Dead Sea (7 page)

‘Fine.' Richard growled. ‘Any news of the girls?'

‘Nothing you won't be on top of. But I wondered if you'd seen the Fox Special? They've edited it all together in record time, so I hear. I'd guessed they'd run it by your guys if they haven't run it by mine.'

‘No.' Richard sat up, frowning. ‘Nobody here has said anything about it. When's it going out?'

‘Part of their package in the
One O'Clock News
programme.'

‘If that's Eastern Standard Time, then that's now,' said Richard. He reached over and grabbed the TV remote. He flipped through the Sky channels until he hit Fox International.

Suddenly it was as though Richard was looking into a mirror. His face half filled the screen. And Robin was sitting beside him. ‘Of course we have fears,' she was saying. ‘We'd be stupid not to see the risks.' The camera panned across to Liberty, scanning over a line of vital young female faces as it swept past the two crews. On the big photo wall behind them were pictures of the girls in younger days. The earnest young adventurers answering the questions were revealed in a range of attractive but alluring beachwear.

‘
Flint
is almost invisible, for example,' said Liberty, her face serious; the picture behind her showing her in seemingly skintight fencing whites. ‘A polystyrene hull doesn't give much of an image on radar after all. We've had to put extra radar reflectors aboard so that nearby shipping can make us out. We'll be sailing through some pretty busy waters, certainly to begin with . . .'

‘And how will you all get along, cooped up together for a month and more?' asked the interviewer.

‘Yes, that's another fear,' Liberty admitted. The camera lingered first on her, then on the other members of her crew as she spoke. Each of the others seemed – in younger, less sensible days – to have been beach bunnies and wannabe
Playboy
pin-ups. ‘Maya and I are old shipmates, but Emma and Bella have only sailed with us during the training and the short shakedown voyages.'

Liberty looked across towards Robin. ‘I've actually done more sailing hours with Robin and Flo Weary than I have with them. But I'm sure it'll all be fine . . .'

‘And what about your crew, Captain Mariner?'

‘The same,' answered Robin shortly. ‘We've trained together. But only Flo and I have done all that many hours together.' The pictures behind her were like something out of a beachwear catalogue. Or a lingerie directory. Nothing really in criminally bad taste, but enough to raise Richard's eyebrows. ‘But you have to understand, there was an exhaustive selection and profiling process. Catfights are the least of our worries,' insisted Robin seriously.

‘What other worries do you have, then Captain? What fears?' probed the interviewer. And Richard realized. The beachwear backdrop was not designed to make the girls seem sexy. It was to emphasize their vulnerability. And it was doing a good job.

‘Well, obviously, there's communication. We can't just pick up a cell phone and call for help if the radio crashes or the computer goes down. And in many ways the North Pacific is more remote than the Amazon rainforest or the African jungle. But I'm experienced with navigation of course, and, like Maya over there, Flo is one of the leading yachts women of her generation. As is Rohini here, in fact. And Akelita has been sailing Oceania since she was born.' The backdrop changed abruptly. Bikinis were replaced by sailing kit. Suddenly the women looked as competent as they sounded. But still the subtext lingered. Eight girls going out into the great unknown – their lives at the least at risk . . .

‘You getting this?' Richard asked Nic.

‘Yup. Scary stuff.'

‘It would be,' Richard agreed, ‘except that they're all first-rate yachtswomen as Robin says. Even if things get a bit hairy, they can handle it.' He emphasized the words, not because he needed to convince Nic but because he wished to counteract the message given out by the programme itself.

‘I hope so. Liberty's mom is worried . . .'

‘But you're OK yourself?'

‘As calm as I was the day her grandfather celebrated her fifth birthday by letting her sail out alone across Nantucket Bay. Comes with the territory. Father of boys –
you worry
. Father of girls—'

‘
You pray
. Yes. I get that. So do husbands.'

‘Some husbands. Some wives. Some prayers, I guess . . .' A light flashed beside Nic. Communication failed abruptly.

The Fox programme had cut to footage Richard had not seen before. Shots of
Katapult
sailing like a white gull across the deep blue of Te Namo Lagoon from Willy's digital camera; others of
Flint
being whirled like a snowflake across the stormy grey of English Bay.

And this cut to a big, bright map of the Pacific Ocean. All sixty-four million square miles of it. Three bright red spots gave the current positions of the yachts and of their objective. Richard strained to get some kind of accurate fix from the display, but with no success. The spots were too small; the map was too big. He sat back, his frown deeper still. He'd check up more closely on his own laptop later. In the meantime he wanted to listen.

‘And you can see at once,' said the voiceover from the invisible commentator, ‘that
Katapult
has made little progress so far. She is all but becalmed there a little north and east of Tuvalu, well south and west of Hawaii, in the middle of that huge, featureless, mid-Pacific wilderness. Whereas
Flint,
on the contrary, is sailing almost at the limit of her design speed and seems to have covered a great deal of distance. Just not quite in the right direction so far! She has been pushed well off course by the storm system above her – though she could hardly be sailing any faster, as I say. And Doctor Tanaka's bottle, the famous good ship
Cheerio
has also made surprising progress – and is very nearly at the spot he predicted it will have reached in seven days' time from now!'

It was just after two a.m. in Manila but the man who occupied the equivalent flat to Richard's at the top of the huge building that housed the main offices of Luzon Logging in the heart of Quezon City rarely slept. He too was watching the Fox Network programme, but unlike Richard he was not bothered with the excited tones of the voiceover. He had turned the sound off and was watching the subtitles instead. He slept little and was careful how he listened because of the terrible damage done to his ears. His head was long, lined, bald. His nose was pronounced. Hooked. His chin was broad and square. He had been a striking man given the mixed heritage from Dutch/Indonesian parents that had left his skin the colour of old ivory. Now he was simply memorable because of the great black boxes that clamped to either side of his skull like the jaws of a vice. If he took them off – loosened them, even, he was profoundly, helplessly deaf. His ears and much of the delicate bone structure immediately within them had been catastrophically shattered by an uncontrolled plunge from high in the air to the bottom of a deep river.

A disastrous fall for which the deaf man blamed Richard Mariner.

The long, dark Indonesian eyes watched the screen intently. Then, when the programme was finished, an unsteady hand rewound it so that the intent gaze could observe the bikini-clad forms of the eight contestants once again.

Like Richard, he recognized that the message here was one of vulnerability, not of sexual availability. But the problem was that this man was excited by power. And he most enjoyed exercising it over people who were vulnerable. It was the exploitation of vulnerability, the pressure he could bring to bear on his victims towards helplessness and humiliation that most excited him. It was a pleasure that he practised in private on the rare occasions that the desire overcame him. And those few victims whose helplessness he enjoyed to the full never survived to tell the tale.

And now his greatest enemy seemed to have sent eight of his most attractively vulnerable associates in two almost laughably fragile craft into the vastness of the North Pacific. Into the deaf man's playground. And, as with the ridiculous Japanese doctor's pointless bottle of Cheerio, the women's vessels were fitted with tracking devices so he would know at any time of the day or night exactly where they were. Exactly where he could get his hands on them, when the desire to do so became too strong to control any longer.

The phone began to ring but he did not hear it. And such was his concentration on the defenceless bodies frozen on the screen that he did not even see the warning light flashing in time to the urgent sound.

It was just after three in the morning in Tokyo, but Dr Reona Tanaka still found it impossible to sleep. A man of lifelong abstinence, he was on his third bottle of Sake. A man of strict propriety, he had nevertheless spent an evening of extremely improper, unprofessional abandon in the arms of one of his most beautiful colleagues. A man of almost monastic self-denial, he now found that the sight of his new-found love returning naked from the bathroom of his tiny university flat made him ready for action again – for the fourth time since he had realized the truth.

Seeing how ready he was once more, Dr Aika Rei stepped delicately astride him and prepared to lower herself. ‘You're sure?' she teased again, taking him gently in hand. ‘You're
certain
?'

‘I have the number written down. There can be no mistake. I have the winning ticket.'

Satisfied, she settled into place once more and leaned forward until her hair formed a fragrant tent around his face. ‘And where have you put it? Where is the ticket itself?' she whispered.

And the realization cut through the euphoria then. Through the euphoria, the sake and the sensuality. He felt himself begin to soften as he looked up at her with simple horror.

‘I put it in the bottle with all the others,' he whispered soberly. ‘It's in the good ship
Cheerio
somewhere out in the middle of the ocean. All one-hundred-and-ten-million US dollars' worth of it.'

‘L
ook,' shouted Liberty, raising her voice only just above the relentless storm to reach Maya down in the communications and navigation area –
the snug,
as they called it now. Maya, like the rest of them, was dressed in orange oilskins as though they were sailing at the North Pole instead of British Columbia. ‘We just have to stay calm. This won't last, and at least its swinging us round so we're almost back on course. Think how far we've come already!'

‘Yeah. More than a thousand miles. Mostly in the wrong direction.'

Liberty closed her eyes for a moment and tried not to get distracted as the wind inflated her hood like a beach ball, almost literally making her light-headed. Thank God she had abandoned the idea of live camera coverage almost immediately, she thought. What they lost in publicity value they would gain by protecting their reputations. ‘Oh, come on, Maya! Where's the grit you showed in your last scheduled contact with
Katapult
?
Flint
is streets ahead of
her
. All we have to do is stay calm, keep going and try not to weaken.'

‘But three days. Three whole days and then some. We're coming up for eighty hours! Watch on watch. And for what?!'

Liberty had split the crew into two watches. It had been the last thing she did on camera. But even that had been a bit of a challenge. Should she keep Maya with her and make it seem like Stanford versus USC? Or should she head one watch and let Maya head the other – as though the Stanford students couldn't trust the Southern Californians to do it on their own. There was the potential for a downside either way. Especially when time and tiredness took their toll.

In the end she decided to keep Maya with her because her fellow Stanford student could be so negative, though Liberty had kept this motivation strictly to herself. She did not want the world to know what a pain she thought her watch-mate could be at times. At times such as the present, in fact. But Liberty could see Maya's point. The last three days had been hellish. With the best will in the world they couldn't have filmed any of it. They had trouble enough keeping up with their scheduled contacts – with
Katapult
, with the back-up teams ashore.

But in the face of it all,
Flint
had held together. And the stormbound run to the south of their planned course had at least kept them too close to land to make the really big seas a threat no matter how squally the wind became down to the south of Portland. But the girls had all become seasick with morale-destroying regularity. Nelson's ailment and the relentless cold were really beginning to sap their strength now. To use up the very last of Maya's very limited supply of good nature. Especially as she was beginning to suspect that the USC watch was pulling a good deal less than their weight.

In consultation with Robin, on camera for the world to see, Liberty had worked out a watch schedule designed to let the teams she finally selected get a reasonable amount of rest – under the right circumstances. Given her English training, it had seemed an uncomfortable liberty to take with a tradition almost as old as the age of sail, but she and Robin had decided that if they allowed two seven-hour night watches – from nine p.m. to four a.m., then four a.m. to eleven, the rest of the day would split conveniently into five two-hour watches. So team A would get the nine to four night watch on the first night and the four to eleven a.m. one the next day, and so in rotation, day after day as necessary, with everybody up and about from eleven a.m. to nine p.m., notionally taking charge watch by watch in two-hour blocks as the daylight hours passed.

It had looked OK on paper – but, like everything else they had planned, it had all gone to hell in a handcart in the face of the relentless storms. Now it was just past eleven a.m. Watch A, the Stanford girls, should have been relieved the better part of ten minutes ago. The USC Watch B girls were still asleep – militantly so – almost
mutinously
so, said Maya venomously, thoroughly disgruntled.