“I regret that you must leave us,” said Dorsett between bites of toast heaped with caviar. “A pity you couldn’t have stayed for brunch.”
“Don’t you know you’re supposed to boycott caviar?” said Pitt. “Poachers have nearly driven sturgeon to extinction.”
Dorsett shrugged apathetically. “So it costs a few dollars more.”
Pitt turned, his eyes staring over the empty sea, starting to look ugly from the approaching storm. “We were told we were to board another boat.”
“And so you shall.”
“Where is it?”
“Floating alongside.”
“I see,” Pitt said quietly. “I see indeed. You plan to set us adrift.”
Dorsett rubbed food from his mouth with a napkin with the savoir-faire of an auto mechanic wiping his greasy hands. “I apologize for providing such a small craft, one without an engine, I might add, but it’s all I have to offer.”
“A nice sadistic touch. You enjoy the thought of our suffering.”
Giordino glanced at two high-performance powerboats that were cradled on the upper deck of the yacht. “We’re overwhelmed by your generosity.”
“You should be grateful that I’m giving you a chance to live.”
“Adrift in a part of the sea devoid of maritime traffic, directly in the path of a storm.” Pitt scowled. “The least you should do is supply pen and paper to make out our last wills and testaments.”
“Our conversation has ended. Good-bye, Mr. Pitt, Mr. Giordino, bon voyage.” Dorsett nodded at John Merchant. “Show these NUMA scum to their craft.”
Merchant pointed to a gate in the railing that was swung open.
“What, no confetti and streamers?” muttered Giordino.
Pitt stepped to the edge of the deck and stared down at the water. A small semi-inflatable boat bobbed in the water beside the yacht. Three meters in length by two meters wide, it had a fiberglass V-hull that appeared sturdy. The center compartment, however, would barely hold four people, the neoprene outer flotation tube taking up half the boat. The craft had mounted an outboard engine at one time, but that had been removed. The control cables still dangled from a center console. The interior was empty except for a figure in Pitt’s leather jacket huddled in one end.
Cold rage swept Pitt. He took Merchant by the collar of his yachting jacket and cast him aside as easily as if he’d been a straw scarecrow. He stormed back to the dining table before he could be stopped. “Not Maeve too,” he said sharply.
Dorsett smiled, but it was an expression completely lacking in humor. “She took her ancestor’s name, she can suffer as her ancestor did.”
“You bastard!” Pitt snarled with animal hate. “You fornicating scab-!” That was as far as he got. One of Merchant’s guards rammed the butt of his automatic rifle viciously in Pitt’s side, just above the kidney.
A tidal wave of agony consumed Pitt, but sheer wrath kept him on his feet. He lurched forward, grabbed the tablecloth in both hands, gave a mighty jerk and wrenched it into the air. Glasses, knives, forks, spoons, serving dishes and plates filled with gourmet treats exploded over the deck with a great clatter. Pitt then threw himself across the table at Dorsett, not with the mere intent to strike him or choke him to death. He knew he’d have one, and only one, chance at maiming the man. He extended his index fingers and jabbed just as he was smothered in guards. A maddened Boudicca slung her hand down in a ferocious chop to Pitt’s neck, but she missed and caught him on the shoulder. One of Pitt’s fingers missed its target and scraped over Dorsett’s forehead. The other struck home, and he heard an agonized primeval scream. Then he felt the blows raining on him in every bone of his body, then nothing as the crazy melee snapped into blackness.
Pitt woke and thought he was in some bottomless pet or a cave deep in the earth. Or at least in the depths of some underground cavern where there was only eternal darkness. Desperately, he tried to feel his way out, but it was like stumbling through a labyrinth. Lost in the throes of a nightmare, doomed to wander forever in a black maze, he thought vaguely. Then suddenly, for no more than the blink of an eye, he saw a dim light far ahead. He reached out for it and watched it grow into dark clouds scudding across the sky.
“Praise be, Lazarus is back from the dead.” Giordino’s voice seemed to come from a city block away, partially drowned out by the rumble of traffic. “And just in time to die again, by the look of the weather.”
As he became fully conscious, Pitt wished he could return to the forbidding labyrinth. Every square centimeter of his body throbbed with pain. From his skull to his knees, it seemed every bone was broken. He tried to sit up, but stopped in mid-motion and groaned in agony. Maeve touched his cheek and. cradled his shoulders with one arm. “It will hurt less if you don’t try to move.”
He looked up into her face. The sky-blue eyes were wide with caring and affection. As if she were weaving a spell, he could feel her love falling over him like gossamer, and the agony slipped away as if drawn from his veins.
“Well, I certainly made a mess of things, didn’t I?” he murmured.
She slowly shook her head, the long blond hair trailing across his cheeks. “No, no, don’t think that. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.”
“Merchant’s boys worked you over pretty good before throwing you off the yacht. You look like you were used for batting practice by the Los Angeles Dodgers.”
Pitt struggled to a sitting position. “Dorsett?”
“I suspect you may have fixed one of his eyes so he’ll look like a real pirate when he slips on his eye patch. Now all he needs is a dueling scar and a hook.”
“Boudicca and Deirdre carried him inside the salon during the brawl,” said Maeve. “If Merchant had realized the full extent of Father’s injury, there is no telling what he might have done to you.”
Pitt’s gaze swept an empty and ominous sea through eyes that were swollen and half closed “They’re gone?”
“Tried to run us over before they cut and ran to beat the storm,” said Giordino. “Lucky for us the neoprene floats on our raft, and without an engine that’s all you can call it, rebounded off the yacht’s bows. As it was, we came within a hair of capsizing.”
Pitt refocused his eyes on Maeve. “So they left us to drift like your great-great-great-grandmother, Betsy Fletcher.”
She stared at him oddly. “How did you know about her? I never told you.”
“I always investigate the women I want to spend the rest of my life with.”
“And a short life it’ll be,” said Giordino, pointing grimly to the northwest. “Unless my night-school class in meteorology steered me wrong, we’re sitting in the path of what they call in these parts a typhoon, or maybe a cyclone, depending how close we are to the Indian Ocean.”
The sight of the dark clouds and the streaks of lightning followed by the threatening rumble of thunder was enough to make Pitt lose heart as he peered across the sea and listened to the increasing wind. The margin between life and death had narrowed to a paper’s, thickness. Already the sun was blotted out and the sea turned gray. The tiny boat was minutes away from being swallowed by the maelstrom.
Pitt hesitated no longer. “The first order of the day is to rig a sea anchor.” He turned to Maeve. “We’ll need my leather jacket and some line and anything that will help create a drag to keep us from capsizing in heavy seas.”
Without a word, she slipped out of the coat and handed it to him while Giordino rummaged in a small storage locker under a seat. He came up with a rusty grappling hook attached to two sections of nylon line, one five meters, the other, three meters. Pitt laid open the jacket and filled it with everyone’s shoes and the grappling hook, along with some old engine parts and several corroded tools Giordino had scrounged from the storage locker.
Then he zipped it up, knotted the sleeves around the open waistband and collar and tied the makeshift bundle to the shorter nylon line. He cast it over the side and watched it sink before tying the other
end of the line solidly to the walk-around console mounted with the useless controls for the missing outboard engine.
“Lie on the floor of the boat,” ordered Pitt, tying the remaining line around the center console. “We’re in for a wild ride. Loop the line around your waists and tie off the end so we won’t lose the boat if we capsize and are thrown in the sea.”
He took one last look over the neoprene buoyancy tubes at the menacing swells that swept in from a horizon that lifted and dropped. The sea was ugly and beautiful of the same time. Lightning streaked through the purple-black clouds, and the thunder came like the roll from a thousand drums. The tumult fell on them without pity. The full force of the gale, accompanied by a torrential rain, a drenching downpour that blocked out the sky ant turned the sea into a boiling broth of foam, struck them less then ten minutes later. The drops, whipped by a wind that howled like a thousand banshees, pelted them so hard it stung their skin.
Spray was hurled from wave crests that rose three meters above the troughs. All too quickly the waves reached a height of seven meters, broken and confused, striking the boat from one direction and then another. The wind increased its shrieking violence as the sea doubled its frightening onslaught against the frail boat and its pitiful passengers. The boat was stewing and corkscrewing violently as it was tossed up on the wave crests before being plunged into the troughs. There was no sharp dividing line between air and sea. They couldn’t tell where one began and the other left off.
Miraculously, the sea anchor was not torn away. It did its duty and exerted its drag, preventing the sea gone berserk from capsizing the boat and throwing everyone into the murderous waters from which there was no return. The gray waves curled down upon them, filling the boat’s interior with churning foam, soaking them all to the skin, but tending to pull the center of gravity deeper in the water, giving an extra fraction of stability. The twisting motion and the choppy rise and fall of the boat whirled their cargo of seawater around their bodies, making them feel they were being whipped inside a juice blender.
In a way, the size of the tiny craft was a blessing. The neoprene tubes around the sides made it as buoyant as a cork. No matter how violent the tempest, the durable hull would not burst into pieces, and if the sea anchor held, it would not capsize. Like the palms that leaned in the wind from gale-force winds, it would endure. The next twenty-four minutes passed like twenty-four hours, and as they hung on grimly to stay alive, Pitt found it hard to believe the storm had not overwhelmed them. There was no word, no description for the misery.
The never-ending walls of water poured into the boat, leaving the three of them choking and gasping until the boat was thrust up and onto the crest of the next swell. There was no need for bailing. The weight of the water filling the interior helped keep them from capsizing. One second they were struggling to keep from floating over the sides of the tubes, the following second preparing for the next frenzied motion, as they fell into a trough, to keep from being slung into the air.
With Maeve between them, each with one arm-protectively draped over her body, Pitt and Giordino braced their feet against the sides for support. If one of them was thrown froth the boat, there could be no chance of rescue. No soul could survive alone in the writhing sea. The downpour cut visibility to a few meters, and they would quickly be lost to view.
During a flash of lightning, Pitt looked over at Maeve. She looked convinced that she had been dropped into hell and must have been suffering the torment of the damned from seasickness. Pitt wished he could have consoled her with words, but she could never have heard him over the howl of the wind. He cursed the name of Dorsett. God, how terrible it was to have a father and sisters who hated her enough to steal away her children and then try to murder her because she was good and kind and refused to be a part of their criminal acts. It was horribly wrong and unfair. She could not die, he told himself, not as long as he still lived. He gripped her shoulder and gave it an affectionate squeeze. Then he stared at Giordino.
Giordino’s expression was stoic. His apparent nonchalance under such hell reassured Pitt. Whatever will be, will be, was written in his eyes. There was no limit to the man’s endurance. Pitt knew that Giordino would push himself beyond the depths of understanding, even die, long before he would let loose his grip on the boat and Maeve. He would never surrender to the sea.
Giordino’s friend of thirty years looked as though he could go on forever. Giordino ceased to be amazed by Pitt’s fortitude and love for adversity. Pitt thrived on disaster and calamity. Oblivious to the frenzied pounding by the swells, he did not look like a man waiting for the end, a man who felt there was nothing he could do against the furies of the sea. His eyes gazed into the sheets of rain and froth that lashed his face, strangely remote. Almost as if he were sitting high and dry in his hangar apartment, his mind seemed concentrated elsewhere, disembodied and in a vacuum. Pitt was, Giordino had thought on more than one occasion while they were in or under the sea, a man utterly at home in his own element.
Almost as if their minds worked together simultaneously, Giordino looked to see how Pitt was faring. There were two kinds of men, he thought. There were those who saw the devil waiting for their soul and were deathly afraid of him. And there were those who mired themselves in hopelessness and looked upon him as a relief from their worldly misery. Pitt was of neither kind. He could stare at the devil and spit in his eye.
Darkness came and passed, a night of torment that never seemed to end. They were numbed by the cold and constantly soaked. The chill cut through their flesh like a thousand knives. Dawn was a deliverance from hearing the waves roar and break without seeing them. With a sunrise shrouded by the convulsive clouds, they still grimly hung onto life by the barest of threads. They longed for daylight, but it finally came in a strange gray light that illuminated the terrible sea like an old black-and-white motion picture.
Despite the savagery of the turbulence, the atmosphere was hot and oppressive, a salty blanket that was too thick to breathe. The passage of time had no relation to the dials of their wristwatches. Pitt’s old Doxa and Giordino’s newer Aqualand Pro were watertight to two hundred meters deep and kept on ticking, but saltwater had seeped into Maeve’s little digital watch and it soon stopped.
Not long after the sea went on its rampage, Maeve buried her head against the bottom of a flotation tube and prayed that she might live to see her boys again prayed that she would not die without giving them fond memories of her, not some vague recollection that she was lost and buried in an uncaring sea. She agonized over their fate in the hands of her father. At first she had been more frightened than at any other moment in her life, the fear like a cold avalanche of snow that smothered her. Then gradually it began to subside as she realized the arms of the men about her back and shoulders never let up their pressure. Their self-control seemed extraordinary, and their strength seemed to flow inside her. With men such as these protecting her, a spark grew and nurtured the imperceptible but growing belief that she just might still be alive to see another dawn.
Pitt was not nearly so optimistic. He was well aware that his and Giordino’s energy was waning. Their worst enemies were the unseen threats of hypothermia and fatigue. Something had to give, their tenacity or the storm’s violence. The constant effort to keep from drowning had taken all they had to give. The fight had been against all odds, and total exhaustion was just around the comer. And yet, he refused to see the futility of it all. He clung to life, drawing on his dwindling reserve of strength, holding tight as the next wave engulfed them, knowing their time to die was fast approaching.
But Pitt, Maeve and Giordino did not die.
By early evening there was an easing of the wind, and the jumbled seas began to diminish shortly after. Unknown to them, the typhoon had veered off its earlier course from the northwest and suddenly headed southeast toward the Antarctic. The wind velocity noticeably slackened, down from over 150 kilometers to a little below 60, and the seas curtailed their madness, th
e distance between the wave crests and the troughs decreasing to no more than 3 meters. The rain thinned into a light drizzle that became a mist, hovering over the flattened swells. Overhead, a lone gull materialized from nowhere, before darkness swept the seas again, and circled the little boat, screaming as if in stunned surprise at seeing it still afloat.
In another hour, the sky was clear of clouds, and the wind was hardly strong enough to sail a sloop in. It was as if the storm were a bad dream that struck in the night and vanished with the soft light of day. They had won only one battle in a war with the elements. The savage seas and the cruel winds had failed to take them into the depths. What the great whirling storm could not destroy with its murderous fury, it rewarded with clemency.
It seemed almost mystical, Maeve thought. If they were destined to die, they never would have lived through the storm. We were kept alive for a purpose, she decided staunchly.
No word passed among the fatigued and battered trio huddled in the boat. Consoled by the calm in the wake of the departed tempest, exhausted beyond endurance, they entered a region of utterly uncaring indifference to their circumstances and fell into deep sleep.
The swells retained a mild chop until the next morning, a legacy of the storm, before the seas became as liquid smooth as a millpond. The mist had long since faded, and visibility cleared to the far reaches of empty horizons. Now the sea settled down to achieve by attrition what it had failed to achieve by frenzied intensity. They slowly awoke to a sun they had sorely missed for the last forty-eight hours but that now burned down on them with unrelenting severity.
An attempt to sit up sent waves of pain through Pitt’s body. The battering from the sea was added to the injuries he had suffered from John Merchant’s men. Blinking against the dazzling glare of the sun’s reflection on the water, he very slowly eased himself to a sitting position. There was nothing to do now but lie in the boat and wait. But wait for what? Wait in the forlorn hope that a ship might appear over the horizon on a direct course toward them? They were drifting in a dead part of the sea, far from the shipping lanes, where ships rarely sailed.
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