Dead Reckoning (22 page)

             
“Maybe,” Jeff and I replied simultaneously.

             
I continued the thought: “There is probably a lot of fuel left out there. But if the power is off, and it seems that it is, we will have a hard time getting at it.”

             
We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Jeff continued: “When we round the south end of Whidbey, it gets really tight.”

             
“South end of Whidbey?” I questioned. “We can’t go up the east side. Mukilteo and Everett are right there on the mainland, and they are heavily populated areas. Or were.”

             
“But if we go around the north end, it will take an extra day,” Jeff continued. “Not to mention that Deception Pass is far narrower than the southern route. This is the best way to Langley.”

“
We don’t need to go around either end. You can just drop me off at the old marina north of the Bush Point lighthouse. It’s pretty old and rickety, but it’s deep enough, and there will hardly be anyone over there.”

Jeff slid his finger around the map as he scanned for Bush Point. He found it on the western shore of the island.

“But it’s gotta be five, six miles to Langley from there.”

“Ten, actually, but I’ll hoof it. After coming all this way, I am not going to risk getting us killed before I ever set foot on the damned island!”

“There is one other question,” I continued. “How are we supposed to know if Seattle has been nuked?”

“Ah, I think we have that covered,” Sonny said as he emerged to join the conversation. He carried a small wooden box with a speaker dangling from the side by wires. He sat beside me with a satisfied look.

“We built this homemade Geiger counter when we were on Gilligan’s Island,” Jeff said.

“What? How?” I asked confusedly.

“You remember when my phone kept going dead?” Sonny asked.

I nodded.

“Well, it turns out I have one of the test phones for project Tattle-Tale.”

“What the hell is project Tattle-Tale?”

Sonny looked at Jeff. Jeff explained that it was a project started by the Department of Homeland Security to fit cell phones with tiny solid state radiation detectors. When the phone detected radiation, it would call the DHS to alert them and then they would track the phone. They were trying to head off a terrorist packing around a dirty bomb.

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said.

“Of course not. They had to keep it under wraps because terrorists wouldn’t want to carry around little government Geiger counters, now would they?”

“They were in the testing phase of Project Tattle-Tale,” Jeff continued. “And they put the devices in about one out of every hundred new phones. The call back to DHS went unnoticed during normal phone usage. The user could never detect the transmission unless they knew what to look for. But Sonny’s
phone kept going dead way too soon after being charged, especially when it wasn’t being used. I never thought anything about it. But we got to talking with some of the engineers on Gilligan’s Island, and we put two and two together.

I lowered my head. “So that means we
were
in the radiation during the ash storm!”

“Yes,” interjected Jill. “But it must not have been much of a dose or we would surely know it by now. None of us has any symptoms of radiation poisoning.”

“So then you built this thing?” I asked. “What does it have to do with the phone?”

“Well, we couldn’t use Sonny’s phone as a detector because until it made the connection with the DHS, it wouldn’t reset. So we’d never know if it was detecting new radiation or still trying to call on the first detection. The engineers on the island knew what to look for so we took apart the phone, figured out which parts were which, and made our own crude Geiger counter. He motioned to the box on his lap.”

“How do you know if it works?” I asked.

He switched it on, adjusted the speaker, and it started making a series of clicks. I became nervous.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s just background radiation. It’s normal. We’ll know we’re heading into radiation when the rate of the clicks increases.”

I suddenly felt very lightheaded and weak. My head felt like a shaken compass suddenly righted, the ball rolling around inside, trying to find up. I felt my consciousness began to slip away. Jill and Jeff took hold of my arms.

“You need to take it easy,” Jill said. “You’ve had a very serious head injury. And I don’t know about you walking all the way to…”

“I’m fine!” I said as I forcibly freed my arms, determined to remain conscious. “I’m just tired, and I need to lie down.”

. . .

DAY 52 AT SEA, ENTRANCE TO THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA, NORTHWEST WASHINGTON STATE (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 48.4°N, 124.8°W)

I awakened the next day to yet another pounding headache.

I rolled over and noticed that the boat pitched in a way that I had not experienced before. The boat rolled from side to side, but there was no bow to stern motion—we felt like a boat adrift. Suddenly concerned that something was wrong, I sprung out of my bunk and nearly hit my head on Sonny’s bunk. I had to hold onto the counter, not because I was unsteady on the sea—I surely was by then—but because I was still dizzy from having gotten up too fast.

I needed aspirin badly but didn’t dare ask for any. They were already suspicious enough of my health. They would insist on going with me when we got to Whidbey, and I couldn’t have that. I rummaged quietly around the cabin but found nothing. Then I remembered Jill putting the first aid kit under her bunk near the head and subsequently and discreetly found what I was after.

I downed four of the pills and sat dizzily on the edge of the bunk. Sometimes I could convince myself that I was getting better, until I tried to do anything. I worried that I was dying. What then? Jeff knew where Kate’s parents’ house was, and I felt confident that he would check it out, even if I died. I considered talking to them all about it, but then they would know for sure that I was ill, and I would become a burden. I absolutely did not want Jeff helping me at the expense of his own family.

I emerged topside in a fog, literally and figuratively. Jeff had put the RY in park, which was some sort of maneuver that forced the sail, hull, and rudder to
produce force in opposite directions. So long as the wind and current remained fairly constant, the boat hardly moved. I had never tried it, but I’d seen Jeff do it twice, including this one. So there we sat, stuck in a fog bank. Strangely, that was our first and only encounter with the ubiquitous North Pacific fog on our entire journey. The parking maneuver put us almost head on into the southwest wind, but it was the northwest swell that rolled the boat oddly from starboard to port, which was what I had sensed below.

I found my three shipmates sitting at the helm talking. We were somewhere near the entrance to the strait, but there was no way we could attempt to enter with such low visibility and no instruments. It would have been suicide, and there were doubtlessly many ships on the sea floor below that could attest to the danger.

. . .

DAY 54 AT SEA, ENTRNACE TO THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA, NORTHWEST WASHINGTON STATE (DEAD RECKONED POSITION: 48.4°N, 124.8°W)

Two days, several arguments, and about forty secret aspirin later, it began to rain. The wind switched to easterly, and we watched the fog retreat west, like a curtain pulled offshore at the speed of the wind.

No more than three miles to our southeast, the white and orange Cape Flattery Lighthouse stepped out of the mist and stood silent and dark atop the rocky and battered Tatoosh Island. Swells grew into giant breakers that hammered the weathered ocean side bedrock of the island, while much tamer waves lapped at the vegetated shores of the inland side. The island was dotted with no more than a half dozen trees, and save for the gnarled, bushy slopes on the leeward side, only hearty grasses survived among the tattered rock outcroppings. Of the trees that managed to cling to life on the rocky island, most were twisted and bent toward the east, permanently deformed, as if shying knowingly away from millions of years of grizzly weather.

A scant half mile past Tatoosh Island loomed the far northwestern corner of mainland Washington State. I had been there as a child and never forgot the secrets it held. As I stood on the cliffs and looked down upon craggy channels filled with tiny tree-topped islets and crystal clear water and over slung by trees growing straight out of the dripping cliffs, I wondered how many people had ever ventured out that far to witness such beauty. I understood then why God put such treasures at the ends of the earth rather than right in the middle to be trampled upon and ignored.

We passed miles of breathtaking scenery, numb and nearly ambivalent to it. No one stirred as we passed the tiny fishing village of Sekiu where, as a child, I took my first chartered fishing trip with my father. I failed to set the hook on my first bite as I daydreamed about the foreign country of Canada just on the other side, and it got away. I caught a King later, but my father didn’t miss another opportunity to remind me to pay attention during the rest of the trip.

We passed Crescent Beach, where, in summers pas
t, the waters of the protected Crescent Bay almost certainly shimmered beautifully in the fading sunlight as teenagers from Port Angeles lay on blankets on the course, gray sand and had their first kiss. We passed Crescent Lake, a lake so deep and frigid that local legend maintained that the lake was actually connected to the strait through a channel at the bottom. Folklore was that huge sea creatures had been seen in the lake at night and that a subterranean connection to the ocean was the only explanation. We passed the locations of numerous Bigfoot sightings, and we never saw a thing.

We turned our make-shift Geiger counter on only occasionally, to save the batteries. It sampled nothing but background radiation.

We drew ever closer to a place I knew well: Port Angeles. The mountains jutting up in the background reminded me of my friend Sean McMasters and his parents’ ranch up there.  Last I heard, he was in the military and working toward being in the Special Forces or an Army Ranger or something. If he did indeed bug out to the ranch like he said, he was probably well-equipped.

Suddenly we saw the first sign of life—a campfire on the beach. Do we even call them campfires anymore? People weren’t out camping, they were surviving. Still, no one stirred.

A tanker had run aground on Ediz Hook Sand Spit, the tiny sliver of sand that enclosed Port Angeles Harbor. It leaned heavily and lifelessly to starboard. A massive, rusty anchor hung motionless, under its own weight, from a hole near the bow. The links in its massive chain looked large enough for a man to walk through. Massive shipping containers, the kind normally filled with useless crap from China, lay on the beach and in various states of submersion in the strait. The contents of the single container that someone had managed to get open lay strewn over the beach.

As we rounded the spit, we came face to face with our first inhabitants. A large motorboat roaring out of Port Angeles Harbor slowed to watch us. We did not have time to pull our weapons or, perhaps subconsciously, we thought better of it. Women and children scattered as men raced to the gunwale and trained their weapons on us. They watched us carefully as they passed not fifty yards in front and then to our port. They finally lowered their weapons when they were safely past and went back to their families. They probably could have taken us over were they so inclined, but they
apparently meant us no harm—however, they certainly allotted us no trust. We allowed ourselves to hope that civilization was still civilized; maybe there would be lots of people like us.

Suddenly we were downwind of Port Angeles and got our first whiff of death, North American style. The smell of rotting flesh is as unmistakable as it is indescribable—but once smelled, it is not forgotten. The intensity of the odor built as we moved further downwind of the town.

Sonny brought me out of thought with a tap to the shoulder.

“Here,” he said as he handed me a vial of menthol jelly. He mimicked rubbing his finger under his nose as if to demonstrate the procedure. I declined, reasoning that I had better get used to it.

We made it to the town of Sequim just as dark settled over the area. Being that close, I desperately wanted to continue, but it was just too dangerous at night. The wind died down considerably and shifted to the northeast, a direction which should keep the fog at bay. There was definitely a bite to the wind, though, as we anchored on the tip of Sequim’s Dungeness Spit. The five mile long sand spit is one of the longest in the world and was said to be growing by more than ten feet per year. We chose that location because it was over two miles from the mainland, afforded a three hundred and sixty degree view for security, and there was only one way in.

I chose first watch that night because I wanted to be fresh as we arrived at my drop-off point the following day. I had been out on that spit before. It was not unusual to be alone out there since Sequim was a town of only about 5,000 people, and the weather, among other things, was certainly not conducive to a sunset walk on the spit. But I found the darkness of Sequim, Port Angeles, and Victoria on the Canadian side unsettling, to say the least. The light from the cities normally bathed the area in a romantic orange glow, but that night was pitch black.