The Drift (A Hans Larsson Novel Book 1) (24 page)

A
s
the growing morning warmth massaged his exhausted soul, Hans resisted the urge
to lie down on his sodden sleeping bag, a luxury that would come later. From
here on in every second counted. He needed to make a plan and take action. He
had to think laterally, maximizing the potential of their equipment and
supplies and exploiting all the environment had to offer. That way they might
just live through this nightmare. Soon Hans would start a log – dates, times,
conditions, position and drift of the raft – something to at least give the
illusion of control rather than relinquish all influence to the sea’s wet grip.

He hung the bedding out to dry and began the monotonous
chore of bailing out their waterlogged home. Each time he lifted an arm, a
searing pain spread from his temple to his jaw. Jessica lay asleep on the
equipment bag. Even considering the traumatic events, Hans could see she was
not herself.

He winced.

Figuring they were thirty days from the shipping lines – perhaps
twenty-five if the breeze kept up – he pulled in the drogue chute to hasten
their progress, folding it neatly and stowing it in its designated mesh holder
ready for immediate deployment. Beneath the raft were four ballast pockets that
automatically filled with water to give the raft stability. They certainly
served their purpose in last night’s storm, but now Hans wished there was some
way to collapse them, reducing the drag and seeing them skim across the sea toward
rescue.

Taking a seventy-foot length of cord, he tied one end to
Future
’s
horseshoe buoy, one of the items salvaged when the yacht went down, and the
other to the external handline. It acted as a man-overboard measure should either
of them become separated from the raft, and as the orange life preserver
dragged across the sea’s surface, its bow wave created a disturbance, increasing
their visibility to search-and-rescue aircraft. A ninetieth of a nautical mile
between raft and buoy meant Hans was able to record the time it took for a
piece of weed or other flotsam to travel the distance and work out their speed.

Next he contemplated their rations, making rough mental
calculations as he did. If he could get by on half a pint of water a day and
Jessica a third, the eighteen pints on board would last them twenty-four days –
not long enough to reach the shipping lanes. With luck they might be able to
supplement their meager intake, even build up a reserve, using the solar still
and any rain they could collect.

Luck?

Reflecting on events, Hans allowed himself a moment of
self-pity.

Food he was not too worried about, although kicking himself
for assuming he would simply grab the emergency box should the yacht go down.
Stocked with cans of meat, fish and soups, water and other vital supplies, it
would have guaranteed their survival as long as the raft held out.

Tinned fish?

Although far from judging eyes, Hans felt foolish for
packing the one fare that now swam beneath them in abundance.

Something that did go in their favor was Hans’ knowledge of
survival, as all SEALs passed through the navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance,
and Escape (SERE) school during training. One of his often-told anecdotes was
of an exercise he underwent as a young frogman. In pairs, and wearing blindfolds,
they had been bundled onto the back of a truck and dropped off a hundred miles
from camp, their mission – with no money, map or food – to make it back in the
fastest time possible. Standing there in the dark on a dirt track in the back
of beyond, Hans looked at his buddy and knew immediately they had the same idea
– scrambling up the vehicle’s tarpaulin to stow away on the roof. As the truck neared
the camp on the return journey, they dived off and rolled into the bushes on
the side of the road, spending the evening in their local bar, beer and food on
the house, before strolling back into base, fighting the urge to smile, early the
next morning.

Hans’ love and thirst for adventure began at a young age. An
introverted kid, he was never happier than having his nose in a book loaned
from the town library, most often a Willard Price novel detailing the escapades
of Long Island teenagers Hal and Roger, whose father, a respected animal
collector, sent them on exciting missions around the world in search of exotic
species for his zoo.
Amazon Adventure
,
Africa Adventure
,
Underwater
Adventure
,
South Sea Adventure
– the list went on, and Hans could
not soak up the storylines fast enough.

For Hans’ tenth birthday his grandfather presented him with
a book titled
The Kon-Tiki Expedition
, the story of how in 1947 five
Scandinavians under the leadership of Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific
Ocean on a balsawood raft to prove a theory that settlers drifting across the sea
from South America inhabited Polynesia.
Kon-Tiki
, named after the Inca
sun king, proved a resounding success, the men able to collect a plentiful
supply of rainwater and catch enough fish to supplement their fresh provisions
of coconuts, sweet potatoes and fruit and see their dried rations redundant. During
the crossing an ecosystem flourished beneath the raft attracting larger marine life,
the men feasting on all manner of sea fare, including sharks they hauled on
board and flying fish that bombarded their bamboo cabin at night. After her hundred
and one days at sea, having crossed four thousand miles of ocean, huge breakers
smashed
Kon-Tiki
onto a reef surrounding the Raroia atoll in the Tuamotu
Islands, the crew making it safely ashore.

However, in Hans’ opinion the ultimate story of endurance
adrift had to be that of Poon Lim, who in 1942 worked as a steward on the
British merchant ship SS
Ben Lomond
.
A German U-boat sunk the cargo
carrier en route from Cape Town to Suriname, seven hundred miles east of the
Amazon. Lim grabbed his life jacket and jumped overboard, just in time to hear
the ship’s boilers explode. After several hours in the sea he located a wooden
life raft, crawling aboard to find it stocked with the bare minimum of supplies
– a few cans of crackers, a forty-liter jar of water, some flares and a
flashlight. When food and water ran out, Lim took to catching raindrops in his
life jacket, making fishing hooks out of the metal springs in the flashlight
and nails from the raft’s wooden decking, and tying them to a line braided using
fibers plucked from the raft’s hemp painter. With a knife fashioned from a sliver
of can, he was able to slice up the fish he caught and hang the excess meat out
to dry. When rain failed to materialize, he sucked blood from birds he snared and
gorged on the juicy livers of hand-caught sharks. Finally, after Lim’s one
hundred and thirty-three days at sea, Brazilian fishermen picked him up, forty
pounds lighter, just a few miles from land.

If there was one lesson Hans learned from reading these
accounts, it was that the will to live and human resourcefulness far supersede
available equipment and supplies, and if he kept the faith, Mother Nature would
provide – though none of his heroes had a three-inch gash in their head to
contend with.

Careful not to wake Jessica, Hans took the yellow Poly Bottle
from the equipment bag and unscrewed its chunky red lid. Inside were six
parachute flares, two handheld flares and a smoke flare. He added the signaling
mirror and whistle and stored the container in a webbing pocket alongside the
drogue chute and strobe light, ready to grab at a moment’s notice.

The radar reflector consisted of flat-packed aluminum fins
that slotted together to form an octahedron and sat on a mount that came in
three interconnecting fiberglass sections like a fishing pole. When assembled,
it looked like a prop from a Flash Gordon movie. With no practical way of
securing the pole to the raft, Hans lashed the reflector itself to the outside
of the canopy using a length of cord, which he looped through two of the
utility ties stitched to the orange fabric. He did not hold out much hope.
Future
had a similar device at its masthead. Even at that height it proved ineffective
more often than not.

Taking up a pen and notepad, he began a log. On the cover he
wrote the name of the yacht, their personal details and a contact number and
email address for his brother in the States. Should the worst case unfold, at
least their bodies would be identifiable . . . if the raft stayed afloat.

Inside he recorded dates and a summary of events.

Day 1. Collided with foreign object (cargo container, whale?)
Time: 1831 hrs. Approximate position: 16° 18’ N, 25° 36’ W. Both crew evacuated
to life raft. Captain sustained severe contusion to side of the face. EPIRB and
radio not on board. 7 days’ food. 24 days’ water.

Day 2. Battered by storm day and night. Raft flooded. Bailed and
drogue streamed. Desperately need sleep. Captain’s facial contusion likely to
become infected. Jessica appears healthy but withdrawn. No sign of rescue
craft. Morale OK. 6 days’ food. 23 days’ water.

Hans ripped a page from the rear of the notepad, screwed it
into a ball and soaked it in seawater. On his wrist was a Rolex Oyster diving
watch, a present to himself after his first combat mission in the military. Now
he used it to time how long the paper took to travel the length of the man-overboard
line and reach the horseshoe float seventy feet away – forty-five seconds to cover
one-ninetieth of a nautical mile, which meant they were drifting at half a knot
and had covered approximately twenty-four miles. He divided off the previous
day’s tally and logged both distances accordingly.

Only now did Hans feel he could rest. Pangs of hunger and thirst
racked his overtired self, but he resisted the urge to eat and drink, figuring
if they fasted for forty-eight hours their stomachs would shrink and their
bodies get used to fluid deprivation. He knew Jessica would understand. She
still lay motionless on the equipment bag.

She’s a good kid.

After making sure the sleeping bags were secure, Hans left
them drying in the sun. Curled up against the tubes, he drifted into fractured
sleep and a repeating nightmare. He dreamt he was clad in combat gear on a
chopper with Jessica. They were heading to an island to rescue Penny, who lay
sunbathing on the beach with his late wife. Every time they drew close to the
shore, Jessica fell out of the door and plummeted into the ocean. He would jump
to her rescue, the vision flicking to them being in a life raft and the helicopter
returning but flying right past.

Wamp wamp wamp wamp wamp . . .

Hans awoke feeling confused. Having dreamt of a helicopter,
he could now hear one. It took him a few seconds to put the pieces together.
Search
and rescue!

Wrenching the Poly Bottle from the webbing pocket, hands
shaking, Hans unscrewed the lid and took out a parachute flare. The noise of
the chopper grew louder, until it passed directly overhead. As he struggled
with the zippers, the infamous command wielded by military instructors the world
over came into his head.

Move your fingers!

He fought to stay calm.

“Are you going to leave me?”

“No.”

“You left them.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“And you left her.”

Hans peeled back the door. His spirit plummeted.

Dark-gray cloud blotted out the sky, the ceiling so low it
would take a miracle for the aircraft to spot them. The sound of rotor blades
drew nearer once more . . . and gradually faded away.

A
hmed
sat upright, legs astride his mattress, staring at the lamplight dancing on the
hessian and listening to the Grower and his piratical flunkies partying late
into the night. He felt disenchanted and depressed but forced himself to
contemplate their options, dismissing all but the most drastic one – entering
the farmhouse while the men slept, shooting them dead with Naseem’s shotgun and
likewise the guard on the boat.

The guffaws quietened and grew further apart, eventually
ceasing as the cocktail of booze and hashish induced slumber. Ahmed pumped up
their small brass kerosene burner and made coffee. Sitting back down, he sipped
his hot, sweet drink, willing the pick-me-up to give him the answer.

There
had
to be a way.

There was always a way.

. . . and there it was!

“Brother, get up!”

By the time Mohamed woke, Ahmed had their savings out from
under the floorboards. “We go!”

“Wha—?”

“Don’t ask. Just get yourself ready.”

He lifted the door latch.

“Where are you going?”

“Where do you think?”

Mohamed recognized the look in Ahmed’s eyes. “Me too.”

He whipped out his blade, and Ahmed knew it was pointless
arguing.

They left the hut and crossed the yard. Music played in the
farmhouse, covering the sound of their footsteps. Light shone from the window,
Ahmed figuring the men had been too drunk to extinguish the lamps. He peeked around
the frame to see Al Mohzerer sprawled in a chair, his guests comatose on the
floor amidst empty bottles and a hookah pipe.

“Okay, wait here.”

Ahmed eased open the solid wooden door and slipped inside,
the stench of unwashed bodies and liquor fumes taking him back to the sewer. The
bandits snored like swine, but Al Mohzerer looked as if he might wake at any
moment, the wicked scar giving the impression he was grinning in his sleep. It
was easy to see why he was so bitter. With yellowing paint peeling from the
damp walls and the furniture sparse and shabby, it was not what you would
expect of a man once revered as the biggest drug producer in the land.

Worried the floorboards would creak, Ahmed stepped onto the
rug, its weave, faded and threadbare, offering little cushioning for his carefully
placed feet. He crouched at the burnt-out fireplace, grabbed a handful of
charcoal and dropped it inside his T-shirt. The music came from a cheap
cassette player sat on an oak dresser at the far end of the room. Ahmed stepped
over the prone figures and began searching through the drawers for the keys to
the pickup.

Damn!
They
had
to be somewhere.

He looked at Naseem, wondering if they were in his djellaba.
The thought of going near the man filled him with dread, but with a nervous
check of his knife, he tiptoed over and dipped his fingers into the Grower’s
chest pocket.

“Urrh!” Naseem shifted position.

Ahmed froze. Seconds passed, but when Naseem snoozed on, his
facial expression unchanging, Ahmed threw caution to the wind and slipped his
hand all the way in.

Bingo!

His fingers made contact with cold metal. Pinching it
between thumb and forefinger, he withdrew his hand . . . to find a gold watch
with “Cartier” printed on its face in tiny black letters. He shoved it in his
jeans and went back to the search, breathing an inner sigh of relief when he
pulled out the keys.

His body trembling and mind on autopilot, Ahmed turned to
creep out of the room, not realizing someone stood behind him with a shotgun.

“Uh!”

“Peeow-peeow!” Mohamed grinned.

“Fool!” Ahmed whispered, his body returning to earth.