Buried At Sea (48 page)

"They won't sink," she said. "Catamaran hulls are full of watertight compartments." Crack!

A high-powered slug smacked past the mast.

"Down! Get down!"

Crack! The second shot passed the backstay.

Down he went, flat on his face on the cockpit sole, his ears ringing. He never even heard the third shot, but it passed so close it felt like he had been kicked in the head. Shannon screamed, "Jim," and threw herself over him.

"I'm okay, I'm okay—just knocked me off my feet." He raised his head for a quick look. The cat had come about and was reaching west, clawing closer to the wind to intercept them, while the gunman on its mast was pinning them down so they couldn't sail Hustle. Flat on the cockpit sole, he was out of tricks and done running. Shannon said, "Promise me you won't do anything stupid when they come aboard. There'

s five of them and one of you."

Jim said, "Can you get below?"

"I'm staying here with you."

"No, listen to me. Will's shotgun is in the aft cabin in one of the bunk drawers. Pass it to me through this port."

Shannon was shaking her head. Jim said, "Will used to say at moments like this, 'When all is lost there's nothing to lose.' I promise I won't do anything stupid." Shannon dragged herself to the hatch.

"Keep your head down."

She removed the washboards, slid the hatch open, and slithered down the companionway. Jim took another look. The cat was nearer, starkly visible through the snow. He jogged the wheel, altering course again to intercept. Ice banged along the hull. He popped his head up to see if any big pieces were floating in their path. Crack! This shot skimmed the cabin roof. He threw himself flat, his heart pounding. They were still pinning him down so he couldn't sail the boat. Perfect.

"Jim!" Shannon opened the port in the side of the cockpit and started to pass Will's sawed-off shotgun through it. Jim took the stubby stock.

"Stay away from the barrel."

They worked it through the narrow opening. "Okay, close the hatch."

"Here." Her gloved hand reached through with three cartridges. "Do you know how to use this?"

"I shot clay pigeons in Boy Scouts."

He had to remove a glove to load the weapon. His fingers went stiff in the cold. Ice crunched against the hull.

He took a quick look through the binoculars. The catamaran had closed within two hundred yards. Andy Nickels was braced on the first spreader with a rifle. Another man was on the bow spotting ice. A hundred feet aft, two were manning the sheets for the jib and main, while the fifth worked an enormous stainless-steel helm. They made tempting targets in their yellow foul-weather suits. But the shotgun had a very short range. Besides, he didn't have a prayer of winning a gunfight with heavily armed professionals. He raised his head for another look, still hoping that the snow would turn so thick that they would lose sight of Hustle. It was thicker, but not that thick, and through its swirling scrim he could see the catamaran looming large. A gust hit its sails hard and it surged ahead. The same gust knocked Hustle half over. It brought more snow with it but still not enough to hide them.

Jim looked again, concentrating on the foot of the big cat's mast. It was dead ahead and he stared hard, trying to distinguish through the blowing snow on which side of the mast her halyards ran.

"Son of a bitch."

The halyards that held up the mainsail and the jib were led down inside of the catamaran'

s mast and emerged just above a cluster of winches on the port side of the hollow spar. But Hustle was angling toward her starboard side. Jim grabbed a spoke and yanked the helm. He had to get across her bows.

An instant after he turned, the cat turned, too, swinging to

starboard, sails thundering as she headed up to slip behind the wind so he couldn't escape.

"Thank you," Jim whispered.

But they were so close now that in another second the rifleman on the spreader could look down over Hustle's sail and shoot him where he lay on the floor of the cockpit. It was now or never. Jim rose on one knee and took aim at the halyard winches clustered at the base of JoyStick's mast.

The shotgun's report was a deafening boom. The recoil staggered him. Quickly, he jammed another shell into the breech and fired again. But the boats were moving apart and already the catamaran was out of shotgun range.

As the boats moved farther apart, Andy Nickels, who was standing high on JoyStick's first spreader, saw Jim grab the wheel to steer around a bulldozer-size growler. He raised his weapon and took careful aim.

ANDY NICKELS BEGAN to squeeze the trigger, intending to take out the shotgun by shattering Jim Leighton's shoulder with a high-powered slug. Stop shotgun, stop resistance, start questions. Focused intently on what was even for him a difficult shot between two boats in wild motion, he shifted into firing-range mode. Tuning out the distractions of wind, snow, and biting cold, he even ignored the high-pitched shriek of a broken halyard wire flying up its channel inside Joy Stick's mast. Only when a shadow passed over his face did animal instinct force him to look up. Like the wing of a giant albatross, fifteen stories of black mainsail tumbled down the mast and enveloped him in thundering, wind-struck folds. Before the shotgun stopped echoing from the ice-rimmed coast, Val saw chaos erupt: Murphy's Law in spades. Everything that could go wrong went wrong at once. The mainsail fell, billowing like a parachute, blocking her view of the water ahead. A sixtyknot gust filled the jib at the same instant and with no mainsail to balance the foresail, the wind

slewed the cat into a ninety-degree skid and sent it off at high speed. She was sailing blind at twenty-five knots when the port bow struck ice—a low, massively heavy growler. JoyStick bucked. The deck slammed under her feet and Val felt herself go flying. Her braided nylon harness tether jerked her up short. Something snapped with a loud bang. And suddenly she saw gray water coming at her face. Next thing she knew she was under water so cold that the exposed skin on her face felt like it was burning. Her buoyant dry suit floated her to the surface just as the shallowdraft JoyStick skidded over another growler and flew away. Val watched in utter disbelief. The huge catamaran careened, as out of control as an unexamined life, and vanished into the blizzard. She was alone, with the snow falling darkly, the sea growling against the advancing pack ice. Her mind churned. Observation vied with incredulity, but there was nothing to prevent it from spiraling into the bleakest despair.

A thunderous wind scythed across the sea. It parted the snow like a theater curtain and she glimpsed, far away, the big catamaran still racing for the horizon. It suddenly reared up on its starboard hull and teetered there for a long moment, its mast nearly parallel to the water. Val could not see whether it had struck another growler or fell prey to a wind gust. But it teetered further, dipped its mast in the water, and turned upside down.

The snow descended like a dark blanket and she was alone again, floating up to her chin in five-degree seawater, fully aware that her HPX Ocean Drysuit would keep her alive for two hours. Viewed logically, this was not an acceptable option. She could imagine times in a life when two hours might be viewed as a great gift. But not two hours of selfincrimination. Sentinel was lost. No. She had lost Sentinel. How could she have been so stupid as to go sailing? She, who knew that the quintessence of computer science was to dominate events from the distance. It was unimaginable that she had succumbed to a romantic hands-on impulse at the precise

moment when her firm hand was required at the foundation. It was unacceptable. Water transmitted cold thirty times faster than air. She grabbed the zip puller, tore open the front of the suit and stretched the latex neck seal. The wave that poured in was cold enough to stop her heart.

The buoyant suit still trapped enough air to hold her head out of the water. But within moments of embracing the intense cold, she wanted to sleep. She resisted only briefly, then closed her eyes in a dreamy delirium, recognizing the peaceful symptoms of an Antarctic death. Here's a quote for you, Dad: "To sleep, perchance to die." Asleep, adrift—but her heart kept thudding, pounding her ribs like she had just pedaled a six-minute sprint on the Air-Dyne. An acid thought percolated through her brain: the payoff for her workouts would be a healthy body's longer death.

She willed herself to accept sleep. There was a shrieking in her ears so loud it hurt. She wanted to die in peace. Something was shaking her by the dry suit, something powerful, and she thought of a sea leopard. Shackleton's men had encountered one on the ice—a gigantic, voracious penguin-eating seal too big and arrogant to fear humans. The theory was they thought humans were penguins.

Like a killer whale, it actually lifted her out of the water. Killer whales played with their prey, tossing live seals to each other like lacrosse balls. It was a part of teaching their young to hunt. Val supposed they enjoyed themselves.

Adrift, asleep, her busy mind tucked around some final thoughts, like a cat settling into a corner. Her peace was disturbed by the purposeful click, click, click of a yacht winch. She felt as heavy as a rock. Suddenly there was a hard deck under her and Shannon Riley was shrieking in her ear, "Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!" A man was shouting, "Let's get her below. I gotta steer. If that pack ice gets around us, we're dead."

Val's last conscious thought was that she hoped the pack ice crushed them, hoped that they were dead. Later, she became aware that she was in shelter, out of the wind and snow. She heard Jim Leighton struggling up on deck. A sail was flogging violently. The bow was plunging. Ice was banging against the hull. Shannon was slapping her face and screaming for her to wake up.

Val said, "Tell him he has to sail faster than the ice. Tell him bare poles won't do. He needs speed and steerage. Tell him to fly a storm sail and a Yankee jib." Jim was at the helm. But even with the work lights glaring down from the spreaders, Shannon could barely see him through the snow.

"How's your patient?" he yelled over the wind. "Babbling."

"Can you take the wheel? I want to go down and get the Yankee jib. It'll clear the seas breaking over the bow."

Shannon clipped onto a pad eye and dragged herself upright behind the helm. She took his arm. "Jim, I'm not stupid. If it was one of the men I would have left him in the water. She's just one small woman. We can handle her."

He went below. Shannon had removed the bulky dry suit from the woman they had winched out of the sea and strapped her into the leeward pilot berth. She lay dead to the world, eyes shut, barely breathing. Her skin was paper white. Pale as a vampire, in Will's words.

He went up into the forepeak and found the high-cut Yankee jib. Hustle slammed into a piece of ice. It sounded like an explosion in the cramped space. The fiberglass bulged inward. He held his breath, expecting seawater to follow. The dent was a foot wide, but the hull held.

For the moment.

He dragged the sail through the cabin. The woman opened her eyes and tried to sit up. " Where is Will Spark?" she whispered.

"Dead."

"He can't be."

"He died last month in the South Atlantic."

"That's not possible. Why didn't you—"

"Tell your killers in Buenos Aires? We hoped that your killers would chase Will and leave us alone."

"Where is Sentinel?"

She had huge dark eyes, but they weren't focusing. Jim looked deep into them and said, " Sentinel is where it always was: in Will Spark's head."

Her eyes flickered toward the dry suit heaped on the cabin floor. Jim hauled the Yankee jib up to the cockpit.

"You know who we rescued? That's Val McVay?' "You're kidding—what's that?"

"It's her gun. I found it in her dry suit." Jim showed Shannon the compact pistol and tossed it over the side. "We caught ourselves a shark." As he hanked the Yankee jib onto the forestay, he could hear the ice pack closing in. Grinding ice and surging water made a sound deeper than the wind as the pack undulated on the steepening swell.

Back in the cockpit, he began to despair. The grinding, surging noise was coming from both sides now, a sustained groan that meant the lead they were in was narrowing. Then the full force of the blizzard hit with a scream.

Hustle leaped ahead as if she had been kicked. Jim forced himself to his feet. "We've already got one dent in the bow," he told Shannon. "If we hit anything else at this speed, we're dead. I'll go up on the foredeck and show you where to steer." The wind was holding the narrow lead open in the ice field. The danger was the massive chunks left floating. He stood in the bow pulpit with a spotlight, his legs braced against the stainless-steel frame, and guided Shannon with arm signals.

Somewhere ahead was the Drake Passage. It had taken them six brutal days to cross the six hundred miles of South-em Ocean that channeled between the Antarctic Peninsula and Cape Horn. He could not conceive of a worse stretch of

water in the world. It made the Burdwood Bank a pleasant memory. But right now—if Hustle could only reach it—the Drake Passage would resemble heaven. Jim was so tired he was hallucinating. He saw a human face watching from a growler, which was floating just below the waves. Will Spark smiling up at him. "Wake up, cockpit man. "You're not out of this yet."

Jim rubbed his own face, blinked, slapped his cheeks. Ice, dead ahead, a flat floe twenty feet wide. He signaled frantically for Shannon to steer to port. Hustle swung around it. When they were back on course, Jim glanced over his shoulder. Shannon had both hands on the helm and was watching for his next signal. Will Spark stood close beside her.

"She's your home run, Jim," the old man called in his "me-hearties" voice. "A lass for a pirate's wife!"

Jim turned his attention to the dangers ahead. It took him a while to realize that the sky had grown marginally lighter in the northeast. The snow blew harder than ever. But he saw no more floating ice and Hustle was battering through a vicious cross sea whipped up by the south-blowing blizzard and a westering swell.