WITHOUT PAUSING TO think, Jim did what Will had done when he first spotted the ship off the Saint Paul's Rocks. He leaped to the mast, let fly the halyards, and dropped the mainsail on the cabin and the storm on the foredeck. Quickly gathering the reefed main before it could fall over the side, he secured it with sail ties, then did the same for the small storm sail.
Shannon opened the hatch. "What is going on?" "They're back."
"Oh, shit!" She popped up a moment later with the binoculars. Jim started the engine and put the boat back on course, tight into the wind. Did they have an engine on the catamaran? They must. How big? How fast? Who knew?
"Do they see us?" he asked Shannon.
"I can't tell."
Jim turned a desperate circle, looking for some advantage. Back on the Burdwood Bank? No, they'd get beaten to death. Besides, somehow the thing had found them. It must have sailed all the way around the shallows, racing downwind east, then beating into the south wind, and now reaching west, making up time on its better point of sail.
How far,
how long? How in hell had they found them? Was it just back luck?
"It's closer," said Shannon. "Maybe they see us."
"It's a long way to see a white boat," said Jim. But he couldn't meet Shannon's eyes, knowing they were both thinking about the lookout atop the fifteen-story mast.
The cold wind turned suddenly colder. A sharp gust bit at his face. Another whined through the rigging. Then an icy crosswind pressed hard on the bare mast. The source, they saw, was a new line of snow squalls roaming out of the west. Dark and dense, bunched like a herd of woolly black mastodons, they threatened another round of violent winds and chaotic seas.
He looked at Shannon. She shook her head in resigned disbelief. "Do it:' she said.
He altered course, swinging southwest to intercept the darkest snow squall.
Before Hustle had closed within a mile, snow was swirling around her. Jim looked back and watched the black spire dissolve into a soft white horizon. By the time it had disappeared from sight, Hustle was pitching on short, steep seas. He ran forward on the slippery deck to raise the storm jib to steady her for the corning battle.
A fierce gust nearly blew him off the cabin roof. Crawling on his hands and knees, he felt his way back to the cockpit, where he shut down the engine. Shannon was already at the helm, attempting to steer a safe path through suddenly leaping seas. Jim removed his glove to brush the crust of snow from her eyelashes.
They pounded through the squall for half an hour. When the wind slackened and the snow thinned, they immediately changed course to hide in another. By nightfall they had lost count of how many squalls they had fought. The wind steadied up when the last squall passed and veered hard out of the west. The barometer was dropping. Cape Horn rollers were getting taller. Jim and Shannon shaped a course close-hauled into the west.
Then they strapped themselves into the pilot berth, grateful to have escaped the black boat and too tired to care about the weather.
Jim woke up thirsty, hungry, and tired. Something had jarred him out of sleep. It was dark out, and it sounded like a gale blowing up outside. Then he heard a sharp thump against the hull. He pulled on his foul-weather gear and harness and went up on deck.
It was pitch-black. The wind was cold, the seas felt fairly even. Then he heard another thump and saw something gleam dully in the wake. He shined the handheld spotlight on it but couldn't make it out, and then shot the beam around the boat. Chunks of ice were floating in the water.
He played the light on the water ahead of the boat. It reflected off a piece of ice as big as a car. He took the helm and steered around it. For a while he saw nothing, but he was afraid to return to sleep knowing that they might run into another piece.
Thus he was still at the wheel, dozing intermittently, when dawn broke, casting a reluctant gray glow on a sullen sea. He took a long, careful look for more ice, then ducked below to make some coffee.
"You poor thing," said Shannon. "You look exhausted." "I had to look out for ice. I'll just get some coffee." "Lie down," she said. "I'll watch for a while."
He collapsed into the pilot berth and closed his eyes. After what could have been hours or only seconds later, Shannon called urgently and he sat up with his heart pounding, trying to figure out where he was. The wind was blowing harder. The boat was flying.
"What? What?"
"They're coming up behind us."
Will's fine sloop could sail closer to the wind. The catamaran angled away to cut them off. They found a cloud bank, which led to a blinding rain squall. Once again, Hustle sailed them out of danger. But even though they could maneuver in directions the catamaran couldn't go and found
shelter in squalls and fog, the cat had an uncanny, terrifying genius for finding them again.
Night after night, they were sure they had escaped in the desolate waters; morning after morning, the spiky black silhouette cut the horizon. Sometimes it looked like a distant skyscraper, as if a city lay across the water, sometimes like an offshore oil rig, sometimes like a spear.
"We're like a mouse hiding in our little mouse hole of head wind," Jim despaired.
"But how is the cat circling?" asked Shannon. "How can they always know where we are?"
"It's not like when Will threw my monitor overboard. They don't have any tracking device on our boat." "Radar?"
"According to Will they'd have to have an immensely powerful radar—like on a navy ship. No way they could generate enough electricity on a sailboat. Besides, they never find us at night. It's something else, like satellites. Will said the McVays were big in military electronics."
"So what do we do?"
"I don't know. Try to outsail them."
"But where?"
They pored over the chart. They could go anywhere in the world from the Southern Ocean—Atlantic, Pacific, Indian. If they could survive it. The easier routes were downwind, downwind all the way to Australia.
"We can't go downwind, they'll catch up in a flash."
"The wind is west. The only thing west is Cape Horn."
"If we could somehow get around the Horn, we could sail to Hawaii." They looked at each other, then checked Ocean Passages to see how many thousands of miles. Four thousand three hundred to Papeete in the South Pacific and another twenty-five hundred north to Hawaii.
"Seven thousand miles?"
Shannon said, "It's warm in Hawaii."
Too numb to consider long-range consequences, and terrified that when next the black catamaran suddenly appeared, it would pop up too close for them to escape, they decided to cut and run for the Pacific Ocean.
Head winds hurled them back.
Jim searched the sail locker in the wildly bouncing fore-peak and came out sick to his stomach, dragging a small, stiff Kevlar jib. It took him two hours to hank it on the forestay and attach the sheets. But it was worth the effort. The hard, flat sail took a better bite of the head wind. With it and the reefed-down main, Hustle began inching ahead.
"She's heeling too much," said Jim, but he was too tired to leave the helm.
Shannon heated potato and leek soup. She lost half the mug when a cross sea buried the bow, staggering the boat just as she crawled through the hatch. But even three warm swallows were restorative and Jim went forward, while Shannon steered, to take another reef in the main so Hustle would sail faster.
It was a brief victory. Night was closing in again, another respite from the black catamaran, but with the dark the wind blew harder. The seas rose, and the sloop was repeatedly pounded back.
It was three hundred miles to Cape Horn. They made fifty miles in two days. The radio finally dragged in a fresh weather report. The fax page was splattered with low-pressure systems. Northerly winds were predicted to rise to forty knots.
Jim looked at the instruments. The wind had already shifted due north and was blowing forty-five. When the note it hummed in the rigging turned sharper, he checked again. The wind was rising to fifty k
nots, riling cross seas. And now it seemed that every other wave smashed the sloop back two yards for every yard it gained.
Still they fought the boat west through the dawn and into midday. Jim felt like a robot, a mindless machine that would run as programmed until it broke. But the immensely strong Kevlar jib broke first, ripping the steel ring out of its clew, which probably saved their lives. Because, cold, sleep-deprived, and exhausted, they finally admitted that they could not even reach Cape Horn, much less round it.
They bore off to the northeast. But no sooner had Hustle settled onto the marginally easier course than they saw the black steeple spike the horizon.
They retreated in the only direction left to them. South. South again, south into the violent seas of the Drake Passage, south into deepening cold. They stuffed every scrap of warm clothing they could find on the boat under their foul-weather gear, and they were still cold. A mouthful of hot food was a rare luxury, a night's sleep an ancient memory,. respite from the ceaseless, violent motion a fantasy.
Val McVay taught the boys to sleep with their feet forward in their bunks. JoyStick had been stuffing her bows regularly since they crossed the sixtieth parallel and if they slept head forward they would crack their skulls into the bulkhead when the sudden deaccelerations brought her from twenty knots to a dead stop.
They were driving the cat deep into the Drake Passage, guided—sporadically--by satellite data relayed by Lloyd McVay. Communications were not conducted seamlessly in the high latitudes as they shifted between low-orbit and polar platforms.
JoyStick was pounded by the heavy seas. Gear was breaking down and Val had blown out two sails. Her crew fared better. Despite the misery, none seemed even close to beaten down by the cold and wet and the brutal wind.
Lloyd McVay sat-phoned with an update—yet another course change. He relayed some more grim weather data and had a quotation ready for the sound of the wind battering the phone in her hand.
" 'Such groans of roaring wind and rain, I never remember to have heard.' "
No surprise: he was throwing Lear at her. The young "king of years" was proving a wayward daughter. The rudders tugged hard. A deep trough yawned and JoyStick was suddenly bent on hurling herself into it.
"I can't talk now, Dad. Talk to Andy." She handed off the phone and gripped the helm.
"Yes, sir, Mr. McVay."
"Dammit, Andy, put my daughter on the phone." "She's steering, sir."
"You steer, put her on the phone."
"I can't, sir. It's too wild. She's the only one who can drive in this wind. Greg tried earlier. Almost killed us."
"You tell her for me, this is getting out of hand. Go on, tell her right this minute."
Andy held the phone to the wind and said to Val, "You father says to tell you this is getting out of hand."
Val's dark eyes flicked once from the seas. "Deal with it." Andy said, "Hey, I can't blow him off."
She wrenched the helm to fling the cat through a soft spot in a dangerous crest, then glanced at Greg, who was poised at the mainsheet.
"Can you answer him?" she asked.
Greg saw a fierce challenge in her gaze and maybe an offer, maybe not. Whatever, he was thoroughly convinced that the A team was right here on this rocket ship and that nothing that happened anywhere else mattered at all.
He snatched the phone from Andy Nickels, said, "Val says everything is under control, Mr. McVay," and keyed End.
Andy's expression told Greg that from now on he had better watch his back. But before either man could speak there came a cry from the first spreader high above the deck. Joe was yelling, "I see them! I see them. Two miles off the starboard beam."
The worst possible position. South of the boat. In the eye of the wind.
Val threw the cat to the northeast, intending to race downwind several miles and then come about and attack on a broad reach. The wind had been boxing the compass all day and the seas were confused, so she was busy trying to keep JoyStick under control. When she finally got a moment to steal a look, she stared hard.
"Give me the glasses." Bracing the helm with her body, she peered through the binoculars. Then, unable to mask her disappointment, Val steered back onto the course the satellite data suggested.
Andy said, "Hey, where are you going?"
"It's an iceberg."
"It is not."
"It's an iceberg."
"Check it out. It's only a couple of miles."
"Icebergs are brilliant so they seem nearer. It looks like two miles, but it is at least ten miles away."
Greg switched on the radar. "Ten miles, on the nose."
Up on the spreader, Joe focused and refocused his binoculars, still not certain.
The slab-sized tower of ice loomed as tall as a twenty-story hotel. Waves thundered against it, flinging spray on the boat. They were so close they could see rocks embedded in its blue-green side and feel internal explosions as huge chucks of ice broke loose and thumped into the sea.
All the while it was drifting down on them, riding a current that set opposite the wind, and Jim was busy with the throttle and helm, trying to hold Hustle off while sticking close enough to hide.
"They're turning east," said Shannon.
"Are you sure?"
Hustle edged around the iceberg, sheltering from view as the black boat faded over the horizon. Like a rodeo clown, Jim thought, keeping the barrel between him and the bull. It was their third close call in three days.
"Every time the sky clears," Shannon said, "can they see us from a satellite?"
There was heavy cloud in the south. Jim headed south.
LOW. SLANTED SUNLIGHT lit a rugged mountain range where the wind had scoured the snow from the rock. Icebergs and islands deep in snow marched on the rim of the sea.
An undulating field of pack ice was reaching out from the coast, moving with the wind.
Had they escaped the black catamaran at last, only to be trapped at the bottom of the world?
Jim looked over his shoulder. Hustle was plodding warily under staysail and reefed main somewhere off the Antarctic Peninsula—a finger of the polar continent that pointed across the Drake Passage toward South America.
It was a disorienting, ever-shifting world of float ice, drifting packs, towering bergs and pressure ridges thrust up like Gothic castles. At the moment, the sky was crystal clear, the sea oddly calm. But the wind was rising as it seemed to whenever the Antarctic sky cleared. The barometer was falling. And the weather fax showed a blizzard pounding up from the South Pole.
He didn't believe that they had escaped. In his bones he felt that the McVays were still searching. It was as if he had developed an internal radar that sensed the catamaran.
Twice
it had saved them, given them a jump on the pursuit. But now, two grim weeks and a thousand miles south of Cordi's snug farmhouse in the Falkland Islands, Hustle was running out of ocean.
They had no business being here. Hustle's fiberglass hull was no match for the rock-hard chunks of floating ice. Suddenly they were in the thick of it, the wind-driven ice reaching for the boat like tentacles. Drift pieces as big as Hondas floated low on the surface, forcing him and Shannon to stay up on deck, on constant lookout. They were called growlers—according to Will's "bible" Bowditch, which devoted eight pages to ice in the sea—for the growling noise they made bobbing up and down in the water. Some were transparent, some were green, some as black as the boat chasing them. Bowditch said that you could spot them with radar if the sea was smooth. But Will's warnings about radar were fresh in Jim's mind, and he was afraid the McVays would home in on the signal.
"The sailing couple I read about called ice 'moving rocks,' " said Shannon.
"What couple?"
"I told you. They wrote that wonderful book about how
they spent the whole winter in Antarctica on a boat."
"This isn't a book," Jim said more sharply than he had intended. "I mean—this is real. This is happening now. To us." "T
hey were real people,"
said Shannon.
"The GPS says we're on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. I guess that's those mountains. But I've got no chart, so I don't know where the hell we really are. Or where to go next."
He took his eyes from the water for a moment to look at Shannon. Huddled in her windbreaker, with her watch cap pulled down over her brow and Will's scarf over her nose, all she revealed of her face were her eyes. Jim saw them suddenly, unexpectedly, and wholly uncharacteristically fill with tears.
"What's wrong? What did I say?" - "They were real," she sobbed. "And it seemed to me they loved each other."
"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I'm just so tired."
"I'm so cold."
"I'm sorry." He put his arm around her and looked over his shoulder again. A gust shook the sails. The wind was swinging due south and it felt suddenly twenty degrees colder.
"I better take another look."
He climbed the mast. Sure enough, the sea was getting smooth. The last time that had happened they found themselves downwind of drifting pack ice, running for their lives before it closed around them. There was a kind of creepy yellow light in the southwestern sky. Just like last time.
"Ice!" he called down to Shannon. "We're outta here!"
Shannon jibed about and headed up the coast.
He started down the mast but paused partway. Something was changing. His tired brain wouldn't compute. He was back in the cockpit with Shannon before he realized that the mountains were disappearing from view. The dark rock looked soft. Snow. The blizzard—screaming in ahead of schedule. How were they supposed to dodge the ice pack, much less floating ice, in blinding snow?
He made a sound in his chest, part despairing grunt, part light-headed laughter. What the hell could happen next? "What?" asked Shannon.
"Will said to keep running even after Antarctica." "Where?"
"I don't know. The South Pole. Jesus, what a mess." "But what did he mean?" Shannon asked. "It doesn't sound like him to just say that."
And suddenly Jim realized why Will wanted him to flee. "Oh my God. We're running for him."
Buried At Sea Page 37
