Mariner's Ark

by Peter Tonkin

  ‘Can you get to us?’ shouted Liberty. ‘The sail seems safe for the time being. It’ll keep us out of the water, at least.’

  Once again, a weary arm waved to show that the others had understood. And immediately the J hook started to move determinedly towards the sail as Maya and Emma started kicking in unison. Satisfied that there was nothing else she could do for them for the moment, Liberty began to look around. Her kneeling position on the sail gave her a view over the tops of the waves, though she couldn’t see all that far. The set of the steep-sided chop all around them was disturbed by what looked like a ring of bright orange basketballs. They curled around almost in a circle, then wandered away downwind into the distance. And right in the shadowy heart of that distance, every now and then, something shone with the same jewel brightness as the rescue lights on their Gills. It was only when she saw the bright orange balls and recognized them as net floats that Liberty began to understand what had happened to them.

  ‘Flo,’ she said to her companion, ‘it looks as though we got tangled up in some kind of drift net. But I can’t see a trawler. It must have come free.’

  ‘Really?’ Florence answered, her voice flat with exhaustion and depression. ‘Better hope whoever left some kind of drift net drifting out here hadn’t caught much in it, then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Scavengers. Sharks. They’ll be around as soon as they smell death. And they won’t care whether they’re eating dead tuna or a living yachtswomen.’

  ‘OK,’ allowed Liberty bracingly, narrowing her eyes automatically and looking out for Maya and Emma, only to realize at once that the waves which surrounded them all looked like sharks fins anyway. ‘But on the other hand, whoever lost the net might well look for it. Especially if the catch was good.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Florence’s tone made it clear she supposed nothing of the sort.

  ‘And in any case, my dad’ll be coming after us as fast as he can the moment he realizes he’s lost radar and AIS contact.’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to get so far ahead of him after all.’

  Liberty bit back a retort. Then she took a deep breath, thinking that Katapult8 must have meant so much more to the daughter of the man who designed and built her – who designed and built a fair bit of her herself – than it did to the woman who’d merely bought her and sailed her. ‘You think?’ she said instead. But as she spoke, the float nearest to them jerked under the surface, as though something pretty big had become caught in the net. Or as though something pretty big was eating something that was caught in the net. ‘Come on, Emma,’ she called. ‘Give it all you’ve got, girl!’

  A few moments later, the shark fin of the J hook was bumping against the metre-high wall of the sail’s edge. Liberty reached down and caught Emma’s raised hand, hanging on tightly to one of the toeholds, just as she had done with Florence, and pulled the Japanese Olympic sailor aboard. Flo shook herself out of her depressed inactivity and pulled Maya on to the sail as well, using the grab handle on the lifejacket. The sail was so massive and so buoyant that it hardly registered the added weight or activity. It just sat on the water like a huge black raft. Then the four of them lay spread out like starfish and gasped at the humid air, waiting for their pulses to slow down.

  But not for long. ‘This won’t do,’ said Liberty, rolling over and kneeling up again. ‘Did any of you see anything of Katapult8? If she’s still tangled in the net I’m game to get my lifejacket off and go down after the life raft.’

  ‘She’s gone,’ said Maya. ‘I saw her going as I cut my lifeline. I was pretty damn lucky not to go down with her.’

  ‘Don’t get ideas above your station,’ said Liberty. ‘That’s the captain’s job. But Katapult8’s gone, you’re sure?’

  ‘Deep six,’ said Maya. ‘Davy Jones. Full fathom five. Gone.’

  ‘Right. Then what I suggest is this, just for the time being. Flo, you snap your harness on to the inertia-reel toggle and you two tie the ends of your lifelines to Flo’s harness. I’ll do the same in a moment and that way we’ll all be secured. In the meantime, while things are relatively settled, I’ll stand up and take one good look around.’

  While the other three were doing as she suggested, Liberty slowly and carefully pulled herself erect. In actual fact, the sail was pretty steady. Her footing on the black composite was quite secure. And yet Liberty felt as though she was on a tightrope. The situation went straight into her unconscious – the difference between walking along a metre-wide pavement on Knight Way outside her alma mater in Stanford and crossing a metre-wide ledge high in the Himalayas. Even erect, on the stable platform of the sail, her calf and thigh muscles jumped and her torso felt dangerously top-heavy, making her wave her arms for balance. The wind didn’t help, blowing steadily from the north-west. But after a few moments she straightened and her eyes cleared.

  She saw the serpentine pattern of bright orange floats more clearly and followed the bobbing tail of the things across the restless ocean until they ended in that bright, flashing light made more vivid by the gathering darkness out there. It was a phenomenon she found acutely disturbing, given that it was early morning and ought to have been getting brighter – not darker. But then, right in the very distance, far beyond that flashing light, she saw something else. A shape back there in the shadows that looked to her like some kind of vessel. A small one, running without lights, that seemed to come and go like a ghost ship. It was so vague and fleeting that she wondered whether it was anything more than a coincidence of shadows and wishful thinking.

  And Liberty was still trying to focus on this, to get some kind of idea exactly what and where the mysterious vision was, when something hit her on the back of the head. She staggered, her imagination conjuring everything from attacking seagulls to flying fish. She began to turn and was hit again – on the ear this time. An ear that was instantly full of water. She looked down. The composite at her feet seemed to explode as though a little bomb had detonated there. One the size of a baseball. She turned further still and looked up. The blue of the morning sky had vanished. In its place there was a low scud of rapidly moving overcast. And beneath it trailed grey veils of rain, sweeping across the agitated ocean towards her. Another raindrop hit her, square on the forehead with enough force to make her stagger. It was the size of a baseball – and felt as hard as one into the bargain. Within a heartbeat, the four women marooned on the sail, unprotected in the middle of the ocean, found themselves at the heart of a deluge that would have done credit to Angel Falls.

  NINETEEN

  ‘Look, Nic,’ said Robin, keeping her voice at its calmest and most reasonable, ‘the chances are that Katapult8’s AIS has just gone offline again. That’s all. If anything more serious had happened, we’d know about it, wouldn’t we? I mean, if Katapult8 was in trouble the girls would radio for help.’

  ‘That’s all very well, but I’ve radioed them and they’re not replying.’

  ‘Nic, you know that’s Liberty playing her mind games with you. She was sneaking around and hiding yesterday evening. Now she’s probably got a wind that we haven’t caught yet and is making such good time she doesn’t want to give anything away. That was the last message, wasn’t it? They were coming up past forty knots and due in Puerto Banderas by sometime tonight? That’s probably what’s happening, then. If there was anything serious enough to put the yacht at immediate risk, especially if this rain has started wherever she is, they’d go into their life raft, and that has EPIRB emergency beacons which would alert us automatically – alert everyone from Canada to Costa Rica. Really. Think about it. They are four of the most competent sailors in the world, in one of the best-designed vessels afloat. Face it, Nic. In this case no news really is good news.’

  Nic didn’t look convinced, though he nodded in courteous agreement.

  But Robin could see why he was worried. She had never come across rain like this. Huge drops were smashing down out of the low sky with astonishing force. The wipers
on Maxima’s clear-view windscreen had given up the fight and seemed just to be sliding an inch of solid water back and forth across opaque glass. Even Robin’s most reasonable tones had to be projected in her quarterdeck voice as though calling down half the length of a super tanker instead of across Maxima’s command bridge. Water thundered on to the deckhead above them as though they were trapped beneath a waterfall. The decks outside were inches deep in seething water, even though they were open, with nothing but deck rails surrounding them. Robin had visions of paint and varnish being stripped from metal and wood, as though the downpour was as powerful as a sandblaster.

  Nic had ordered the automatic cover to be slid into place over the pool, which was just as well, Robin thought, or it would have been overflowing. Not that it made much difference to the amount of water cascading off the lower deck – just in its temperature and quality. What little could be seen of the sea that they were sailing in seemed to be boiling fiercely. Indeed, the surface was so completely shattered by the downpour that it formed a low mist which looked disturbingly like steam.

  And yet there was almost no wind. That was part of what made this such a strange experience. That the sky could be vomiting down gallon after gallon of water hour after hour on to Maxima, but without a storm or even a squall. Robin had a mental image of a wedge of air trapped against the Baja California, backed hard up against the Cordillera’s ten-thousand-foot peaks while the ARkStorm was forced to rise high above it. Forced up fast enough to be losing some of its massive weight of water, even out here. It would have to be a wedge of hot air rather than cold, which tested even her meteorological understanding to its limit. Yet there was something. Right at the back of her mind. What did they call it? A temperature inversion? Was that it? But whether this inversion was real or something she was making up, it was all she could envisage that made any kind of sense of the weather they were experiencing now. If Katapult8 was caught in this, whether she was becalmed or running at forty knots before a friendly wind, then Nic would be getting a radio call, no matter how much pride and humble pie his over-competitive daughter would have to swallow.

  And then she thought of Richard’s all-too accurate words: ‘This ARkStorm everyone’s been so worried about isn’t going to hit Long Beach and LA after all. It’s going to hit Mexico. Everywhere from Tijuana to Puerto Banderas and on down south. Wherever Katapult8 and the girls are, they’re likely to be right in the worst of it.’ The only thing he had missed out was that Maxima would find herself in the way of it as well, particularly as she was going at full speed south after the girls like a blind man running across a motorway.

  But then she realized that this might not, in fact, be the worst of it.

  Humming thoughtlessly and nearly silently as she crossed to the forward section of the command bridge, she was surprised to find she was unconsciously partway through an old Bob Dylan song about dead oceans and hard rain falling down. That’s all I need, she thought. Both Bob Dylan and my bloody husband screwing up my head.

  ‘What’s that?’ demanded Nic suddenly, his voice pitched loud to overcome the roaring rain, his tone rising with tension. ‘Looks like some kind of emergency beacon ten or so miles dead ahead of us.’

  Robin and Captain Toro crossed to stand beside him at once. The three of them crowded together in silence, looking into the ship’s state-of-the-art electronic display. There were screens showing readings from the big navigation and communications systems in the white domes on the communications masts high up above them. Sonar, radar and satellite feeds, each with their own display. Then there was a big central screen where all the information came together. And, just as Nic said, this screen showed, somewhere way out ahead, a tiny signal. An electronic contact registered by something in low orbit over their heads and rebroadcast to their displays down here. Matched with the sonar feed and the collision alarm radar, then put on to the electronic chart that reflected their immediate environs above and below the surface. And that little point of electronically generated brightness could only mean one thing. Maybe twelve miles up ahead of Maxima, someone was probably having quite a serious emergency.

  Robin wondered whether either of the men beside her saw the irony of the fact that the emergency signal was in all likelihood being picked up and broadcast to them by the same NOAA satellites that were watching the ARkStorm which was making their current predicament so risky. But even she remained ignorant of the fact that the downpour was limiting the range of their radar, so that although the pre-programmed bands reached outwards promising to see contacts as far away as one, five, ten, fifteen and twenty miles, the radar could actually scarcely see less than five with any accuracy. Had Pilar, which was in fact twenty miles south-east of them and easing north-west on a reciprocal course, had her location system switched on, the NOAA satellites would have displayed her position accurately in spite of the torrential rain. But she did not, and so, although the bright emergency beacon blinked on the read-outs clearly enough some twelve miles ahead, the fishing boat remained invisible to Maxima.

  ‘It’s too small to be a lifeboat beacon,’ said Robin after a moment. ‘They tend to be emergency position indicating radio beacons: EPIRBs. Like I said, the ones on Katapult8’s life raft certainly are. This may be something smaller, maybe a personal locator beacon or PLB. Like you might find on a lifebelt.’

  ‘On a lifebelt!’ said Nic, horrified at the thought of someone actually in the water under these conditions.

  ‘Not one of ours,’ said Robin. ‘Didn’t you tell me the girls’ Gill Marine lifejackets didn’t have individual beacons? Just lights, whistles and grab handles. Basic standard issue with no fancy bits to get in the way and slow them down. Lean and mean. If they’re in trouble, they’ll activate the life raft and their big, bright, in-your-face EPIRBS satellite locator beacons.’

  ‘It’s what they’ve planned and practised.’ Nic nodded, a measure of relief creeping into his voice.

  ‘Still, Señor Greenbaum,’ said Captain Toro quietly, ‘we should go to this beacon. It may be your daughter or it may not. But it is somebody. And it looks as though they may need help.’

  ‘If they’re out on the water in this,’ said Robin, ‘they will certainly need help. And we are likely to be the only vessel in the immediate area not running for safe haven. The only vessel about legitimate business, at any rate. If we don’t go and check it out then it’s a fair bet no one else is going to.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Nic grimly. ‘It’s on our way. And anyone out on the water in this will need all the help they can get. Especially if, as you say, there’s no one else likely to be out there except pirates, smugglers or drug runners.’

  TWENTY

  ‘Have you ever known rain like this, Capitan?’ asked Miguel-Angel, simply awed as he stood and looked over Carlos Santiago’s shoulder out at the watery nothingness cascading blindingly down the windows of Pilar’s bridge.

  Carlos grunted his customary paternal ‘don’t bother me now, boy’ reply. Given an edge, if the truth be told, by the fact that it had been Miguel-Angel at the helm when everything went so catastrophically wrong. But, in spite of the fact that he was little more than a metre away, Miguel-Angel didn’t hear it over the relentless roaring of the downpour.

  Pilar was feeling her way gingerly forward through the blinding deluge as her capitan nursed her badly damaged engine into turning the twisted shaft that made her dented and misaligned propeller spin. The loss of the net, the inexperienced helmsman’s unthinking demand for full power at the worst possible moment and the way the propeller had leaped right out of the water while this was all going on had done more damage than even Carlos Santiago could have imagined. But, he told himself, he blamed himself, and then his bad luck, long before he blamed Miguel-Angel. Besides, now that the damage had been assessed and some basic repairs put in place, Pilar had come back to life.

  Carlos had long since stopped worrying about the torrential rain, for, once the wind had fallen away, the hull and upper works
were well enough maintained to keep most of the weather out. The unsettling, sharp-sided chop was even easing back into the familiar sets of long Pacific rollers he and Pilar knew so well. Besides, he had a simple, unalterable mission: to follow the faint signal of the beacon he had providentially attached to the end of the net. To find it and to pull it aboard no matter what the heavens were throwing down at them. To fill his freezer holds with the biggest catch Pilar had ever brought home in all her life, if the nets were as full as he hoped and prayed they were. If San Telmo, patron saint of sailors, would intervene for them. If San Andreas, patron of fishermen, looked kindly down. If Hernan and the others had fixed the winch by the time Carlos found the net. If the propeller maintained them on a true course and kept turning. If the twisted shaft did not warp any further or jump out of its bed along the keel or – heaven forbid – break altogether. If the motor that kept both of them turning and also worked the winch continued to do so until Hernan and the others pulled the catch aboard and Pilar brought them safely – and richly – back to her dock by Los Muertos.

  The fact that his equipment saw so little – for it was hardly even comparable to that aboard Maxima twenty miles north-west of him and racing blindly south-east towards that same faint beacon – meant that he had to rely on his instincts. And, although his experience was wide enough to give him almost god-like status in the boy’s eyes, the fact was that age was beginning to dull them. And desperation, in any case, was driving him more powerfully than his usual care and caution. It was as though the act of letting that net go out over the transom had changed him from a model citizen to a desperate pirata.

  Straining forward over the wheel, able to see no more than the boy whose reflection filled the windscreen from behind his right shoulder, Carlos eased the throttles another couple of centimetres forward. The engine responded without complaint. The twisted shaft remained in its bed. The battered propeller turned faster. The faint signal on his battered old screen seemed to approach more rapidly. He allowed a little hope to trickle in among the prayers. ‘Go down and see how work is coming on the winch, Miguel-Angel,’ he ordered. The reflection of the boy sitting like a good angel on his right shoulder deepened the guilt the old man was feeling at what he was doing and deadened the hope as it threatened the efficacy of the prayers. He half expected to find a devil reflected on his left shoulder prompting him to run faster down the wide, welcoming road to hell, like in the Sunday-school stories of his youth. But when he looked up again the screen was empty of all reflections except for his own. And he wondered for a fleeting, bitter moment whether he was becoming a devil himself.