by Tom Hilpert
Jasmine walked up to Stone and grabbed his face in one hand, pinching his cheeks like an angry mother does to a naughty child. She glared at him. “Now, you Neanderthal SOB,” she said in low, bitter voice, “I’m going to enjoy watching you die slowly.”
CHAPTER 3 6
I stared at her. I could feel Leyla doing the same. In the last five minutes, Jasmine had been an ordinary civilian caught in horrible situation, then an FBI agent deliberately hunting her quarry, and now what? An agent turned bad, a criminal?
“What is this, Jasmine?” I asked.
“I’m quitting my job,” she said sweetly. “They just don’t know it yet. In fact, as far as they’ll ever know, I am about to die in the line of duty, along with Tony here.” She looked at me significantly. “They’ll probably give me a posthumous medal – which I will be alive to enjoy.”
“Jasmine,” said Angela. “Don’t talk so much.”
Jasmine shrugged. “What does it matter now? The only serious obstacle was him.” She jerked her thumb at Stone.
“We talked about this,” said Angela. “Just wait until tomorrow.”
“Fine. Suit yourself.”
There were several long moments of silence in the cabin, while the storm beat upon the outside of the vessel. The boat shuddered. Leyla shook herself. “We’ve lost the engine. We need to put out a sea-anchor to straighten us out to the waves and slow our drift, or we’ll be battered to pieces.”
“Not so fast,” said Phil. He pointed at Stone, who had closed his eyes and was trying to brace himself from bouncing around and aggravating his wounds. “He said they were FBI.”
“Phil,” said Angela in a sarcastic and pained voice, “try not to be such an idiot. We knew he was FBI. Jasmine was too. She gave him to us.”
Phil was suspicious, but perhaps not overly bright. “Okay, but what if Borden was working with them, you know, wearing wire or something?”
“A wire, out here?” asked Jasmine incredulously. “A wire is a short-range transmitter. You have to be within half a mile. There’s no one within two dozen miles of us. Besides, he wasn’t cooperating with the FBI – I’m FBI, remember? I’d know.”
“Maybe he was working with Stone, not you.”
“Tony was my partner. We would have worked it together.”
“You didn’t work this together with him, did you?” asked Angela. “Are you sure he had no suspicions of you?”
“Doesn’t matter now, does it? We’ve taken care of him. But if it makes you feel better, search Borden and Bennett. In fact, I’ll do it.”
Jasmine thrust me roughly against the closed door that led to the bow cabin. “Stay still, pastor,” she said in a mocking voice. She patted me down lightly.
“Clean,” she said. I breathed a sigh of relief. When I took off my jacket, I had hidden Tony’s knife in my shoe, underneath my foot.
Angela searched Leyla, somewhat half-heartedly. “She’s clean too.”
“Okay,” said Leyla. “We need to get that sea anchor out, right away.”
“No,” said Angela. “We need to keep on. Put up the sail again.”
“That’s very dangerous,” said Leyla. “We could capsize, founder, all sorts of things.”
“So make it safer,” snapped Angela. “Can’t you just put part of it out? What do they call that, ‘shortening the sail?’”
Leyla’s shoulders slumped. “We could do that I guess. But it’s still pretty dangerous to carry any sail in this storm.”
“Do it,” said Angela. “And get us back on course to that GPS point.”
“I need one other person to help me,” said Leyla.
I could see they didn’t like it. If one of them went, it shortened the odds below deck, though I had no idea how I would take out one person armed with a gun, let alone two. But if I went up with Leyla, they would have only one hostage below, a man they thought might already by dying.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “There’s nowhere to go, and you’ll kill Tony and us if we try anything. We’ve seen that you’ll use those guns.”
Angela chewed her lip for a minute. “One of us could go,” said Jasmine. “But that leaves one of us cold and wet and slow. Why be more uncomfortable than we have to? Borden is right, what are they gonna do?”
“Okay, go,” said Angela. “When you are done, Leyla comes in and Borden stays out to steer.”
I took my jacket from the galley counter. There were two holes in it from when Phil fired his gun.
We staggered up the stairs, and stepped into the cockpit, pulling the doors shut after us.
The wind roared like a thousand tortured souls and plucked a deadly threnody from the rigging. The dodger offered little protection anymore, and the spray and rain were constant. It was like being doused with ice water every five seconds. Actually, we were being doused with ice water every five seconds. It was full dark, but I caught glimpses of the wild and angry waves. They were heaving twenty feet and more, creating an ever-changing violent landscape of hills and valleys. I had to hold on to the rails to keep my footing.
“How did you manage out here?” I shouted. “This is insane!”
“It’s easier when we are under way,” Leyla shouted back. “The dodger gives more protection then, and the waves are more predictable.”
We both strapped life vests on. As Leyla directed, we freed the appropriate lines. She swung the starboard one around a winch roller as I handed her the handle. She began to crank. The rope tightened and then stopped.
“It’s not working,” she called. “It’s hung up on something.”
She tried again, to no avail.
“How important is this?” I asked, squinting through the deluge.
“Probably life or death.”
“Okay,” I said. My head was throbbing and my shin was aching. I was freezing once more, and icy water had seeped behind the life vest into the bullet holes in my jacket. I took a breath, grabbed the cable life-line, and put my foot on the cockpit bench.
“Jonah!” shouted Leyla. “What are you doing?”
“Going to fix it,” I bellowed back.
We stared at each other for a moment, water streaming down our faces. “You said life or death.”
Her shoulders slumped in resignation. “Let’s at least rig a rope,” she said.
We found a rope and secured one end of it to one of the cleats in the cockpit. I spent the next three minutes trying to tie a bowline around my waist. I had almost no feeling left in my fingers. When I was finally secure, Leyla pulled on it to check it. It held. She pulled again and I stumbled into her arms. We held each other tightly for a long moment.
“I love you, Jonah,” she said into my ear. “Be careful.”
“I love you too,” I said, and climbed out of the shelter of the cockpit.
It was worse on deck. I had been wrong about the dodger offering no protection. As soon as I stood up, the wind slammed me forward and I sprawled onto my knees, my hands scrabbling for something to hold onto. I slid to the starboard edge, and grabbed the lifeline. Here, higher up on the boat, the pitching, corkscrewing motion was like that of a roller coaster designed by an unimaginably manic personality. The wind battered at me and the spray felt like bullets of ice pelting me all over. I could feel the tension on the rope around my body as Leyla slowly gave me slack. Reluctantly, I let go of the cable lifeline and felt for the jib-sheet – the rope we needed, that was jammed somewhere. Inching forward on hands and knees, I felt along the line for tangles and obstructions. After roughly ten feet, the sheet ran through a line organizer that routed about a half dozen ropes around the deck. My fingers were numb and the moments jarred by in agony as I tried to make sure that the obstruction wasn’t in the organizer. I spent another twenty seconds trying to make sure that I followed the correct rope out of the forward side of the organizer; twenty seconds of lashing wind and freezing water and pitching blind through the darkness.
At last I was reasonably sure I had the right rope, an
d I continued forward. A few feet further on, I found that the wind had tangled the jib sheet with another rope, I couldn’t tell which one. I held on to the lifeline with my right hand, while with my left I plucked at the knot. I could barely feel it through the numbness of my fingers. I was closer to the bow now, and waves regularly swept up over the deck here. I felt like I was sitting at the edge of the tide at the beach, except that the shore was heaving and jostling like a crazed water-buffalo.
I was making no progress on the knot. There was a little lip at the very edge of the deck, maybe an inch or two high. I think I had heard Leyla call it a toe-rail. I turned my back to the lifelines, kneeling down and bracing my toes against the toe-rail. Now I could use two hands on the knot. Another wave swept over the deck, covering my thighs. It lifted my feet from their brace as the deck canted down behind me, and I slid quickly and easily over the edge, underneath the lifelines.
CHAPTER 3 7
I caught myself on the toe-rail. Holding on with my left hand, I flung my right upwards and grabbed onto the lifeline. The cold metal bit into the palm of my hands as it took my weight. My chest was at deck level, while the rest of me hung there, my feet dragging in the water below. A second later, I was submerged all the way above my waist as the starboard forward quarter dipped down and a wave foamed across the deck from the port side to splash into my face. The cold was like physical blow striking my entire body at once. Abruptly, I was heaved up and out of the water again, only to be dipped once more like a grotesque fondue item in a feast of the storm-gods. Only, instead of cooking me, the fondue was slowly freezing me.
Twice, three times, I was submerged to my chest and then hauled back out. My hands were so numb, I couldn’t tell if my grip was firm or not. I was panting for breath that was repeatedly stolen by the cold. On the fourth roll, as the water came up around me, I took advantage of my suddenly lightened body-weight to swing my right leg up over the toe-rail. In my numbness I missed clumsily, merely kicking the side of the boat with my toes. As the boat rolled back to port, my body fell back down with a cruel jerk against my arms. It was getting harder and harder to clench my hands. The next time I went into the water, I was motivated by desperation. I drove my right leg high and forward like a peripatetic roundhouse kick. I pulled my heel back to meet the toe-rail, and found I had thrown my leg all the way over the bottom cable of the lifeline. I wrapped my leg around and held on. The roll to port lifted me out of the water, and I tumbled back inside the lifelines, on deck once more.
I sat for a moment, holding on to the lifelines, panting hard. Finally, scrabbling in the dark with numb hands, I found the tangle. It was near the skylight hatch that was over the forward cabin. I could see the light from the main cabin filtering faintly through the closed door and then up to the skylight. I knelt with my legs on either side of the skylight and gripped hard with my thighs. Working feverishly with the last remnants of feeling in my fingers, I finally freed the loops and twists that held the jib sheet. I pulled on it twice to signal Leyla and felt in return when she pulled it tight to keep the rope free of further encumbrances.
Feeling old and lame, I found the lifelines and crawled back to the cockpit. I slithered in face first and lay on the floor, breathing hard.
“Jonah!” said Leyla, kneeling next to me. “What happened?”
“Almost went overboard,” I said. “I’m OK, just tired and cold and wet.”
“Can you help with the jib?”
I pushed to my feet, and cranked the line while Leyla held the wheel.
“That’s enough!” she ordered sharply. “We aren’t going to use the whole sail. We’ll keep most of it furled.”
Ahead in the darkness, I could make out the white form of the sail. I felt the life in Tiny Dancer again as she came under way.
Leyla slowly took her around to port, headed back for the GPS waypoint, and we heeled over to starboard as the wind came more abeam of us.
“Let it out just a bit,” commanded Leyla, and I did. “Now come here.”
I went over to her. She took a hand from the bucking wheel and pointed at cluster of dials on the pedestal in front of her. “This is an auto-pilot. I used it when we were on diesel, and spent most of my time out of the wind, up close under the dodger.”
“Why didn’t you tell you Angela about it?” I asked. “You could have come in out of the cold.”
I felt, more than saw her shrug. “I don’t know. I was worried about what she would do if she didn’t think she needed us to keep running the boat.”
That was a sobering thought, but also a wise one.
“The auto-pilot runs on electric power. That wasn’t an issue when the engine was on, but without the engine, it starts to drain the battery, especially with the work it would have to do to keep us on course during this storm.”
“So we shouldn’t use it anyway?”
“Maybe for a short time you could turn it on, and get out of the wind for a few minutes.” She proceeded to show me how to use it.
“Do you want to see if Angela will let you change into dry clothes first?” she asked.
I thought about what was in my bag. Chances were that Angela would either stand and watch me get my clothes, or else get them for me. “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
Leyla looked at me doubtfully.
“Maybe you could bring me some hot coffee, though.”
She smiled and kissed my cheek. “That’s my Jonah. Coffee fixes all ills. One more thing,” she added. “We need to keep all hatches and the companionway shut all the time. If a wave came over and started pouring into the cabin, the weight of the keel, plus the water, would pull us under. We’d drop like a rock.”
“Okay,” I said. I stepped behind the wheel, and Leyla went below, shutting the door behind her.
It was not peaceful. The wind screamed through the rigging, the waves battered us again and again on the forward port quarter. Spray and rain splattered noisily onto the plastic windshield of the dodger. The part of the dodger that was bent and not fitted correctly was on the port side – the side where all the wind and weather was coming from. About every five seconds, I was sprayed in the face by the water that made it over and through. At least I knew it was clean. You could take water straight out of the middle of Superior, put it in bottles and sell it. Well, you could if it was legal.
The wheel jerked and shook in my hands, and I had to make constant small corrections to keep us on course, and to keep the wind from knocking us too far over. It was wild and wet and cold and dangerous, and after five minutes I realized I was singing a hymn, a fierce grin of joy on my lips. Here, where my very life was in the balance, I felt fully alive and at peace. My heart was full of love for Leyla, implacable determination to stop Angela, Phil and Jasmine, and strangest of all, gratitude to God. I shook my head in wonder as I realized that I hadn’t even had my coffee yet.
I touched the GPS to check my course, and backlight illuminated the screen. There was a graphic display that showed our course and position. It was all blank around us, reflecting the vastness of the lake. I looked carefully at the unit, not wanting to screw it up and have Angela ask me why I had done so. I touched the menu button and quickly figured out how to change the detail level on the graphic display. After I zoomed out several times, I could see that our course was a long gentle curve moving from northeast to straight north, ending in the middle of the western arm of lake Superior, probably thirty-five miles from the nearest land. We were about forty miles from the end of the path, and it would take us all night to get there. Presently, we looked to be about twenty-five miles off Michigan, and more than forty from Minnesota or Wisconsin. Even if I could see through the rain and dark, no land would have been visible.
I wondered why Angela wanted to go the middle of the lake. The surface of Superior is as big as South Carolina, and it drops to depths of thirteen-hundred feet. There was nothing but huge amounts of fresh, clear, cold water where we were going.
I fought the wheel
and mocked the cold rain and spray, and thought. After a few minutes, Leyla came up with a cup of coffee in a covered travel mug, proving, as coffee always did, that there is a God in heaven, and he is good.
Leyla took the wheel from me, while I cradled the mug with both hands and stepped forward to shelter a little more behind the dodger.
“What do you think they want, Jonah?” asked Leyla.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “That’s what I was just asking myself.”
“Angela seems to be in charge.”
“Absolutely.”
“She seems to have issues with men. Phil acts pretty cowed.”
“I don’t normally talk about counselees, but somehow I think confidentiality is off the table,” I said. “Angela definitely has a lot of confusion in her life about men and male figures. We didn’t get this far in counseling, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn she was abused by a man, or several, at some point in her life.”
“So you think she’d be more inclined to listen me?”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “It could be. Probably more than me anyway, though before this, I thought we had developed a little bit of rapport in counseling.”
I finished my coffee, and stepped back to the wheel. “Another cup?” I asked, handing her my empty one. She smiled and went below. I thought for a moment about Angela and her issues with men.
A few minutes later, the companionway opened and Angela herself came out. She handed me another cup of coffee. “I don’t know if you and your girlfriend are up to anything, but you’d better not be.”
I sipped some coffee. “We like being together,” I said. “And we’re just trying to stay alive.” The boat jumped and rolled and the waves thundered around us. The only thing I could think to do was to try and dig around and unsettle her somehow.
“How is your struggle with guilt coming along, Angela?”
She laughed, short and harsh. “That was all a put-on, to sucker you into all this.”
“But how did you know I would have a counseling cruise? I’ve never done that before.”
