Buried At Sea (46 page)

through the wind. The sails shifted from port to starboard and she accelerated across the path of the catamaran, which sheered to port, off the wind. It was so close that as it swung away, the starboard bow brushed Hustle's stem. Jim braced for a hull-splintering crash. But a hull wave shoved them roughly aside as the huge cat roared past.

"Jim, look out!"

A diver in a wet suit, bristling with weapons, strode in long bouncing leaps across the net between the two hulls. Using the springy material like a trampoline, he launched himself over the side and into Hustle's cockpit.

A HIGH-TOP ADIDAS came flying at Jim's face. He blocked it with both hands and the diver soared over him, crashed onto the cabin roof, and fell against the sail. His face mask was ripped off in the fall, and Jim saw that it was Andy Nickels, whom they'd last seen in Stallone's villa miseria. He jumped to tackle him, but his tether was clipped to a pad eye in the cockpit. That was all the time that Nickels needed to regain his feet and draw a bayonet.

"Where the fuck's the old man?"

"Left!" yelled Jim. Shannon turned the helm hard left. Hustle heeled sharply to port into the wind. Nickels kept his balance by grabbing the flapping sail. Hustle completed her tack. The wind smacked into the sail and the boom whipped across the cabin and swept Andy Nickels into the sea.

Jim looked again at the east. Was it any darker? The black boat was two miles behind them, circling as they tried to pick up the fallen man.

Shannon had dragged herself onto the cabin roof and forward to the mast, where she leaned, watching with binoculars. "They got him. They're hoisting him up with a halyard.

I hope that bastard freezes to death. Oh, God, here they come again."

"Okay," Jim said. "We're going south, as close to the wind as we can."

"That'll put us on the Burdwood Bank"

"Any second, I'm hoping." The depth finder read eleven hundred meters, but ahead, several miles on the rim of the darkness, he could see wildly broken seas. They were almost

on the bank. "Why?"

"Shallow water. It's too rough for them to make speed. We'll sail as close as we can and keep dodging them till dark. All we have to do is get away from them in the dark. It's a big ocean. By daylight tomorrow we'll be a hundred miles from here. They'll never find us."

Jim had expected sea conditions on the Burdwood Bank similar to the gale-blown Barbados waters his first night aboard Hustle. He expected to be bounced around. He even expected to be seasick. But he had not expected that he and Shannon would be thrown around the cabin like Ping-Pong balls. Nor had he expected to hear Hustle's bulkheads resound with loud cracks and her hull groan with every bone-jarring fall from a steep wave. For the first time, he saw water streaming in where the mast pierced the cabin roof and through the frames of the window lights.

Bruised, cold, hungry, and exhausted, he and Shannon struggled to hold the boat close to the wind while driving her across the bank. It was only sixty miles on the chart, but at three knots it was a long, brutal night and an equally grim day. After they had each suffered painful falls, Shannon got the idea to wear their life jackets in the cabin, inflated to cushion their bodies. Neither dared to step on deck without a harness. As night gathered in the east again, the crashing and banging had still not ceased. They went up on deck together while Jim made the rounds, securing things for the night.

"At least," said Shannon, "we got rid of them. I was so afraid we'd wake up and find them right behind us."

In the last rays of the setting sun Jim could see a black bruise that covered her left cheek where she'd been thrown against a cabinet while trying to open a can of stew.

"There can't be much more of this," he said.

"Is that a promise?"

They huddled below, listening for disaster. A sharp hissing noise drew Jim up on deck, but it was only hail, which left the decks slick and dangerous until the salt spray melted the glaze. Sometime after midnight the water grew deeper, the fierce chop began to level out, and the pounding slowly eased. They slept at last, wedged together in the port-side pilot berth. By dawn, Hustle was plowing a somewhat smoother course through a chain of snow squalls, climbing and descending long, deep Southern Ocean swells, propelled by fifteen knots of cold wind.

Between snow squalls, Jim went up on deck to make his rounds. The cockpit was a spiderweb of tangled sheets. He untangled and coiled them. A winch handle had gone overboard. He brought up the spare from below.

Up on the foredeck he discovered that the spinnaker pole, too, had gone by the boards, sometime in the night. The massive spar had been plucked from its cradle like a strand of linguine.

They had no spare. But on the upside, he had no intention of flying a spinnaker in the Southern Ocean. He double-secured the lighter whisker pole and headed back to the cockpit, pausing to remove the canvas cover they had lashed around the stovepipe. Through the vent he smelled coffee brewing and he was heading with a grateful smile to the companionway when he saw silhouetted between two squalls in the east a tall, black spike.

WITHOUT PAUSING TO think, Jim did what Will had done when he first spotted the ship off the Saint Paul's Rocks. He leaped to the mast, let fly the halyards, and dropped the mainsail on the cabin and the storm on the foredeck. Quickly gathering the reefed main before it could fall over the side, he secured it with sail ties, then did the same for the small storm sail.

Shannon opened the hatch. "What is going on?" "They're back."

"Oh, shit!" She popped up a moment later with the binoculars. Jim started the engine and put the boat back on course, tight into the wind. Did they have an engine on the catamaran? They must. How big? How fast? Who knew?

"Do they see us?" he asked Shannon.

"I can't tell."

Jim turned a desperate circle, looking for some advantage. Back on the Burdwood Bank? No, they'd get beaten to death. Besides, somehow the thing had found them. It must have sailed all the way around the shallows, racing downwind east, then beating into the south wind, and now reaching west, making up time on its better point of sail. How far,

how long? How in hell had they found them? Was it just back luck?

"It's closer," said Shannon. "Maybe they see us."

"It's a long way to see a white boat," said Jim. But he couldn't meet Shannon's eyes, knowing they were both thinking about the lookout atop the fifteen-story mast. The cold wind turned suddenly colder. A sharp gust bit at his face. Another whined through the rigging. Then an icy crosswind pressed hard on the bare mast. The source, they saw, was a new line of snow squalls roaming out of the west. Dark and dense, bunched like a herd of woolly black mastodons, they threatened another round of violent winds and chaotic seas.

He looked at Shannon. She shook her head in resigned disbelief. "Do it:' she said. He altered course, swinging southwest to intercept the darkest snow squall. Before Hustle had closed within a mile, snow was swirling around her. Jim looked back and watched the black spire dissolve into a soft white horizon. By the time it had disappeared from sight, Hustle was pitching on short, steep seas. He ran forward on the slippery deck to raise the storm jib to steady her for the corning battle. A fierce gust nearly blew him off the cabin roof. Crawling on his hands and knees, he felt his way back to the cockpit, where he shut down the engine. Shannon was already at the helm, attempting to steer a safe path through suddenly leaping seas. Jim removed his glove to brush the crust of snow from her eyelashes.

They pounded through the squall for half an hour. When the wind slackened and the snow thinned, they immediately changed course to hide in another. By nightfall they had lost count of how many squalls they had fought. The wind steadied up when the last squall passed and veered hard out of the west. The barometer was dropping. Cape Horn rollers were getting taller. Jim and Shannon shaped a course close-hauled into the west. Then they strapped themselves into the pilot berth, grateful to have escaped the black boat and too tired to care about the weather.

Jim woke up thirsty, hungry, and tired. Something had jarred him out of sleep. It was dark out, and it sounded like a gale blowing up outside. Then he heard a sharp thump against the hull. He pulled on his foul-weather gear and harness and went up on deck. It was pitch-black. The wind was cold, the seas felt fairly even. Then he heard another thump and saw something gleam dully in the wake. He shined the handheld spotlight on it but couldn't make it out, and then shot the beam around the boat. Chunks of ice were floating in the water.

He played the light on the water ahead of the boat. It reflected off a piece of ice as big as a car. He took the helm and steered around it. For a while he saw nothing, but he was afraid to return to sleep knowing that they might run into another piece. Thus he was still at the wheel, dozing intermittently, when dawn broke, casting a reluctant gray glow on a sullen sea. He took a long, careful look for more ice, then ducked below to make some coffee.

"You poor thing," said Shannon. "You look exhausted." "I had to look out for ice. I'll just get some coffee." "Lie down," she said. "I'll watch for a while." He collapsed into the pilot berth and closed his eyes. After what could have been hours or only seconds later, Shannon called urgently and he sat up with his heart pounding, trying to figure out where he was. The wind was blowing harder. The boat was flying.

"What? What?"

"They're coming up behind us."

Will's fine sloop could sail closer to the wind. The catamaran angled away to cut them off. They found a cloud bank, which led to a blinding rain squall. Once again, Hustle sailed them out of danger. But even though they could maneuver in directions the catamaran couldn't go and found

shelter in squalls and fog, the cat had an uncanny, terrifying genius for finding them again.

Night after night, they were sure they had escaped in the desolate waters; morning after morning, the spiky black silhouette cut the horizon. Sometimes it looked like a distant skyscraper, as if a city lay across the water, sometimes like an offshore oil rig, sometimes like a spear.

"We're like a mouse hiding in our little mouse hole of head wind," Jim despaired.

"But how is the cat circling?" asked Shannon. "How can they always know where we are?"

"It's not like when Will threw my monitor overboard. They don't have any tracking device on our boat." "Radar?"

"According to Will they'd have to have an immensely powerful radar—like on a navy ship. No way they could generate enough electricity on a sailboat. Besides, they never find us at night. It's something else, like satellites. Will said the McVays were big in military electronics."

"So what do we do?"

"I don't know. Try to outsail them."

"But where?"

They pored over the chart. They could go anywhere in the world from the Southern Ocean—Atlantic, Pacific, Indian. If they could survive it. The easier routes were downwind, downwind all the way to Australia.

"We can't go downwind, they'll catch up in a flash."

"The wind is west. The only thing west is Cape Horn."

"If we could somehow get around the Horn, we could sail to Hawaii." They looked at each other, then checked Ocean Passages to see how many thousands of miles. Four thousand three hundred to Papeete in the South Pacific and another twenty-five hundred north to Hawaii.

"Seven thousand miles?"

Shannon said, "It's warm in Hawaii."

Too numb to consider long-range consequences, and terrified that when next the black catamaran suddenly appeared, it would pop up too close for them to escape, they decided to cut and run for the Pacific Ocean.

Head winds hurled them back.

Jim searched the sail locker in the wildly bouncing fore-peak and came out sick to his stomach, dragging a small, stiff Kevlar jib. It took him two hours to hank it on the forestay and attach the sheets. But it was worth the effort. The hard, flat sail took a better bite of the head wind. With it and the reefed-down main, Hustle began inching ahead.

"She's heeling too much," said Jim, but he was too tired to leave the helm. Shannon heated potato and leek soup. She lost half the mug when a cross sea buried the bow, staggering the boat just as she crawled through the hatch. But even three warm swallows were restorative and Jim went forward, while Shannon steered, to take another reef in the main so Hustle would sail faster.

It was a brief victory. Night was closing in again, another respite from the black catamaran, but with the dark the wind blew harder. The seas rose, and the sloop was repeatedly pounded back.

It was three hundred miles to Cape Horn. They made fifty miles in two days. The radio finally dragged in a fresh weather report. The fax page was splattered with low-pressure systems. Northerly winds were predicted to rise to forty knots.

Jim looked at the instruments. The wind had already shifted due north and was blowing forty-five. When the note it hummed in the rigging turned sharper, he checked again. The wind was rising to fifty knots, riling cross seas. And now it seemed that every other wave smashed the sloop back two yards for every yard it gained.

Still they fought the boat west through the dawn and into midday. Jim felt like a robot, a mindless machine that would run as programmed until it broke. But the immensely strong Kevlar jib broke first, ripping the steel ring out of its clew, which probably saved their lives. Because, cold, sleep-deprived, and exhausted, they finally admitted that they could not even reach Cape Horn, much less round it.

They bore off to the northeast. But no sooner had Hustle settled onto the marginally easier course than they saw the black steeple spike the horizon. They retreated in the only direction left to them. South. South again, south into the violent seas of the Drake Passage, south into deepening cold. They stuffed every scrap of warm clothing they could find on the boat under their foul-weather gear, and they were still cold. A mouthful of hot food was a rare luxury, a night's sleep an ancient memory,. respite from the ceaseless, violent motion a fantasy.