by Peter Tonkin
‘Someone in the water? In this? Hell, yes! I think we could give it a try. What are the sea conditions like? It feels like a fairground ride down here.’
‘Hairy. But that’s my call. You just get ready to start reversing on my command. And thanks for giving us power and light.’
‘That’s OK. We’ll try for heat later. Out.’
‘Right,’ said Toro. ‘We’ll try. I need someone on the radar who can feed me precise headings and distances.’
‘I can do that,’ said Nic. ‘I’ve spent enough time with Liberty—’
‘Someone mention my name?’ asked Liberty as she came on to the bridge. ‘I’ve left the others below either asleep or crouched over sick bowls. This is sure as heck one rough ride! What’s going on?’
Two minutes later she was at her father’s side poring over the collision alarm radar, calling out headings and distances even more expertly than Nic could have done as Toro began to position Maxima for a run back to where the beacon was located.
‘This is all very well,’ said Robin, ‘but you really need eyes out there too. ‘I’ll take the walkie-talkie and go aloft. I want to see which of the golf balls went west anyway.’
‘OK,’ said Toro. ‘I’ll send Manuel up after you in a minute. I don’t want anyone out on deck alone. Really and truly, I don’t want anyone out on deck in the first place.’
‘I’ll hook on to the safety lines and take extra care,’ promised Robin.
Robin was careful to do what she promised because the moment she stepped outside it became clear to her that the wind was picking up even further. Maxima was running south-eastwards and the wind was coming from behind her now. One glance at the sea told Robin that they were up to a steady nine or ten on the Beaufort scale, gusting to eleven, perhaps. It would only take one even stronger hurricane-strength gust to blow her away, but she was still able to stagger across to the starboard side of the top deck and clip on to the safety rail beneath the headless stub of the communications mast where Manuel had clearly failed to secure the golf ball covering after he had facilitated Robin’s brief contact with Sulu Queen. One glance served to settle her mind about that. Then she was looking back over the starboard, hoping to catch another glimpse of that lone red light.
She saw it almost at once, closer now, but still three wave crests away, almost lost beneath the spume torn off the wave-tops and hurled towards the distant shore of Mexico. Somehow, amid all the howling, screaming, thundering batter of the storm, she felt the engines go into reverse. Maxima did not begin to climb the wave-fronts crowding in behind her easily or quickly, but she did begin to slide sideways, slipping along the troughs of the waves towards that intrepid little light which continued to flash, beating like a heart exposed to the elements. She estimated the distance with a practised eye, even as she strove to make out what the flashing light was attached to. ‘Seventy-five metres,’ she called. ‘Has Liberty given you the heading, for all the use it is? I think I see a lifejacket and a head. Keep coming on that, keep coming on that …’
Something struck her on the back and she jumped. But it was only Manuel, trying to attract her attention. He gestured up to the headless communications mast and gave a pantomime shrug.
She shook her head and turned back. ‘Fifty metres. That’s good. Can you alert Raoul or Emilio, or do you want me to?’
The blow on her shoulder came again and she turned angrily. It was Manuel again, warning her by gesture that he was going to check on the other golf ball. ‘For heaven’s sake, be careful!’ she screamed and he nodded. She turned back – and gasped. The brief distraction had been enough to bring the flashing light almost within touching distance. And now she could see clearly the inflated lifejacket, the dark head slumped on to the bright orange cushion of the neckpiece. ‘Raul!’ she shouted into the walkie-talkie. ‘Go! Go! Go!’
Maxima hesitated partway up the wave, then began to slide down it again. The man in the water was also slipping down the face of it. Suddenly he was no longer alone – Raul and Emilio, adding exponentially to the fortune already promised by Nic Greenbaum, were swimming rapidly towards him, their lifelines dragging across the surface behind them. A moment later they had him and the three of them were being pulled back towards the side. Robin felt her heart swell with pride and relief. In the worst of all possible conditions, Maxima had put aside her own danger to come to the aid of someone who would otherwise have died.
Robin watched, entranced as the two swimmers and the man they had rescued were pulled back to Maxima’s side. She strained over the top of the safety rail, watching Raoul and Emilio handing him up to the team waiting there, then begin to start scrambling aboard themselves, a process complicated by the fact that the bathing platform had gone. And that became briefly significant because, as the rescued man was lifted aboard, something dropped from him. Robin recognized it as the EPIRB beacon that had guided them to him in the first place, and shouted ‘Catch it!’ without thinking. It skittered into the scuppers and was swept back overboard. Raoul tried to catch it but failed. It fell into the gap left by one of the big hinges when the platform was torn off. And there it stayed, wedged tight, well beyond anyone’s reach, flashing red, broadcasting its emergency signal. The swimmers came aboard. The rescued man was carried into the deck house and the motors were switched from reverse to full ahead. Maxima settled into a steadier motion. Robin knew that Toro’s best hope of keeping them all alive now was to try and match the speed of the waves surrounding them, running in towards the distant shore at a knot or two faster than the wave-sets. But it would take a little time to get to that speed. In the meantime, Maxima would see-saw sickeningly. But she would soon settle down. They had saved a life and were running for shelter.
Robin swung round, unable to contain her elation any longer, needing to share her joy and relief with somebody. Anybody. But the only person nearby was Manuel at the top of the ladder leading up to the undamaged golf ball. As she turned, another gust of that near-hurricane wind arrived. The strongest gust yet. It brought with it a haze of spume as thick as an old-fashioned pea-soup fog. And, weirdly, it brought a sound Robin half recognized. A wailing sort of a song, as though there was some kind of musical instrument out there, playing a mad, stormy tune, as though a singing whale could fly. Frowning, Robin looked around. The ghostly music got relentlessly louder. Robin’s mouth went dry. Her heart fluttered. She felt she should recognize the sound, but she simply couldn’t put her finger on it. It frightened her. As she staggered over to the bottom of the undamaged ladder and began to climb up after Manuel, the only way of communicating her concern was by touch. She hammered on the back of his leg as though it was some kind of door. He looked down. She gestured wildly: come down. And he obeyed. In an instant they were standing side by side on the deck. He pushed his lips against her ear and shouted, ‘What?’
And out of the heart of the murk, there came the answer. Something more solid and more lethal even than the storm wind. It smashed into the golf ball Manuel had been preparing to work on. The sound was deafening, overwhelming. But nothing compared to the sight of it. It beheaded the communications mast as efficiently as a guillotine and carried the top away in an instant, even as Robin, horrified, recognized what it was. It obliterated the golf ball that contained the last of their electronic equipment. Then it span, end over end, away down the wind, hurling the dead wreckage of the electrics away into the sea.
Katapult8’s massive jet-wing sail.
THIRTY-THREE
‘Is there a problem?’ asked Guerrero the next morning, looking over Richard’s shoulder at the radar display.
‘Nothing for you to worry about. How’s the container-sorting going? From the look of the weather forecasts you’ll have to be quick.’
‘It’s going well, in spite of rapidly worsening conditions. With Lieutenant Harding and First Officer Cheng in charge, and that wizard who’s driving the gantry, lifting and laying the containers at record speed, we should have done everything by the time
we catch up with those nasty-looking clouds dead ahead. But why the worried face, Richard? Something disturbing ahead? Other than the weather?’
‘No. It’s just that the emergency beacon we’re heading towards is now moving eastward at a steady ten knots. I logged it as being dead ahead when I went off watch last night. Now it’s miles east of that position.’
‘How’s that possible? I mean, I guess whoever’s got the thing can’t be swimming at that speed. Unless it’s Michael Phelps or Mark Spitz.’
Richard gave a grunt of laughter. ‘Even those two would find it hard to keep that speed up! No, there’s only one explanation I can think of – the beacon, and hopefully whoever’s holding it, is on a vessel.’
‘If he’s on a boat, why hasn’t someone switched it off?’
‘Heaven only knows. But there’s no other explanation I can think of.’
‘OK. So the beacon’s on a boat. And where’s the boat headed?’
‘Eastwards. Towards the coast. Towards Puerto Banderas, actually.’
‘And the boats most likely to be out here are …’
‘Katapult8 and Maxima are the only ones we know about. And Maxima’s the most likely of those two. I can’t see Liberty and Katapult8’s crew being able to pick anyone up, no matter how much they might want to.’
‘So …’
‘So, in the absence of any contact from either one of them, we have to assume that everything down there is now resolved, and we’ll return to the original plan of meeting up in Puerto Banderas. Helm, alter your course to the south-east. Steer one hundred and thirty degrees, please.’
‘That looks as though it will take us further into the rough weather even more quickly,’ said Guerrero. ‘I’d better go down and chivvy them along.’ He vanished.
Richard noted the changes of the beacon’s position and the ship’s bearing in the log, then he walked to the starboard side of the bridge and stepped out on to the open bridge wing. He was at once overwhelmed by a range of sensations that the quiet of the bridge had kept at a distance. The smell of the ship itself, all oil and rust, was overlain by the odour of the ocean, the ozone; the salty tang that was half smell, half taste. The feel – almost the taste – of the new wind, partly originating in the fact that its direction had swung into a new quarter and partly because of Sulu Queen’s new heading. He could feel it gusting stormily at his back, like a drunk pushing past him to get to the bar. The fact that it was unexpectedly cool, even beyond the expectation of wind chill. The noise it made as it buffeted past his ears. A noise subsumed in the bustle ahead and below him. He put his hands on the white-painted metal safety rail, leaned forward and looked down.
The gantry was in operation, lowering the last of Guerrero’s containers into its new position. When fully laden, Sulu Queen accommodated fourteen containers across her deck, twenty-foot equivalent units stacked lengthways. The stevedores and crane men at Long Beach had stacked the new ones lengthways, two containers high, in a kind of wall all around the edge of the deck. They were twice as long as they were wide, so Guerrero had asked the gantry operator to swing them round so the long sides were facing inwards. Now they sat snugly side by side, one level high, reaching in twenty feet from the ship’s sides, with an open area between them made up of the tops of the original cargo. Richard had OK’d this arrangement because it was clearly much more stable than what the guys at Long Beach had done. Though to be fair, they hadn’t envisaged taking the vessel into the conditions she was heading for now. While Sulu Queen’s crew bustled about making sure the new arrangement was secure, placing stacking cones, securing lashing rods, tightening twistlocks and turnbuckles, Guerrero’s men were opening the doors on the inboard ends and pulling the contents out to check against their manifest. The foredeck was crowded and bustling. Richard looked up, sniffing the gale-force wind. The sky ahead was full of clouds and looked deeply threatening. It seemed to him that they would be in some very serious weather by the end of the watch. He hoped with all his heart that the signal from the emergency beacon heading east towards Puerto Banderas was safely aboard Maxima, and that the super yacht’s continued silence – like that of the beautiful multihull – meant that all was well with them. Still, he thought, straightening and turning to step back into the clinical confines of the bridge, he would be in a position to check. And he had aboard everything he needed to find either or both of the vessels and to come to their aid if anything had actually gone seriously wrong.
THIRTY-FOUR
Maxima had been running east at ten knots since she had picked up Miguel-Angel Guerrero sixteen hours ago. And, by the end of that time, Robin for one was getting worried, even though she had not spent much time worrying in the interim. Maxima was riding more easily – especially after the downpour filled her pool to overflowing and rebalanced her hull. She seemed unlikely to succumb unless the force ten storm got a great deal worse. She was well out in a notoriously empty ocean, and now that the last of Katapult8 was gone there wasn’t much she was likely to collide with. They wouldn’t be anywhere near the coast for the better part of twenty hours. And she found she had a lot to do.
She had led the shaken Manuel below after saving him from Katapult8’s rogue sail, and took him down to the sick bay. Here they found the lad Raoul and Emilio had just pulled out of the water, suffering from shock and mild hypothermia but bubbling with the excitement of having survived his adventure. Then, just as Liberty and her crew had preferred to be treated by a woman, she had left the two young men to the attentions of the male medic. With the power back on, it had been possible to prepare hot food and she had welcomed Liberty, Flo, Maya and Emma to the dining room, glad to see that even those who had suffered motion sickness were beginning to feel better. She had also welcomed the young survivor, who had told them his name and stretched his command of English to the limit as he recounted his horrific story while consuming a bowlful of chilli large enough for four hungry men. They all packed away more ladylike helpings, marvelling at the resilience of youth while subject to delayed shock, and beginning to look out for it in him. They went through the story of Pilar’s final moments several times, trying to assess whether anyone else could have made it out alive. Then they discussed their current position and where they were heading. How close, in fact, to Puerto Banderas they would be coming, hour after hour as time passed. Shock and food made them all sleepy, especially after the stress of their adventures so far, and even Robin finally bunked down, feeling vaguely guilty that she had not offered to relieve Captain Toro on the bridge.
She had sprung awake a little less than an hour ago – fully awake for once, with her heart racing. She’d come hurrying up to the bridge as fast as her rudimentary ablutions allowed, informed by her trusty wristwatch that the time had come to start worrying about what might be lying immediately ahead of them. Toro confirmed that they were still following the eastward set of the sea at ten knots, which was still the speed Maxima had to maintain to run just ahead of the big storm waves. And they had been running at that speed all night, she discovered in her conversation with a clearly exhausted Captain Toro, who had been on the bridge for two consecutive watches. Maxima was also running deaf, dumb and blind since the beheading of the second communications mast. Even considering keeping a human watch seemed to be a waste of time – nobody could stay outside for any lengthy duration. And there was nothing to see but wall after wall of rain and spray. But even had she been fully equipped and her state-of-the-art electronics all working, there would have been little chance of doing anything other than what she was doing now, Robin observed wryly.
‘We could have called for help,’ admitted Toro, his voice gravelly with fatigue. ‘But we would still have to stay in front of the storm exactly in the way we have done until that help arrived. Of course, we could have done with radar and sonar to tell us what’s ahead. But the chances of altering course are limited. If we turn by more than five degrees – or do so too quickly – the sea is likely to overwhelm us.’
&nbs
p; Deep in thought, Robin moved to the front of the bridge and tried to look through the windscreen, but the heavy downpour had returned fiercely enough to overwhelm the wipers and render the glass opaque. ‘We were just over four hundred and fifty miles out when we recovered the boy,’ she estimated. ‘We must have come the better part of three hundred and twenty miles, therefore, which has brought us to the point at which our blindness is becoming something of a concern. The coast – and Puerto Banderas, with any luck – might be little more than one hundred and thirty miles ahead, but the islands named the Tres Marias are likely to be dead ahead. Maybe five miles, maybe ten. But that close. At this speed, maybe quarter of an hour away. Half hour tops. And even if we manage to miss them, there’s Isla Santa Isabel with its outlying walls of dangerous reefs behind them. And Santa Isabel is less than thirty miles offshore. Even if we miss her, we hit Puerto Banderas or the coast pretty close to it before the end of this watch.’
‘I know. I know this coast quite well,’ said Toro.
‘Our survivor probably knows it even better than you do,’ said Robin. ‘He’s a local fisherman, after all, even if he is just a kid.’
‘You think he’s well enough to come up and see if he can help?’
‘I can find out. If yesterday evening was anything to go by he’ll be in the canteen if he’s up and about. You want me to have anything sent up for you?’
‘Bacon sandwich and coffee. Tocino graso. Big. Black. Four sugars.’
‘It’s on the way,’ she said and walked briskly off the bridge. The way Maxima was riding – even though she was doing her best in the high seas – made Robin decide against the lift, and so she ran down the companionway to the canteen. And there, indeed, was Miguel-Angel, looking lost in clothes borrowed from the crew that were far too big for him, just finishing a massive plate of chilaquiles. The look and smell of the tortilla casserole tempted Robin, especially as it had obviously been topped with fried eggs and grated cheese. But she was vividly aware that if she sat down to eat a serving, Maxima could well be aground on one of the Tres Marias before she finished. ‘The captain wants a bacon sandwich and coffee,’ she told the chef. ‘Both big. Tocino graso …’
