Close Reach (6 page)

The anemometer showed a sustained wind speed of fifty knots, with gusts up to sixty. Going up the wave faces, she looked down into the dark troughs, and it was like leaning over the edge of a cliff. These waves were taller than the maple trees lining the driveway to their house in Mystic. They were not quite as tall as the boat was long, but she knew one out of every few thousand waves rolled across the sea at twice the average height. And she knew that sailing in conditions like these came down to averages. Sooner or later the wave with her name on it would come. Or an iceberg or a growler too low in the water to see until she’d hit it.

Upwind like this was worse. Everything was getting pounded: the hull, the rigging, her body. If she stripped and stood before a full-length mirror, she knew the bruises would be everywhere.

She had to turn around.

If she could run downwind again, she’d be faster and could put out more sail. The boat’s speed would cut the apparent wind and reduce the loads on the rigging. But turning around was hard, because it meant turning sideways to waves big enough to roll
Freefall
like a bathtub toy. She’d have to plan it, starting the turn on the back of a wave and finishing in the trough so she never exposed
Freefall
’s beam to the face of the sea.

And she’d need to figure out where
La Araña
was so she didn’t run right into it.

She glanced at the radar screen and saw nothing but a bright green cloud. This meant the waves were higher than the radar antenna, and the antenna was mounted a third of the way up the mast, at forty feet. She turned and scanned behind her, seeing nothing but waves. She checked to port and starboard and didn’t see it and supposed it must be hanging back somewhere behind her and to the south. When she turned
Freefall
, she’d follow the wind and waves on the fastest course to the northeast, toward Cape Horn and maybe safety. If
La Araña
kept its last course and if its radar was useless, too, perhaps they’d draw away from each other at right angles.

She looked at the electronic chart plotter. It displayed a color map of the Drake Passage, with the Antarctic Peninsula at the bottom and the Strait of Magellan at the top. A little red arrow somewhere in the middle should have marked
Freefall
’s position. But there was nothing.

She couldn’t remember looking at the chart plotter since
La Araña
had come into view. If its jammer had blotted out the EPIRB, of course it would have taken the chart plotter, too. Dean would have known what to do about it. That thought summoned the sound of his knuckles stretching and popping in her grip as the crab boat reeled him in. The way he screamed when she
saw him in the cage above Lena.

What would he do?

He’d stay calm, first of all. He’d do what needed to be done, and that was turn the boat around first and take care of navigation second. She nodded and thought of Dean standing beside her to help her with this. He was always confident, and that soothed her. Her guts twisted with the enormity of her mistake: to have confused everything for boredom, as though a man like Dean could ever be common. She’d acted as though he could be thrown away and replaced at her leisure. But she’d needed him then as much as she needed him now. She let her imagination bloom until Dean’s hands were on her shoulders and his calm voice was in her ear.

Start the turn now, Kelly.

She waited till the top of a wave crest and spun the wheel to starboard, swinging the bow from west to north and then around to northeast. The sails slammed over to port as the wind crossed the centerline and came from the starboard quarter. The storm sail was self-tacking, but the big jib wasn’t. She used the furling gear to roll it in till the clew was past the inner forestay, then let it back out on the new tack by winching in the port sheet, giving the wind more sail than before.

The boat lifted up from astern and caught its first surf on a fifty-foot wave. She prayed the bow wouldn’t bury itself in the trough. If that happened, the boat could pitchpole and land upside down. With its weighted keel and watertight hatches, it probably would right itself, but she might not be alive to appreciate it. Not if seventy-five thousand pounds of boat landed on top of her. She adjusted the sail trim to match the boat speed to the wave, finding the balance point by feel. She surfed the next wave for over a mile, her wake as clear as an icy contrail in the jet stream.

When she could, she turned to the paper chart under the Lexan cover at the chart table. She tried to work out her current position by recalling all the maneuvers
Freefall
had made since the last-known plot. Although the GPS was gone, the knot log was a simpler instrument and still worked. And she had the compass. So she could dead reckon her way to Cape Horn, though she knew she might be off by as much as 20 miles. With 350 miles to reach the cape and
La Araña
still out there, she might not need to worry about the last 20 miles.

* * *

In an hour, the pressure fell another 2 millibars, and by then the waves were too big for the autopilot. Steering in big waves wasn’t about setting a straight course but about curving along the path of least danger. It was a walk on the razor’s edge: a slip either way, and
Freefall
could
spin sideways and roll with a wave or capsize end over end. So Kelly tethered herself at the helm station and hand steered.

Dean would have been better at this.

Dean.

She saw him in the cage on
La Araña,
gripping the wires with his frozen fingers. The wind in the rigging became his scream as he was hoisted aboard with a hook through his knee. These thoughts weren’t even the worst. She tried to concentrate on steering, on keeping
Freefall
afloat and moving toward help. But she kept remembering other things. There were many, but the worst was Dean on the living room couch with his face in his hands and the photographs spread on the coffee table in front of him. Spread for her to see when she came in and found him like that. She’d still been flushed and hot beneath her winter coat from the afternoon in the hotel room. In the instant she saw him, she understood that all her pleasure in the last six months was something she’d stolen for herself by cutting it straight out of Dean.

She’d given some of it back since then, but he’d given even more. So the scale would never be balanced.

“Oh, God, Dean,” she whispered.

* * *

He was in his exposure suit, so he’d have a good chance of staying alive in the crab trap. Better, anyway, than Lena in her blanket. Or the frozen dead around them who’d been stripped to their bare skin and left with nothing against the cold.

Thank God they don’t take his suit away
, Kelly thought. And then, more coldly, she thought:
And don’t let him find some way to pass it down to Lena.
He’d do it if he could, even if it meant his own death.

* * *

She hand steered for three hours, covering sixty nautical miles. In the middle of the second hour, the engine’s rhythm developed a hitch. It was sputtering near the bottom of the fuel tank. She shut it down to save the last half hour of maneuvering. At the end of the third hour, the barometric pressure rose 4 millibars. The worst of the low-pressure system was past. The wind dropped to forty knots, and now only one in twenty waves swelled up to fifty feet. She used the furling gear to roll out a little more of the jib, then watched the knotmeter to get the new average speed, doing the math on the chart because she was too tired to divide in her head.

If she could keep this up, it would be fourteen and a half hours to the cape. Maybe the Chileans could send patrol boats south into the passage to search for
La Araña.
Or better yet, helicopter gunships. She thought of the warm comfort Dean would feel when he heard the rotors, when one of the big Sea Stallions dropped out of the gray gloom, its downdraft flattening a circle in the sea, its guns hanging down like the legs and stinger of a wasp.

He’d know she’d come through.

Kelly released the left Velcro wrist cuff of her exposure suit, pulled the end of her glove out of her sleeve, and looked at her watch.

Five hours since she’d blinded and killed the man at the bow of
La Araña.
Five hours since
La Araña
had swerved away from her and given her a last look at Dean in his cage.

She took the binoculars and scanned the horizon for the crab boat. Nothing. There was a massive iceberg five miles in front of her, visible where the sea was slamming into its western flank and sending geysers of spray skyward. It was so enormous that it sat as solid as an outcrop of rock in spite of the battering the Southern Ocean was giving it.

Probably it had broken off from one of the ice shelves hugging the southern continent. Its smooth top must have covered ten square miles. Windborne spray from the breaking waves whipped over the edge of the ice cliffs and blew in snaking tendrils across the top. The spray would build to a fog bank on the lee side of the ice. She steered
Freefall
five degrees closer to north to give the area a wide berth. She wanted nothing to do with the berg, the fog, or the growlers that probably lay in the smoother water behind the ice mass. So she measured the distance with her eyes and set the course northward and then watched her progress against the ice ahead of her until she was sure it wasn’t drifting north on a line of convergence.

Then she leaned to the VHF and turned up its volume knob, hoping and praying for static.

But the death metal was still there, the same loop of screams.

She switched it off. Dean hadn’t said what the jamming equipment’s range might be, but she couldn’t imagine that it cast too wide a circle. If it jammed a wider area than that, surely someone would notice the dead airspace and report it. Patrol boats or airplanes could triangulate the source and track it down. So they’d limit the range of their jamming equipment, and that meant they were nearby.
La Araña
was probably within twenty miles of her.

Twenty miles was a long way in a rough sea. The waves weren’t as bad as before but were still too high for the radar to pick out anything but sea clutter. If it were dark, she’d take any odds on getting to Cape Horn without
La Araña
finding and catching her. Nothing was harder to see than an unlit boat in a storming sea at night. The more pressing concern would be hitting rocks while running blind downwind at twenty knots.

But it wasn’t dark and wouldn’t be for at least another week.

If the crab boat was still jamming her, it was still looking for her. It had run her down once before on a straight-line test of speed, and now she was out of fuel. Besides, she was
exhausted and had never been able to steer for speed the way Dean could. She realized then that it had been at least eight hours since she’d gone into the cabin to get a drink or use the head. She’d had a thermos of tea when Dean was on his last watch and nothing since then. She was exhausted and needed to pee, and her mouth was dry as old paint. Even with the exposure suit, she was shivering.

As the cold had gotten worse, so had the auditory hallucinations.

These were common enough on long watches in strong weather. The wind carried whirs and chirps, and singing voices, and screams. Voices she recognized, moans of things that might not have come from this world. Any sailor on a solo watch learns to ignore them or at least keep them separate from the sounds that matter. Usually she could. But twice she’d jerked around at the sound of a voice speaking in low Spanish, and more times than she could count she’d heard her name in the crash of the sea. The low beat of an engine that wasn’t hers.

She could set the autopilot and go down below for five minutes.

It wouldn’t take any longer than that to peel off her one-piece exposure suit, pee, make a thermos of soup, put the suit back on, and come back to the pilothouse. Once she thought it out and saw herself doing it, a need that had been merely pressing for the last hour became an imperative.

Kelly was able to hold out only another minute—just long enough to know
Freefall
would pass to the north of the ice ahead. Then she set the autopilot, unclipped her harness tether, and went below. In the galley, she braced herself against the stove and shimmied out of her exposure suit, then hurried to the aft head. She’d held her bladder for so long that she was almost sick with the pressure, and the relief when she finally sat down and held on to the bulkhead grab rail embraced her like a morphine drip. Then she was back in the galley, upending a can of tomato soup into a saucepan and heating it over the gimbaled stove burner. While it came to a simmer, she put her exposure suit back on and cinched her chest harness tight again. She found an energy drink in the cupboard, then poured the hot soup into her tea thermos and climbed back into the pilothouse.

Freefall
was passing two miles to the north of the ice. As she’d guessed, there was a thick bank of fog in the lee, pressing heavily against the flat gray sea where the ice gave shelter from the wind and waves. The fog stretched half a mile, then thinned where the wind picked up again and blew it clear.