Buried At Sea (47 page)

Val McVay taught the boys to sleep with their feet forward in their bunks. JoyStick had been stuffing her bows regularly since they crossed the sixtieth parallel and if they slept head forward they would crack their skulls into the bulkhead when the sudden deaccelerations brought her from twenty knots to a dead stop.

They were driving the cat deep into the Drake Passage, guided—sporadically--by satellite data relayed by Lloyd McVay. Communications were not conducted seamlessly in the high latitudes as they shifted between low-orbit and polar platforms. JoyStick was pounded by the heavy seas. Gear was breaking down and Val had blown out two sails. Her crew fared better. Despite the misery, none seemed even close to beaten down by the cold and wet and the brutal wind.

Lloyd McVay sat-phoned with an update—yet another course change. He relayed some more grim weather data and had a quotation ready for the sound of the wind battering the phone in her hand.

" 'Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never remember to have heard.' " No surprise: he was throwing Lear at her. The young "king of years" was proving a wayward daughter. The rudders tugged hard. A deep trough yawned and JoyStick was suddenly bent on hurling herself into it.

"I can't talk now, Dad. Talk to Andy." She handed off the phone and gripped the helm.

"Yes, sir, Mr. McVay."

"Dammit, Andy, put my daughter on the phone." "She's steering, sir."

"You steer, put her on the phone."

"I can't, sir. It's too wild. She's the only one who can drive in this wind. Greg tried earlier. Almost killed us."

"You tell her for me, this is getting out of hand. Go on, tell her right this minute." Andy held the phone to the wind and said to Val, "You father says to tell you this is getting out of hand."

Val's dark eyes flicked once from the seas. "Deal with it." Andy said, "Hey, I can't blow him off."

She wrenched the helm to fling the cat through a soft spot in a dangerous crest, then glanced at Greg, who was poised at the mainsheet.

"Can you answer him?" she asked.

Greg saw a fierce challenge in her gaze and maybe an offer, maybe not. Whatever, he was thoroughly convinced that the A team was right here on this rocket ship and that nothing that happened anywhere else mattered at all.

He snatched the phone from Andy Nickels, said, "Val says everything is under control, Mr. McVay," and keyed End.

Andy's expression told Greg that from now on he had better watch his back. But before either man could speak there came a cry from the first spreader high above the deck. Joe was yelling, "I see them! I see them. Two miles off the starboard beam." The worst possible position. South of the boat. In the eye of the wind. Val threw the cat to the northeast, intending to race downwind several miles and then come about and attack on a broad reach. The wind had been boxing the compass all day and the seas were confused, so she was busy trying to keep JoyStick under control. When she finally got a moment to steal a look, she stared hard.

"Give me the glasses." Bracing the helm with her body, she peered through the binoculars. Then, unable to mask her disappointment, Val steered back onto the course the satellite data suggested.

Andy said, "Hey, where are you going?"

"It's an iceberg."

"It is not."

"It's an iceberg."

"Check it out. It's only a couple of miles."

"Icebergs are brilliant so they seem nearer. It looks like two miles, but it is at least ten miles away."

Greg switched on the radar. "Ten miles, on the nose."

Up on the spreader, Joe focused and refocused his binoculars, still not certain. The slab-sized tower of ice loomed as tall as a twenty-story hotel. Waves thundered against it, flinging spray on the boat. They were so close they could see rocks embedded in its blue-green side and feel internal explosions as huge chucks of ice broke loose and thumped into the sea.

All the while it was drifting down on them, riding a current that set opposite the wind, and Jim was busy with the throttle and helm, trying to hold Hustle off while sticking close enough to hide.

"They're turning east," said Shannon.

"Are you sure?"

Hustle edged around the iceberg, sheltering from view as the black boat faded over the horizon. Like a rodeo clown, Jim thought, keeping the barrel between him and the bull. It was their third close call in three days.

"Every time the sky clears," Shannon said, "can they see us from a satellite?" There was heavy cloud in the south. Jim headed south.

LOW. SLANTED SUNLIGHT lit a rugged mountain range where the wind had scoured the snow from the rock. Icebergs and islands deep in snow marched on the rim of the sea. An undulating field of pack ice was reaching out from the coast, moving with the wind. Had they escaped the black catamaran at last, only to be trapped at the bottom of the world?

Jim looked over his shoulder. Hustle was plodding warily under staysail and reefed main somewhere off the Antarctic Peninsula—a finger of the polar continent that pointed across the Drake Passage toward South America.

It was a disorienting, ever-shifting world of float ice, drifting packs, towering bergs and pressure ridges thrust up like Gothic castles. At the moment, the sky was crystal clear, the sea oddly calm. But the wind was rising as it seemed to whenever the Antarctic sky cleared. The barometer was falling. And the weather fax showed a blizzard pounding up from the South Pole.

He didn't believe that they had escaped. In his bones he felt that the McVays were still searching. It was as if he had developed an internal radar that sensed the catamaran. Twice

it had saved them, given them a jump on the pursuit. But now, two grim weeks and a thousand miles south of Cordi's snug farmhouse in the Falkland Islands, Hustle was running out of ocean.

They had no business being here. Hustle's fiberglass hull was no match for the rock-hard chunks of floating ice. Suddenly they were in the thick of it, the wind-driven ice reaching for the boat like tentacles. Drift pieces as big as Hondas floated low on the surface, forcing him and Shannon to stay up on deck, on constant lookout. They were called growlers—according to Will's "bible" Bowditch, which devoted eight pages to ice in the sea—for the growling noise they made bobbing up and down in the water. Some were transparent, some were green, some as black as the boat chasing them. Bowditch said that you could spot them with radar if the sea was smooth. But Will's warnings about radar were fresh in Jim's mind, and he was afraid the McVays would home in on the signal.

"The sailing couple I read about called ice 'moving rocks,' " said Shannon.

"What couple?"

"I told you. They wrote that wonderful book about how

they spent the whole winter in Antarctica on a boat."

"This isn't a book," Jim said more sharply than he had intended. "I mean—this is real. This is happening now. To us." "They were real people," said Shannon.

"The GPS says we're on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. I guess that's those mountains. But I've got no chart, so I don't know where the hell we really are. Or where to go next."

He took his eyes from the water for a moment to look at Shannon. Huddled in her windbreaker, with her watch cap pulled down over her brow and Will's scarf over her nose, all she revealed of her face were her eyes. Jim saw them suddenly, unexpectedly, and wholly uncharacteristically fill with tears.

"What's wrong? What did I say?" - "They were real," she sobbed. "And it seemed to me they loved each other."

"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I'm just so tired."

"I'm so cold."

"I'm sorry." He put his arm around her and looked over his shoulder again. A gust shook the sails. The wind was swinging due south and it felt suddenly twenty degrees colder.

"I better take another look."

He climbed the mast. Sure enough, the sea was getting smooth. The last time that had happened they found themselves downwind of drifting pack ice, running for their lives before it closed around them. There was a kind of creepy yellow light in the southwestern sky. Just like last time.

"Ice!" he called down to Shannon. "We're outta here!" Shannon jibed about and headed up the coast.

He started down the mast but paused partway. Something was changing. His tired brain wouldn't compute. He was back in the cockpit with Shannon before he realized that the mountains were disappearing from view. The dark rock looked soft. Snow. The blizzard—screaming in ahead of schedule. How were they supposed to dodge the ice pack, much less floating ice, in blinding snow?

He made a sound in his chest, part despairing grunt, part light-headed laughter. What the hell could happen next? "What?" asked Shannon.

"Will said to keep running even after Antarctica." "Where?"

"I don't know. The South Pole. Jesus, what a mess." "But what did he mean?" Shannon asked. "It doesn't sound like him to just say that."

And suddenly Jim realized why Will wanted him to flee. "Oh my God. We're running for him."

"What do you mean?"

"Will is using us."

"He's dead."

"But we're not running to save ourselves. He wanted me to keep Sentinel out of Lloyd McVay's hands—"

"That's what he said he wanted."

"No, no, no. He set us up to draw the McVays away from Sentinel. It isn't on the boat."

"Of course it isn't. It's in Will's head. At the bottom of the ocean, with the spinning bike."

"It's at the bottom of the ocean, all right. But not in Will's head. Will said it was in his head. Or he hinted it was in his head and I believed him, I fell for it. . . . The whole story was a setup to draw the McVays away from the real thing all along. He conned them. He conned me. He conned everybody with that tall tale about the microprocessor in his bloodstream. The Nickelses and the McVays fell for it. And I fell for it. Oh my God. I've finally figured him out."

"You're tired, Jim. You're not making sense."

"Yes I am! Will conned me into continuing the wild-goose chase. . . . I've finally figured him out. I finally understand

him. Remember what Cordi said? He changed. For the first time, he wanted money too much. He changed."

"She said that Will turned greedy as he got older. 'My charming rogue became a grasping scoundrel. . . . ' "

"He told me that for the first time in his life he had a shot at hitting a home run. That's what he called it. A home run. For the first time Will Spark wanted the prize more than he wanted to play the game."

"What are you saying?"

"Will Spark was so desperate for one last big win—his home run—that he kept the microprocessor for himself. He hoped to escape the McVays and still cash in. But when I spotted their ship at the equator he panicked. So he 'deep-sixed' it along with my heartrate monitor. Do you know what 'deep-six' means?"

"Throw overboard. So?"

"Just like he deep-sixed the money he hid from the FBI." "Are you saying Will threw Sentinel overboard in the middle of the ocean?"

"Yes! I was so distracted worrying about my heart-rate monitor, I didn't register at the time that Will threw two things overboard. My monitor in a plastic bag and a second item—a waterproof container holding the microprocessor. Something heavy. That's what splashed."

"What splash?"

"I heard a splash. I didn't think about it then, but the plastic bag wouldn't splash. He threw the microprocessor overboard at the same time—I'll show you—take the helm."

Jim dove below and checked Will's entry in Hustle's log for the day they spotted the ship hunting for them near the Saint Paul's Rocks and checked the chart. Sure enough, Will had noted the sighting of the ferry. He had determined their exact position by GPS. Jim returned to the cockpit in a daze. Snow was flurrying around the boat, which was picking up speed as the gusts grew stronger.

"What?" asked Shannon.

"He meant to go back."

"Where?"

"Back to where he threw it overboard. I just looked at the chart. All you have to do is punch in the coordinates and follow the GPS back to that spot. Just like when the FBI caught him. He deep-sixed his money and dove for it when he got out of jail."

"But the ocean must be miles deep."

"That's what I thought, but it's actually less than a mile deep where he dropped it. There's a kind of shelf that the Saint Paul's Rocks are on. His home run is waiting there. I'll bet you anything that right until the second he died he thought he would still somehow manage to sail back there."

"And then what? Scuba dive a mile deep? No way, Jim. Impos sible."

"Yeah . . . impossible. No one could scuba dive a mile deep. So he must have had another plan—some way to make Sentinel float to the surface."

"How would he activate it?"

Jim looked to the north as if his eye would magically leap a thousand miles from the square-edged polar ice castles to the hot pearly sky and undulating contours of the equatorial ocean. What he saw instead was the black catamaran looming out of the wind-driven snow.

IF JIM WERE anywhere else on the planet, he would head south, pinching tight to the wind, and disappear into the snow before the cat maneuvered into a downwind position. But south was the one direction in which he could no longer go, unless he wanted to crash into the ice pack and run ashore over the floes, like a latter-day Eliza, leaping open water and climbing pressure ridges with Shannon in his arms. But "ashore" was no promised land, only a deep freeze where they wouldn't survive a single night. The huge cat was racing east to west on a broad reach. Zigzagging. He studied it with the binoculars, puzzled. It must be doing thirty knots, he thought, trailing spray and mist as it hurled port and starboard in lightning swift crash turns.

"Ice dead ahead!" Shannon cried.

Jim dodged the submerged floe. "Good eyes." It was smaller than a washing machine and almost transparent. That's why they were zigzagging. They were dodging ice, too. With a man on the mast to spot.

He put the helm hard over.

"Where are you going?" Shannon sounded more resigned than afraid, he thought.

"Either they'll crash into a hunk of ice and sink. Or we'll lose ourselves in the snow."