Buried At Sea (44 page)

Peter, like Cordi, agreed to payment in half-ounce gold Krugerrands. And like Cordi, he kept a wary eye on the sky. "We've got a blow coming. Best clear off," he told Jim quietly, making sure "the ladies" didn't hear. "Get far offshore. Immediately."

"I want to head north."

"Not on your life. You'll end up on the rocks."

"I came down the coast last night."

Peter paused in his pumping to say, dryly, "I wouldn't press my luck twice."

"You really don't think there's time to sail north?"

The young Falklander spoke kindly, but firmly, as if to a child wandering in traffic. "If it were me, I would sail south for deep water—past the two-hundred-meter line—then run east before the wind. Only don't go too far south or you'll find yourself on the bloody Burdwood Bank."

The Burdwood Bank was marked clearly on the chart, a two-hundred-mile-long, sixtymile-wide patch less than a hundred meters deep. It didn't take an old salt or an islander to picture the effect of storm-driven Cape Horn seas rolling over its shallow waters. But Peter cautioned anyway, "It will not be pretty."

Jim had never seen anything like the seas piled up by the low-pressure systems sweeping in from Cape Horn. The first, which struck with darkness falling when they were only ten miles south of West Falkland, had been a wake-up call, a blunt warning of what to expect from the west. But round two, roaring in less than six hours later in the dark of the night, convinced him that in the nearly four months and six thousand miles he had sailed since he first joined Hustle off Barbados, sailing to Africa and back across to South America, he had never really seen the sea at work.

They had just crossed the two-hundred-meter line into deep water. Hustle, reaching with only her storm sail set, was making three and four knots. In another hour, when they were well clear of the Falklands' shelf, Jim planned to run east. But the second storm obliterated the luxury of choosing when to alter course. The boat was going east whether he liked it or not, steamrollered sideways by the waves or running with them, take his pick. Then something started banging up at the bow, shaking the hull, and he made the mistake of switching on the work lights to see what was wrong.

Hustle was at that instant perched on the crest of a wave and the powerful work lights gave Jim a frightening view of swiftly moving mountains of white water. They couldn't be taller than the mast, he told himself, but they looked as if they were. Taller than the boat, and moving twice as fast.

The crest whipped out from under Hustle and as it raced ahead, the sloop descended into a deep trough. It was a long ride down, but suddenly they were at the bottom of the pit, rolling wildly. The down-pointing work lights shot nearly horizontal for an instant and in their shuddering beams Jim glimpsed the next wave. If he allowed himself to watch it come, he would freeze.

He clipped his harness to the jackline and sprinted forward, hunting for the cause of the banging. The whisker pole, the light aluminum spar Will had last used to pole out a headsail when they were cruising downwind in the trades, had broken loose from its deck mounts. Held at one end by a safety tether, it had fallen over and was being dragged alongside the hull. Jim reached for it, hauled it aboard, and was just finishing tying it down then he sensed an ominous rush.

The wave had caught up. A white slab of water was erupting behind the boat, taller than a truck. He threw his arms around the mast, held on with all his strength, and prayed the wave wouldn't tear him loose and rip him into the sea. But Hustle climbed it. She attained the crest, surfed ahead for an exhilarating rush, then started sliding down the back as the wave raced on.

He saw that there was order out here when the wind was steady and the water deep; the seas were advancing as implacably as an army marched, but they marched in harmony, and he could deal with a predictable pattern. So too, he discovered, could the auto-helm. Will had shown him a trick while they were running in big trade-wind seas off Ascension Island that were nowhere the size of these, but the principle might hold. He set the autohelm to take the waves at a slight angle to the stem. The big rollers overtook the boat, gave her a boost, and raced on. Assured that Hustle, briefly unattended, would climb their breasts, surf their tops, and descend their backs, he opened the hatch while crossing quiet water between them and jumped below.

"It is wild out there."

Shannon was wedged into the port pilot berth. She waved one of Will's widemouthed plastic thermoses. "Hot canned stew. Not as bad as the label sounds." Jim looked at the knot meter while he stepped out of his boots. Riding the wave tops, Hustle was hitting nine knots. He hung his wet gear by the companionway and crawled in beside her.

Shannon gave him a spoon and unscrewed the lid. "I just checked the GPS. You put us right down the slot between the Falklands and Burdwood Bank."

"Let's hope we can stay in it. Oh, this is delicious. Did you have some?"

"Plenty."

"Wait till you see these seas. You won't believe them." "What was that banging?" He told her and finished eating, then slept in her arms for ten minutes. "Okay, I'm outta here."

"Don't forget your harness."

"Yes, Mother."

When he popped his head out of the hatch he caught a faceful of snow. But the boat was on course, surfing along the tops of the waves, falling behind as they sped on, slowing in the troughs where the high seas hampered the wind, rocketing up again, and surfing ahead. He checked that the storm sail was secure and made sure that nothing else had broken loose. Rest when you can, Will had taught him, so he went below. They ran with the storm the full length of the Falklands' south coast, covering a hundred miles by dawn and forty more by noon. The wind had backed north in the night and driven them much closer to the Burdwood Bank shallows than Jim had intended. The depth finder still read a reassuring thousand meters of deep water under the keel, however, and the wind was veering west again.

But it was veering fitfully, battering them with crosswinds. And it blew harder. Hustle responded with surges of ten and twelve knots on the crests. Even deep in the troughs she was sprinting seven and eight. His fear of being blown onto the shallows gave way to the immediate concern of maintaining control.

"We're starting to go too fast."

"She feels funny," Shannon agreed. "Like she's going to suddenly spin out—except everyone I've read warns don't go slow in a following sea." Another crosswind struck her.

"We're heeling too hard. The rudder's losing its grip." He went out to douse the storm sail, an operation that looked like it would be a real bear because the wind had filled it as tight as sheet metal. There was no way he wanted to turn the boat around to ease the pressure on the sail. By the time he got it down he'd be wallowing helplessly in front of waves that reared as high as the first spreader.

Should he motor around? But Hustle was a pig under power. Even Will couldn't make her dance for him with only the engine. Jim looked back, deep down into the next trough, and lost his taste for trying it with the motor.

Should he let the sheets fly and try to muscle the sail down? It wasn't that big, not much bigger than a cloth for a dining room table—but it was built of a heavyweight Dacron/Kevlar mix. Flapping in fifty knots of wind, the loose sail would pack an awful punch.

He had to do something. Quickly. The boat felt as skittish as a rubber dinghy. If she broached—suddenly turned sideways to the rollers—a breaking sea would bury her. Jim started the engine and watched carefully as they ran along in the trough, rehearsing a safe turn through the peaks and valleys. A shaggy comber overtook them. He had a bad feeling that he was about to make an amateur's fatal error.

Hustle soared up the comber and hovered along its top. Jim looked back at the next trough.

The afternoon light was strong. The sky was blueing through wind-tattered clouds. Piercing the shredded scrim that remained, a thin, wintery sun lit miles and miles of desolation. Somewhere in their wake lay the Falkland Islands. Far to the south was Antarctica. Ahead, where a dimness in the east presaged the end of the short day, the ocean stretched across the planet, empty all the way to South Africa. But as Hustle lingered high on the crest of the comber and Jim looked back into seas roaring out of the west, he was amazed to see another boat.

JOYSTICKS STEERING STATIONS were set aft on

each hull, behind nacelles that sheltered the knot counters and wind instruments and the hatchways to the narrow spaces below. Val McVay was steering from the port station, constantly moving her head to keep one eye on the following seas, the other on the sixteen-story mast.

She and Greg and Pete and Joe were sharing tricks at the helm, an hour on and three off to keep their concentration. It was focus or die. The sea was an obstacle course of evermoving hills and valleys. Wind shifts north and back to west were kicking up confusing cross seas. Abysses erupted in jagged peaks. Peaks dissolved suddenly into abysses. The hydraulic assists required to steer the monster at twenty knots through heavy seas absorbed some of the underwater forces that battered the massive rudders. But even through her gloves Val could feel the helm vibrating like a tuning fork. Still and all, JoyStick felt remarkably stable—an ocean straddler with the light, sure stance of a water spider. Steady, Val McVay corrected herself. The huge twin-hull sailboat felt steady—flat-riding and fairly smooth—but it was not stable, as several hairy near broaches in the night had demonstrated. Her sixty-foot beam prevented her from heeling steeply under sail. But she had pitched forward twice since they'd gone screaming out of Tierra del Fuego, simultaneously burying her knife-thin bows under tons of seawater while flinging her rudders uselessly in the air.

So far Val had been able to maneuver out of the nosedives, despite the long years since she had sailed competitively. Racing cats were much bigger now. JoyStick's 110-foot length made her more seaworthy than the eighty-footers she had raced. But it was only a matter of time before the cat stuffed a bow while one of the guys was at the helm. And with the exception of their team leader, Greg, the former SEALs were good sailors, but they had little experience on cats. So Val had had no choice but to slow the monster down by heading upwind on the crests to take the wind and waves on the diagonal. Andy Nickels complained about the slower speed. She took 'him below and showed him the escape hatch. "What the hell is this?"

"An escape hatch."

"In the bottom of the boat?"

"So you can climb back in when the boat flips upside down."

"How do you right it?"

"With a crane." That shut Andy up for a while.

Val gave her crew high marks for keeping busy. When they weren't sailing the boat, they were fixing something, and when they weren't fixing something, they were cleaning their weapons. In between watches and chores, they slept like wolves digesting their last kill. This was especially important because they were shorthanded. Ideally she'd race JoyStick with a crew of eight or ten. They were five, if she counted Andy, who was no sailor. But Will Spark was shorthanded, too. Nor was this race destined to last long. The satellites were homing in on him. And her boat could sail three times as fast as his. Andy Nickels had risen somewhat in her estimation, despite his irritating habit of questioning her orders. For one thing, he was toughing out seasickness better than anyone she had ever sailed with. Enduring it was never a case of mind over matter but rather separating mind from matter—mind over discomfort. And he had quickly learned to puke downwind.

"Drink water," she reminded him. "You'll dehydrate." He plunged below and returned with a bottle, his face green, his eyes like ice. Remote, yet aware—a born leader—the former Ranger kept a close watch on his men but displayed no interest in the boat other than as a means to catching Will Spark. Whereas Greg was in his element—a born seaman. At daybreak, he had climbed the mast, which was raked like a black-diamond ski slope, and was scoping the sea from the top spreader, 150 feet above the deck.

Greg's "boys," the mountainous Pete and Joe, followed orders to the letter and concentrated on learning their tasks. Out here, success and survival were dependent on an ability to function at a professional level despite the cold and wet, which was precisely what the navy had trained them to do.

They were fearless. Thirty-foot rogue waves were met with grunts of "Whoa" and "Cool!

" and the sudden burying of a bow with "Awesome." Heart-stopping was more accurate, Val thought. JoyStick had been designed to withstand the stresses of Southern Ocean racing. But the engineer in her said that Concorde had been designed to withstand the stresses of supersonic flight only to crash and burn on a blown tire. JoyStick's Achilles' heel was in her bows—too short and narrow, they lacked buoyancy.

Ten minutes before Val's watch was up; Pete emerged from the starboard nacelle, sixty feet away, and crossed the springy net that connected the hulls, bouncing like a moonwalking astronaut.

"We reduced sail again," she told him. "We'll take in more if she goes any faster. Just keep watching her nose. The cross seas are getting hairy."

She surrendered the wheel in stages, letting him get used

to it, and showed him the course and their position relative to a computer-projected fix on Hustle.

From high atop the mast, Greg spoke in Val's radio headset. "Can you bear right five degrees, ma'am? I think I see something."

Jim would never have seen the boat behind them at such a distance if it weren't black—

the one color that stood out in the swirls of gray cloud and white water. It was up on a wave top like his and for a long moment the two craft were the tallest objects on the rolling sea. It was about a dozen crests back—at five hundred feet between the waves, nearly a mile—and it caught the midday light as emphatically as if an uncharted rock had suddenly reared glistening from the depths.

Hustle slipped off the back of the roller and descended to the bottom of the trough, where the entire view was circumscribed by the swells.