halter, and tossed it to Kelly. The look on his face was neutral, but there was interest behind the eyes. He hoped his friend had found someone. Life hadn’t been especially fair to the man.
Kelly handed the cup back with a similarly neutral expression.
“There was one freighter coming out behind us,” he went on. “Italian flag, container boat about half full, must have been knocking down fifteen knots. Anybody else clear the harbor?”
“Yeah.” Oreza nodded and spoke with professional irritation. “I’m worried about that. Fuckin’ merchies plowing out at full speed, not paying attention.”
“Well, hell, you stand outside the wheelhouse, you might get wet. Besides, sea-and-anchor detail might violate some union rule, right? Maybe your guy got run down,” Kelly noted darkly. It wouldn’t have been the first time, even on a body of water as civilized as the Chesapeake.
“Maybe,” Oreza said, surveying the horizon. He frowned, not believing the suggestion and too tired to hide it. “Anyway, you see a little day-sailer with an orange-and-white candystripe sail, you want to give me a call?”
“No problem.”
Oreza looked forward and turned back. “Two anchors for that little puff o’ wind we had? They’re not far enough apart. Thought you knew better.”
“Chief Bosun’s Mate,” Kelly reminded him. “Since when does a bookkeeper get that snotty with a real seaman?” It was only a joke. Kelly knew Portagee was the better man in a small boat. Though not by much of a margin, and both knew that, too.
Oreza grinned on his way back to the cutter. After jumping back aboard, he pointed to the halter in Kelly’s hand. “Don’t forget to put your shirt on, Boats! Looks like it oughta fit just fine.” A laughing Oreza disappeared inside the wheelhouse before Kelly could come up with a rejoinder. There appeared to be someone inside who was not in uniform, which surprised Kelly. A moment later, the cutter’s engines rumbled anew and the forty-one-boat moved northwest.
“Good mornin’.” It was Pam. “What was that?”
Kelly turned. She wasn’t wearing any more now than when he’d put the blanket on her, but Kelly instantly decided that the only time she’d surprise him again would be when she did something predictable. Her hair was a medusalike mass of tangles, and her eyes were unfocused, as though she’d not slept well at all.
“Coast Guard. They’re looking for a missing boat. How’d you sleep?”
“Just fine.” She came over to him. Her eyes had a soft, dreamlike quality that seemed strange so early in the morning, but could not have been more attractive to the wide-awake sailor.
“Good morning.” A kiss. A hug. Pam held her arms aloft and executed something like a pirouette. Kelly grabbed her slender waist and hoisted her aloft.
“What do you want for breakfast?” he asked.
“I don’t eat breakfast,” Pam replied, reaching down for him.
“Oh.” Kelly smiled. “Okay.”
She changed her mind about an hour later. Kelly fixed eggs and bacon on the galley stove, and Pam wolfed it down so speedily that he fixed seconds despite her protests. On further inspection, the girl wasn’t merely thin, some of her ribs were visible. She was undernourished, an observation that prompted yet another unasked question. But whatever the cause, he could remedy it. Once she’d consumed four eggs, eight slices of bacon, and five pieces of toast, roughly double Kelly’s normal morning intake, it was time for the day to begin property. He showed her how to work the galley appliances while he saw to recovering the anchors.
They got back under way just shy of a lazy eight o‘clock. It promised to be a hot, sunny Saturday. Kelly donned his sunglasses and relaxed in his chair, keeping himself alert with the odd sip from his mug. He maneuvered west, tracing down the edge of the main ship channel to avoid the hundreds of fishing boats he fully expected to sortie from their various harbors today in pursuit of rockfish.
“What are those things?” Pam asked, pointing to the floats decorating the water to port.
“Floats for crab pots. They’re really more like cages. Crabs get in and can’t get out. You leave floats so you know where they are.” Kelly handed Pam his glasses and pointed to a bay-build workboat about three miles to the east.
“They trap the poor things?” Kelly laughed.
“Pam, the bacon you had for breakfast? The hog didn’t commit suicide, did he?”
She gave him an impish look. “Well, no.”
“Don’t get too excited. A crab is just a big aquatic spider. even though it tastes good.”
Kelly altered course to starboard to clear a red nun-buoy.
“Seems kinda cruel, though.”
“Life can be that way,” Kelly said too quickly and then regretted it.
Pam’s response was as heartfelt as Kelly’s. “Yeah, I know.”
Kelly didn’t turn to look at her, only because he stopped himself. There’d been emotional content in her reply, something to remind him that she, too, had demons. The moment passed quickly, however. She leaned back into the capacious conning chair, leaning against him and making things right ag
ain. One last time Kelly’s senses warned him that something was not right at all. But there were no demons out here, were there?
“You’d better go below.”
“Why?”
“Sun’s going to be hot today. There’s some lotion in the medicine cabinet, main head.”
“Head?”
“Bathroom!”
“Why is everything different on a boat?”
Kelly laughed. “That’s so sailors can be the boss out here. Now, shoo! Go get that stuff and put a lot on or you’ll look like a french fry before lunch.”
Pam made a face. “I need a shower, too. Is that okay?”
“Good idea,” Kelly answered without looking. “No sense scaring the fish away.”
“You!” She swatted him on the arm and headed below.
“Vanished, just plain vanished,” Oreza growled. He was hunched over a chart table at the Thomas Point Coast Guard Station.
“We shoulda got some air cover, helicopter or something,” the civilian observed.
“Wouldn’t have mattered, not last night. Hell, the gulls rode that blow out.”
“But where’d he go?”
“Beats me, maybe the storm sank his ass.” Oreza glowered at the chart. “You said he was northbound. We covered all these ports and Max took the western shore. You sure the description of the boat was correct?”
“Sure? Hell, we did everything but buy the goddamned boat for ’em!” The civilian was as short-tempered as twenty-eight hours of caffeine-induced wakefulness could explain, even worse for having been ill on the patrol boat, much to the amusement of the enlisted crew. His stomach felt like it was coated with steel wool. “Maybe it did sink,” he concluded gruffly, not believing it for a moment.
“Wouldn’t that solve your problem?” His attempt at levity earned him a growl, and Quartermaster First Class Manuel Oreza caught a warning look from the Station commander, a gray-haired warrant officer named Paul English.