Buried At Sea (3 page)

"No."

The electric panel had a triple array of switches. Running lights, work lights, interior lights, stereo, TV, VCR, microwave, washing machine, three radios, sat phone, electronic autopilot, water pumps, bilge pumps, fire pump, fuel pump, electric windlass, freezer, global positioning system, computer, radar. As Jim groped for the right one, Will reached past him and flicked a toggle marked "Master Switch." The cabin went dark.

"You're out of your element, Jim."

"Will?"

"Trust me on this."

"

"What?"

"If the ship is hunting us—"

"If?"

"If it is hunting us," Jim asked, "why doesn't it see us on its radar?"

"It can't."

"Why not?"

"We're invisible," said Will, and again Jim felt fear. Not only was he trapped aboard a boat he couldn't sail, he was trapped with a crazy man who had already threatened to kill him in his sleep.

"Oh, Will. Come on."

Will Spark laughed and slapped Jim's shoulder. Jim recoiled. Will laughed again and turned the lights back on.

"Relax, kid. I'm not crazy. What I mean is, we are invisible to radar. Mostly. Because we present a very small signature. There's not much on the boat to return a strong echo. Her hull's fiberglass, her spars are carbon fiber, the wheel's

wood. Soon as we lowered the bikes into the cockpit, about the only steel above the waterline was her winches.

"The only way those bastards can see us is to eyeball us—that's why I struck the sails. Our hull lies too low on the water to be seen from any distance, but the sails stand out like a bull's-eye. . . . Any more questions?"

Jim shook his head. He didn't believe Will, but even if Will had lost his mind, this was his scene, his turf, and he had an endless store of answers to fit every doubt Jim raised. Another thing was clear: Will Spark wasn't so scared anymore. He wore the content expression of a man at peace with a big decision. Back in charge, the rich guy on his yacht. Unlike his clueless deckhand, caught like a bug swirling down a drain.

"Would you feel better," Will asked gently, "if you e-mailed Shannon? Tell her you'll be a little late, not to worry. Tell her we got shoved east by heavy weather and the boat's beat up, so we're heading into the Cape Verde Islands for repairs!'

"She'll know it's a lie. She's following the weather on the Internet. Why don't I just tell her you freaked out when you saw a ship and you're acting crazy?"

"Tell her what you want, just don't mention Nigeria in case they're breaking into our email." Jim looked at him in disbelief.

"You never heard of a computer program called Carnivore?" Will asked.

"But the FBI uses Carnivore to scan e-mail. Not some—wait a minute, please don't tell me 'they' are the FBI."

"I'll tell you this, sonny: when these folks go head-tohead with the FBI, the FBI blinks!" Jim gave up. What could he say about demons with a longer reach than the FBI's?

Will said, "I'll flashmail it along with my stuff?'

Will's ThinkPad was connected to a satellite transceiver antenna attached to the stem rail. If the boat wasn't rocking too hard to beam up, the communications satellite above the equator relayed their messages to ground teleports that were telephone-wired into the Internet.

But it wasn't private, because to send flashmail on Will's system, Jim had to log on as Will. For total privacy, he had to go on-line using the SSB radio, which didn't always work.

Guess what? I'm going to be away a little longer than we thought. Will's changing course, but I'll get home as soon as I can. I'm really sorry. I miss you. He promises it won't take us much longer. I didn't get much say in this. Sorry. Wait a minute, Jim thought. What the fuck am I doing? She doesn't care if I'm gone another month.

The boat rolled abysmally and the air was close belowdecks. He felt the seasickness coming back, licking tentatively at his throat. A cloying mix of diesel exhaust and fiberglass gel coat clogged his mouth and nose.

He punched Delete and wrote,

I'm going to be away longer than I thought. Will's changing course. Looks like my big adventure's getting bigger. Love,

Jim

then fled for fresh air in the cockpit.

When it was fully dark, they raised the sails, which steadied the boat considerably. The wind and the weight of the lead keel, Will explained, counteracted the wave action simultaneously from top and bottom. "As if you extended your arms on a balance bar." He studied the horizon behind them with his night glasses. Then he went below to cook dinner. Jim continued his watch in the cockpit, which for him meant keeping his eyes open and calling Will if he was in doubt about anything.

Will kept the diesel running for the hot water, the freezer, and the electricity to thaw the lamb in the microwave, and he

left it running until he had established contact with the Inmarsat satellite and flashmailed Jim's message to Shannon.

At their next watch change, midnight, Will noted their miles run with satisfaction, made some minor adjustments to the sails, and again swept the blackness astern with the night glasses. "We're doing pretty good."

He cast an eye skyward, where the stars shone weakly through the haze, then took the wheel, overriding the auto-helm. "I'll see if I can get some more miles under the keel. Just pray we don't lose the wind."

That didn't seem likely to Jim. The northeast trade wind had been blowing like a machine for two weeks straight since the storm off Barbados.

"Better catch some sleep, Jim. See you at oh-threehundred." They were standing watches: three hours on, three hours off. It was good manners, Will had explained, to arrive on deck five minutes before your time, ready to go. Jim set his wrist alarm for ten to three, then lay awake listening to the water rub past the hull a couple of inches from his face.

Suddenly, Will was shaking him awake. He handed Jim a mug of coffee. He'd slept through his alarm.

"Sorry," mumbled Jim. He struggled into his running shoes and followed Will up the companionway. Blearily, he repeated their compass course. The clouds had peeled back, revealing thousands of stars so bright that Jim could see the sea's rolling surface by their light.

Will suggested that he shut off the auto-helm and practice his steering. He showed him a star to steer by. "It's good for fifteen minutes, then find yourself another. When in doubt look over your shoulder. See those three? Orion's belt. It's settling toward the west; just keep it right behind you. But as soon as you get tired, put her back on the auto-helm; we don't want to lose any time. I'm going to get some shuteye." He started to go below. " Oh, by the way, Shannon

wrote back. I left it on the screen. You can read it after your watch."

"What did she say?'

"It doesn't sound to me like an extra month'll hurt. Quote: 'Adventures should not run on schedule. Have a ball.' End quote."

It sounded to Jim like she didn't care, and he felt, anew, the sting of rejection. Have a nice time; give me a ring when you get back?

"Shannon wanted me to do this trip," he blurted. "why?"

"She's done a lot of exciting things in her life. She used to be very adventurous. Much more than I am. I think she's trying to save me from feeling trapped or regretful about being tied down—in the future."

"Why do I get the impression that Shannon does the thinking for both of you?"

"No, Hiked the idea. I just probably wouldn't have come if she hadn't pushed me. She found subs to cover my classes, reserved my plane ticket."

If he allowed himself to get really paranoid he would think she had seized on the voyage as an opportunity to start easing him out of her life even before he asked her to many him. . . . No. . . . She had seemed genuinely surprised. By the time he proposed, he had already accepted Will's invitation and even had his plane ticket. . . . Funny thought: Had he proposed marriage partly out of fear of going away?

"She bought me that awesome Helly Hansen foul-weather gear." Will put on his "me hearties" voice: "Aye, ya looked ready for Cape Horn, matey." Jim couldn't help but laugh.

"Her parents chipped in—hoping I'd just keep sailing around the world?'

"Could it be the lass herself who paid you off, matey?" "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Not her parents?'

"She did not pay me to go away," Jim shot back. "Don't you get it? She's giving me an out."

"What kind of out?"

"Time to reflect on whether I really want to marry her." Or, he wondered silently, time to get over her.

"Why wouldn't you?"

"None of your damned business."

"Sorry. I'm a nosy old coot. It just seems there's a mystery about you two I don't understand." Will started down the companionway again, adding, darkly, "Remember what I told you: if you write her back, leave out our course and position."

"I'm not going to write her back."

The first two hours of the three-to-six watch were the longest of the night. Even the heavens seemed to wheel more slowly. The constellations lagged in their tracks and the Milky Way lay across the stars still as a frozen river. It was a time for the mind to swarm with doubts, confusion, and fear. A time to dwell on Will's crazy actions and his intrusive questions.

Shannon wanted him to have an adventure? Well, she'd succeeded in spades. His ticket home was freaking out and he was well and truly fucked until he figured a way out of this mess. Which allowed Jim even more time to think the unthinkable: Was this whole voyage truly his escape, his chance to opt out of a stunted life with someone he hap-pened to love?

He had promised to think about what it would mean to be married to her. "Really think, Jim," were her parting words. "I don't want to be your job. And I don't want a man who thinks he doesn't deserve more than a wounded bird."

He had printed her last e-mail before erasing it from Will's files. He unfolded the paper and read it by the rose glow of the compass, though he knew it by heart. Your mom drove your dad nuts. And your dad just took it. Sometimes kids from unhappy homes are obsessed to make a better family. I wonder if that's part of what's driving you to marry me. And I wonder if a boy who struggled to make his unhappy mom happy will go way too far trying to make every girl he meets happy. So 1 ask you again: You've worked very

hard to make a beautiful body. Why shouldn't you demand the same from your wife?

*I can't walk.*Remember?*I am crippled.*

Love.

Shannon

She loved driving people nuts by insisting on the word crippled. Handicapped didn't do justice to how thoroughly you could shatter bones by skiing into solid steel at fifty miles an hour. After six operations and a year of therapy she could stand, briefly, with crutches. "Golfers," she said, "have handicaps; cripples have multiple compound fractures."

Crippled was a much better way to describe the young woman whose family had hired him to work up an exercise routine to get the rest of her body back into healthy shape. Holed up in her bedroom, hooked on painkillers and weeping with despair, she had rejected every physical therapist they engaged.

Jim knew that he couldn't take much credit for slipping under her radar. The fact was that they had just plain liked each other from the very first day. And to Jim, at least, that friendship seemed to have grown into a firm basis for a marriage. A thin, pale line began to form where the eastern sky met the sea. The stars faded quickly. Will came up, coffee mug in hand, eyes on the sails, at five minutes before six. He was humming a tune, which Jim took as a sign that the old man was over his fright and felt back on top. He hummed when he felt happy, and when he was really pumped, he sang out loud.

Jim went below to delete Shannon's e-mail. Up in the cockpit, Will broke into a blues song, rasping the verse with a high-pitched nasal twang:

"Standin' on the corner; I didn't mean no harm. Along came a po-lice, Took me by the arm"

SOARING ON TWIN hulls like a gigantic manta ray, the fast ferry Barcelona raced through the thirteenth hour of her ever-expanding pattern search even as the sun rose on vast and empty waters.

The huge catamaran—built for high-speed blue water crossings—was manned by an Australian delivery crew, most of whom were shipyard mechanics tending the four brand-new Caterpillar turbo-charged diesels that hurled her along at eighty miles an hour. Trailing wings of mist and spray, she whipped back and forth across a hundred square miles of ocean.

The Barcelona's glassed-in bridge sat high above the main passenger cabin, which spanned her widely separated hulls. Her pilot station resembled an airbus flight deck, with digital readouts and flat-screen monitors relaying information from the engines, trim monitors, and navigational instruments.

Big windows offered a bird's-eye view of the sea and there was ample room for the Barcelona's Australian delivery captain, his first officer, and the helmsman, as well as the American who had chartered her and his bodyguards. Three big blokes—quiet as mountain shadows—two white, one

black. Ex–U.S. Navy SEALs, the Barcelona's captain guessed, judging by their swimmers' shoulders and barrel chests.

"Mr. Nickels," the captain said, "we're running out of time." At well under six feet, Nickels was not as tall as his bodyguards, but as lean in the gut and big in the shoulders, and immensely powerful. The captain rated him Special Forces, what with the buzz cut, the high-top black Adidas, and the anvil build. His men looked the sort you might have a pint with, but there was a cold, bloodless emptiness in Nickels'

s eyes that warned he was one vicious piece of work.

It had been a long, long night and the captain, a hard-bitten, hard-drinking former salvage master, was fed up. What had looked like easy money back at the Panama Canal had turned into a royal pain in the butt.

"I said we're running out of time, Mr. Nickels."

The near silence on the bridge was broken only by the distant whine of the engines and the maddening on-again, off-again ping of the elusive homing signal. Finally, Andy Nickels looked up from the receiver and said to the Australian, "Shut your fucking mouth."