Close Reach

by Jonathan Moore

  When she looked around again, the crab boat was gone. There was just the sea and the gray horizon, the backs of the thirty-foot waves curling away from her and crashing into white spray and wind-driven foam. Then La Araña burst through the back of a wave a hundred yards back, an explosion of white water followed by the charging shape of the slime-coated bow, rivers of white foam pouring off its deck and its bridge, even its highest antennas whipping and tossing spray. And yet the man was there again, standing in the bow pulpit in spite of the raging sea, the harpoon rifle in the crook of his arm.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Kelly moaned.

  She locked the helm with the autopilot and turned again to look at the man. The man who’d taken Dean like a spider snaring its prey and hauling it away. But away to what? She pushed back a picture of Dean in the filthy hold of the crab boat, encircled by men in hooded foul weather gear and goggles. Men with long dirty knives and no spark of humanity and no mercy. Men who’d hold Dean down with their gum rubber sea boots and saw him up with their knives and hang him upside down over the side to bleed out or die of exposure. And if that’s what they’d do to Dean, what they’d do to her could have no description.

  She slid off the helm seat and crawled along the floor of the pilothouse to the locker where they kept supplies for the dinghy. She had to move or she’d lock up with fear and that would be the end of it. They had no weapons aboard—they’d be too much hassle in most foreign ports. But a year ago they’d sailed across the Indian Ocean from Sri Lanka to Djibouti before going on to the Red Sea and the Suez. Pirate waters. She’d spent her night watches sweating it out in the pilothouse, watching the radar blips of unlit dhows and Somali fishing boats. In three nights, three boats turned to follow, but none could match Freefall for speed.

  They’d been enough to get her thinking, though.

  If La Araña came close enough, she might have something for the man in the bow. Assuming he didn’t get her first.

  She flipped back the top of the cockpit locker and dug inside. There was a yellow ditch bag in there full of things they’d want if they had to abandon ship. She ripped it open and dumped its contents. A first aid kit, a packet of fishing gear. She flung aside a ziplock bag packed with energy bars and space blankets and grabbed an orange waterproof box Dean had labeled in black permanent marker. His script, as ever, was tight and clean:

  SIGNALING

  She took the signaling box and went back to the helm seat and crouched behind it, wedged in tightly between the seat and the bulkhead so that she was hidden from the stern. The chair had a thick teak back, so maybe the harpoon wouldn’t be able to shoot through it.

  But she hoped not to find out. She put the orange box on the chair and opened it. The 12-gauge flare gun was on top, but she took it out and set it aside. Then there was the old-fashioned signaling mirror in its velvet bag and a bundle of smoke flares and dye markers. Beneath all that was what she wanted. She pulled it out and felt the weight of the black aluminum tube. It had the shape and heft of a good D-cell flashlight, but this was something much better than that.

  She peered around the side of the chair.

  La Araña was a hundred feet away. Too far for the harpoon but close enough for what Kelly had in mind. She turned the black tube in her hands and found the set of switches on the side. She remembered when Dean first had brought it home. She’d still been ambivalent about the trip, but she’d let him explain how to turn it on. Letting him show her the gear, letting him teach her about the new boat, was all a part of coming back to him. They’d never spoken about it, but they both understood it, and so she’d sat for this next piece of gear and its lesson the same way she’d sat for the radar manual and the Inmarsat troubleshooting practice.

  There was a federal law, Dean had said, and all Class IV lasers needed a coded interlock switch. She was well aware of this fact; they used Class IV lasers all the time at the hospital. But she let him talk. The interlock was to keep kids from using them, he supposed. But he wanted this laser as a signaling beam for distant aircraft. He figured if it ever came to using it, they’d be in a jam. Wouldn’t be thinking straight. So he’d brought it to a friend at the office, and they’d reprogrammed the interlock code to something easy to remember.

  She punched it in now without looking at the button, instead watching La Araña.

  Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot.

  The international Morse code for SOS.

  She looked down at the laser. The power button was blinking. According to Dean, at its highest power setting, this thing’s beam would be visible from space in broad daylight. In the breakfast nook, they’d used it to burn a hole through a paper napkin from ten feet away. Laser pointers had come a long way. She’d been impressed, even though what she’d really wanted was to finish her coffee and get to the hospital to scrub in.

  She didn’t need Dean or his engineering skills to tell her what this laser would do to a man’s eyes at a hundred feet.

  Or fifty.

  La Araña was coming in fast. The man at the bow was bracing himself with his legs spread wide against the pulpit railings, freeing his hands for the harpoon rifle. She still couldn’t see his face. But there was fresh blood splashed across the front of his foul weather jacket and spattered on the lenses of his goggles. That would be Dean’s.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kelly whispered. She aimed the laser and pressed the thumb button. What happened after that happened quickly.

  In the dim Antarctic storm light, the air full of blowing spray, the beam was clearly visible: it was as thick as her finger and the electric-blue color of the sea-eaten ice at the base of a berg. Her aim was off, but she walked the beam up the man’s chest, the painfully bright dot surrounded by a brilliant corona the size of a saucer. She moved it up to his face until it hit his goggled eyes.

  She had his eyes in the beam for half a second, but that was all it took. The man dropped the harpoon rifle in a frantic lurch to grab for the bow pulpit. The rifle spun into the sea and disappeared.

  Kelly knew about eyes.

  She’d sliced up eyes on wax-bottomed trays, had injected them with needles, had tunneled up people’s noses and through their sinuses with endoscopic hooks to operate on the stalks of nerves running from the eyes to the brain. She knew that if she tied this man up in a quiet room, gagged him so his screams wouldn’t block the other noises, and held a laser like this one to his eyes, she’d hear a low pop as the surface of his retinas flash-boiled and seared onto the face of his optic nerves. Ever afterward, his would be a world of pain and darkness and weird flashes in the shadows.

  She hoped he’d heard them, those pops. Like a pair of ticks bursting deep in his head.

  She watched the man grab a second time for the rail and miss it in his newfound blindness and then watched with cold wonder as he lost his footing in the next wave and went over the bow as if he’d been shoved hard from behind. He wasn’t wearing an exposure suit, but that wouldn’t matter much for him. La Araña never slowed or turned and ran him down the second he hit the water. Its propellers would suck him in and spit him back into the wake like a bucket of chum.

  Kelly stood and pumped her fist at the crab boat and screamed above the wind with her rage and triumph, and then she took the laser and aimed the beam into the wheelhouse. The windows were too filthy and the bridge too dark for her to tell whether her aim was any good. And for all she knew, there was no one in the wheelhouse at all. But before she swept the beam across all eight windows, La Araña veered off sharply to the south.

  Turning, it showed Kelly its stern for the first time, and what she saw there on the aft deck hammered her heart and pulled the strings from all her muscles.

  She dropped to her knees on the pilothouse deck.

  La Araña had indeed been a crabbing boat: there were crab traps tied in a stack on the deck behind the wheelhouse, five deep and three high. Big traps like the ones they used up in Alaska for king crab. Steel wire cages half the size of elevator cars. In ever
y trap there was a person. Most of them had long since frozen to death, naked and blue, their fingers caught like bony icicles in the wires of their prisons.

  But others were alive. There was a young woman huddled naked beneath an old army blanket, rocking back and forth to keep herself warm.

  Lena.

  And above her in another cage was Dean, slumped and bloodied in his orange exposure suit. When he saw her, he put his hands to the wires. His lips moved, but she was too far away to hear whatever he screamed. As the boats drew apart in the waves, a moving mountain of green water came between them. She lost her balance and tumbled to the deck, the laser skipping and bouncing out of the cockpit and into the sea.

  The anemometer showed a sustained wind speed of fifty knots, with gusts up to sixty. Going up the wave faces, she looked down into the dark troughs, and it was like leaning over the edge of a cliff. These waves were taller than the maple trees lining the driveway to their house in Mystic. They were not quite as tall as the boat was long, but she knew one out of every few thousand waves rolled across the sea at twice the average height. And she knew that sailing in conditions like these came down to averages. Sooner or later the wave with her name on it would come. Or an iceberg or a growler too low in the water to see until she’d hit it.

  Upwind like this was worse. Everything was getting pounded: the hull, the rigging, her body. If she stripped and stood before a full-length mirror, she knew the bruises would be everywhere.

  She had to turn around.

  If she could run downwind again, she’d be faster and could put out more sail. The boat’s speed would cut the apparent wind and reduce the loads on the rigging. But turning around was hard, because it meant turning sideways to waves big enough to roll Freefall like a bathtub toy. She’d have to plan it, starting the turn on the back of a wave and finishing in the trough so she never exposed Freefall’s beam to the face of the sea.

  And she’d need to figure out where La Araña was so she didn’t run right into it.

  She glanced at the radar screen and saw nothing but a bright green cloud. This meant the waves were higher than the radar antenna, and the antenna was mounted a third of the way up the mast, at forty feet. She turned and scanned behind her, seeing nothing but waves. She checked to port and starboard and didn’t see it and supposed it must be hanging back somewhere behind her and to the south. When she turned Freefall, she’d follow the wind and waves on the fastest course to the northeast, toward Cape Horn and maybe safety. If La Araña kept its last course and if its radar was useless, too, perhaps they’d draw away from each other at right angles.

  She looked at the electronic chart plotter. It displayed a color map of the Drake Passage, with the Antarctic Peninsula at the bottom and the Strait of Magellan at the top. A little red arrow somewhere in the middle should have marked Freefall’s position. But there was nothing.

  She couldn’t remember looking at the chart plotter since La Araña had come into view. If its jammer had blotted out the EPIRB, of course it would have taken the chart plotter, too. Dean would have known what to do about it. That thought summoned the sound of his knuckles stretching and popping in her grip as the crab boat reeled him in. The way he screamed when she saw him in the cage above Lena.

  What would he do?

  He’d stay calm, first of all. He’d do what needed to be done, and that was turn the boat around first and take care of navigation second. She nodded and thought of Dean standing beside her to help her with this. He was always confident, and that soothed her. Her guts twisted with the enormity of her mistake: to have confused everything for boredom, as though a man like Dean could ever be common. She’d acted as though he could be thrown away and replaced at her leisure. But she’d needed him then as much as she needed him now. She let her imagination bloom until Dean’s hands were on her shoulders and his calm voice was in her ear.

  Start the turn now, Kelly.

  She waited till the top of a wave crest and spun the wheel to starboard, swinging the bow from west to north and then around to northeast. The sails slammed over to port as the wind crossed the centerline and came from the starboard quarter. The storm sail was self-tacking, but the big jib wasn’t. She used the furling gear to roll it in till the clew was past the inner forestay, then let it back out on the new tack by winching in the port sheet, giving the wind more sail than before.

  The boat lifted up from astern and caught its first surf on a fifty-foot wave. She prayed the bow wouldn’t bury itself in the trough. If that happened, the boat could pitchpole and land upside down. With its weighted keel and watertight hatches, it probably would right itself, but she might not be alive to appreciate it. Not if seventy-five thousand pounds of boat landed on top of her. She adjusted the sail trim to match the boat speed to the wave, finding the balance point by feel. She surfed the next wave for over a mile, her wake as clear as an icy contrail in the jet stream.

  When she could, she turned to the paper chart under the Lexan cover at the chart table. She tried to work out her current position by recalling all the maneuvers Freefall had made since the last-known plot. Although the GPS was gone, the knot log was a simpler instrument and still worked. And she had the compass. So she could dead reckon her way to Cape Horn, though she knew she might be off by as much as 20 miles. With 350 miles to reach the cape and La Araña still out there, she might not need to worry about the last 20 miles.

  * * *

  In an hour, the pressure fell another 2 millibars, and by then the waves were too big for the autopilot. Steering in big waves wasn’t about setting a straight course but about curving along the path of least danger. It was a walk on the razor’s edge: a slip either way, and Freefall could spin sideways and roll with a wave or capsize end over end. So Kelly tethered herself at the helm station and hand steered.

  Dean would have been better at this.

  Dean.

  She saw him in the cage on La Araña, gripping the wires with his frozen fingers. The wind in the rigging became his scream as he was hoisted aboard with a hook through his knee. These thoughts weren’t even the worst. She tried to concentrate on steering, on keeping Freefall afloat and moving toward help. But she kept remembering other things. There were many, but the worst was Dean on the living room couch with his face in his hands and the photographs spread on the coffee table in front of him. Spread for her to see when she came in and found him like that. She’d still been flushed and hot beneath her winter coat from the afternoon in the hotel room. In the instant she saw him, she understood that all her pleasure in the last six months was something she’d stolen for herself by cutting it straight out of Dean.

  She’d given some of it back since then, but he’d given even more. So the scale would never be balanced.

  “Oh, God, Dean,” she whispered.

  * * *

  He was in his exposure suit, so he’d have a good chance of staying alive in the crab trap. Better, anyway, than Lena in her blanket. Or the frozen dead around them who’d been stripped to their bare skin and left with nothing against the cold.

  Thank God they don’t take his suit away, Kelly thought. And then, more coldly, she thought: And don’t let him find some way to pass it down to Lena. He’d do it if he could, even if it meant his own death.

  * * *

  She hand steered for three hours, covering sixty nautical miles. In the middle of the second hour, the engine’s rhythm developed a hitch. It was sputtering near the bottom of the fuel tank. She shut it down to save the last half hour of maneuvering. At the end of the third hour, the barometric pressure rose 4 millibars. The worst of the low-pressure system was past. The wind dropped to forty knots, and now only one in twenty waves swelled up to fifty feet. She used the furling gear to roll out a little more of the jib, then watched the knotmeter to get the new average speed, doing the math on the chart because she was too tired to divide in her head.

  If she could keep this up, it would be fourteen and a half hours to the cape. Maybe the Chileans could sen
d patrol boats south into the passage to search for La Araña. Or better yet, helicopter gunships. She thought of the warm comfort Dean would feel when he heard the rotors, when one of the big Sea Stallions dropped out of the gray gloom, its downdraft flattening a circle in the sea, its guns hanging down like the legs and stinger of a wasp.

  He’d know she’d come through.

  Kelly released the left Velcro wrist cuff of her exposure suit, pulled the end of her glove out of her sleeve, and looked at her watch.

  Five hours since she’d blinded and killed the man at the bow of La Araña. Five hours since La Araña had swerved away from her and given her a last look at Dean in his cage.

  She took the binoculars and scanned the horizon for the crab boat. Nothing. There was a massive iceberg five miles in front of her, visible where the sea was slamming into its western flank and sending geysers of spray skyward. It was so enormous that it sat as solid as an outcrop of rock in spite of the battering the Southern Ocean was giving it.

  Probably it had broken off from one of the ice shelves hugging the southern continent. Its smooth top must have covered ten square miles. Windborne spray from the breaking waves whipped over the edge of the ice cliffs and blew in snaking tendrils across the top. The spray would build to a fog bank on the lee side of the ice. She steered Freefall five degrees closer to north to give the area a wide berth. She wanted nothing to do with the berg, the fog, or the growlers that probably lay in the smoother water behind the ice mass. So she measured the distance with her eyes and set the course northward and then watched her progress against the ice ahead of her until she was sure it wasn’t drifting north on a line of convergence.

  Then she leaned to the VHF and turned up its volume knob, hoping and praying for static.

  But the death metal was still there, the same loop of screams.