“I gotta move you, honey,” she said. “But we’re good now. I took care of David.”
Dean was still coughing. If he heard her, he didn’t show it. She brought the wheelbarrow beside him and tipped it again. When she knelt to roll Dean to the sidewall of the wheelbarrow’s metal holding tray, she could feel the earth rumbling beneath her knees. A steady thrum, like Freefall’s engines. She pushed Dean into the tray, braced the wheelbarrow’s lower skid with a rock, and then righted it. She was glad she didn’t have to lift Dean directly. He was too weak to help, and she was getting very tired. She balanced the flensing knife across the wheelbarrow’s handles and stood for a moment, resting. She needed to get out of the flensing house before the whole place fell into the ground, but she was breathing so hard, she couldn’t see straight.
* * *
Five minutes later, she rolled Dean down the beach, toward the Zodiac. She was still dizzy. The tomato juice hadn’t been much. When they were even with David’s building, she stopped.
“I’ll be back in a sec,” she said. Dean didn’t respond, but at least he wasn’t coughing.
She crept up the slope and peeked around the door. David was leaning against the wall of the trap with his back to her. He was watching the door on the other side of the building, the one she’d last used as an exit. She picked up a stone, hefted it to judge its weight, and then pelted it at him. It bounced off the back side of his head, and he cried out, turning as he fell. The only thing on his face was fear. Distilled and refined, like something you could draw into a syringe, shoot into a vein. And it was possible he was getting even smaller. Collapsing like a star at the end of time.
She raised her hand.
“Be back in a minute.”
She went to the wheelbarrow, feeling David watch her till she was out of sight.
It was dangerous to let him stay alive. If he got out, he’d be deadly. There’d be other guns on the island, things worse than flensing knives. He might find a way to call back La Araña. She needed him, though, so she would keep him cold and wounded until she had what she wanted. After that, she’d have to make a decision. It wouldn’t be easy after what she’d seen and done in the flensing house.
But she’d made vows to Dean and Lena, and those were obligations as real and as sharp as the stones stabbing her frozen feet. She pushed Dean the rest of the way to the Zodiac.
Getting Dean into the Zodiac from the wheelbarrow had been hard. She’d had to drag him by his wounded shoulders out of the tray while standing up to her knees in freezing water. Then she’d had no choice but to drop him into the bow section of the boat. The blanket had fallen off him and he’d cried out, his purple and naked body curling in pain and shock. She climbed in and covered him again, shushing his cries and kissing his tightly closed eyes, wrapping the blanket as tightly as she could get it. Then she’d lowered the outboard shaft and revved the motor in reverse to pull off the beach.
Moving Dean onto Freefall had been infinitely harder. The side decks were six feet above her when she stood on the floor of the Zodiac and tossed the painter line around a deck stanchion. Freefall was not a small boat. In the end, she’d had to get him into the bosun’s harness they used for climbing the mast and then raise him on a sail halyard that led to a deck winch.
By the time she got him aboard, he was blue and shivering, and she still had to rig a way to lower him into the salon. That had taken another thirty minutes of frantic work. At least there was a heater in here, which she’d turned on as soon as she arrived. When she finally had him tucked into the pilot berth and wrapped in down blankets, the real work of tending to him began.
* * *
She put on water to boil in the galley and went to the cabinet and drawers where she kept the yacht’s medical supplies. She began with iodine and alcohol, uncovering him bit by bit to clean the wounds from the harpoon and the landing hook. They each had gone all the way through his legs, both of which were grievously infected. When the water had boiled, she used some of it to clean him and the rest for hot water bottles, which she put under the down blankets to raise his temperature while she rubbed antibiotic ointment into the wounds and bandaged them.
Freefall had more medical supplies aboard than some of the countries they’d sailed to, but she knew even they might not be enough. She put a catheter into his left arm and injected him with intravenous antibiotics and then put him on a glucose drip for his dehydration and hunger. She gave him codeine for the pain and used splints and cloth bandages to set his legs roughly so they wouldn’t bang around when Freefall rolled in the storms of the Drake Passage.
Through all this Dean barely moved. His lips were still blue even though his skin had warmed. It was the pneumonia that scared her the most. She could deal with the infections, the broken bones, until they got to Chile. But if his pneumonia didn’t improve, it could kill him before they finished the passage. She used her stethoscope to listen to the wet rattle in his lungs, his full-throttled heart. His shoulders were so swollen and bruised, the muscles probably were compressing his lungs. That couldn’t be helping any.
When he’d rested and could stand it, she’d have to do chest therapy: pounding on his chest and his back to loosen the layers of mucus clinging to his lungs while coaxing him to cough no matter how much it hurt him.
But for now she just sat with him. His watchband was too small for his swollen wrist, so she took it and put it on the little shelf above the pilot berth. It would be safe for him until he could wear it again. She smoothed his black and gray hair back from his forehead and kissed him.
He was asleep. Warm and clean, in a bed. He was flying on codeine and wouldn’t be hurting for a while. If she heard the man’s dying screams when the wind blew through the rigging, if she saw him collapsing with the bone in his ear and seizing up as she ripped his pants off to steal them, she could look at Dean in this place of warmth and comfort and know what she’d bought with that death. And that might make it better.
* * *
She went to the galley and made a bowl of canned soup and ate it while sitting across from Dean. Then she bathed quickly with hot water and a washcloth and changed into her own clothes. When she was done and Dean was still sleeping, she lit the pair of brass oil lamps on the teak bulkhead behind the navigation table, wanting their warm glow for the cold work of tracing David’s wake. She put a tartan blanket across her lap and poured a half shot of Bunnahabhain into her coffee, stirring in sweetened condensed milk from a can.
The log was in Spanish, but she struggled through it anyway. She could pick out the names of ships and yachts, a string of isolated summer-only research stations along the Antarctic Peninsula and scattered in the South Shetland Islands. She spent an hour parsing the journal, stopping only to refill her coffee and get more food from the galley.
Kelly guessed La Araña and her crew had been motoring north after wiping out Russia’s tiny Novodvinsk II station a hundred miles south of Adelaide Island when they’d intercepted Arcturus. Before that, the log read like a list of calamities: places ransacked, ships looted, men and women captured or killed. There were long tables of goods recovered, bank account numbers beaten from caged victims. They’d make a fortune when they fenced it and zeroed the accounts. They’d have a mountain of wealth and a pile of bodies to match it.
When she finished scanning the journal, she turned to the maps. David used the same set of hand-corrected British Admiralty charts she and Dean carried aboard Freefall. But David’s were marked in pencil and grubby with grease and food stains. A trail of X marks and dates plotted La Araña’s last raid from Deception Island, through the South Shetlands, and down the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. A second trail of marks showed Arcturus and its route across the Drake Passage. Lena’s website address was penciled at the beginning of that track and underlined.
“David, you piece of shit,” she whispered.
He’d researched her, maybe stealing her identity to get what he needed from the data banks in Scot
land. He’d gotten tired of taking people without knowing anything first, testing them only to find out they wouldn’t match. It was too dangerous, and he was probably in a hurry. The Colonel couldn’t wait forever. Not for something like this.
But with Lena, he’d found everything before their paths even crossed. And when he was finally sure, he’d put La Araña on a converging course with Arcturus. The two vessels finally came together just five miles from Freefall’s last anchorage. She and Dean had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Lena was no coincidence.
He’d hunted her down.
She paused and went to the pilot berth to check on Dean. His heart rate had slowed, but his lungs sounded like a bathtub draining. Air and liquid fighting for space in the same small pipes. She kissed him again, thankful to be able to just do that, to have him and hold him, and then went back to the navigation table.
She found the admiralty chart that showed the northeastern tip of the peninsula and the chain of the South Shetlands. Deception Island was circled, and David had handwritten the longitude and latitude coordinates. Next to that was the number 6 in a circle. She’d seen other places marked like this on other charts: coordinates and a number to designate them.
These were important places to David, to La Araña. Safe harbors, caches of fuel and gear. He’d probably marked them in a GPS somewhere but hadn’t wanted to take the time to enter a name. So he’d used the numbered waypoints in the sequence the GPS assigned to them and had marked the numbers on the charts.
Each of the numbers 2 through 7 corresponded with safe harbors in Antarctica or the nationless islands scattered off its shores. But she hadn’t seen the first set of coordinates on any chart. Perhaps the first position, the place all this began and the primary waypoint in David’s GPS, was La Araña’s home port in the north.
That would be the Colonel.
She flipped through the charts until she came to the one she wanted: British Admiralty 0554—Estrecho de Magallanes. She studied the map carefully until she found it.
David must have had a second thought about what he’d written on this chart, because he’d gone back and erased it. But when she folded the map and brought it up to the light of the oil lamp and looked at it through the hand lens, she could see the faint indentations where he’d pushed the pencil across the thick chart paper. He’d erased the number 1 inside its circle and had rubbed out a set of coordinates: –54°07′34″ –072°05′52″. He hadn’t merely scratched out this entry or haphazardly blotted it with a dirty eraser so that a casual glance would take in the redaction. He’d carefully gone in to remove every bit of lead. She retraced the marks with her pencil and looked at the spot they marked. It was a tiny offshoot of a narrow fjord on the western side of Isla Clarence, deep in the tortured labyrinth of the central Patagonian Archipelago.
She remembered David talking to her the first time. Telling her about his life on the run with his fugitive family.
Some of these places, David had said, don’t even have electricity.
This would be one of them. A hiding place at the bottom of the continent for an old colonel, a man plotting his return. She wouldn’t let him have it, and she wouldn’t let him have any part of Lena.
She checked on Dean one more time, and then she put on her coat and went out.
* * *
She ran the Zodiac hard until she closed with the shore, then tilted the outboard shaft up and let the boat slide onto the rocky beach. She hopped over the bow onto dry ground and walked around the side of David’s building. He’d have heard the Zodiac, so she didn’t bother to tiptoe. Besides, she wanted him to hear her moving gear. She yanked a blue tarp from a pile of equipment stacked along the wall of the building. There were a dozen jerry cans of diesel there. Barrels of fresh water. She opened one of the jerry cans and sniffed it, then sorted through the rest of the junk until she found the old cook pot they’d used with Dean.
She carried the fuel and the pot to the door and stood where the light would make a silhouette of her so that while she stared at David in his cage, he couldn’t see her face. He was hunched in the corner of the trap with the blanket drawn about him like a hooded beggar. Kelly came into the room and crouched on the ground in front of him.
“They teach history at Deerfield?”
He looked at her without speaking. His mouth and chin were bloody from sucking on his wounded hand.
“Did they teach you history? Yes or no? It’s the easiest question you’ll get.”
He sat up a bit.
“Yes.”
“Then you know about the Spanish Inquisition. Those guys, they knew torture. Better than your grandfather and your uncles. You know about them?”
He nodded.
“Yes or no, David. You speak when you’re spoken to.”
“Yes.”
“They had a process. I read about it. The first step; it’s got a name. Show the instruments. It’s not about threats. Fanatics don’t fuck around with threats. They’re more into vows. So you show the instruments because you will use them. You show the instruments because it’s a promise. You get that?”
He pulled the blanket to hide his wounded arm and looked away from her.
“Yes or no, David. You understand I’m making a promise?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then.”
She stood and took the cap from the jerry can and poured diesel into the pot. She did it from high up so that he could see the pink stream, so that it splashed out of the pot and onto the rocks. Then she capped the jerry can and set it aside.
She pointed at the pot of diesel with her open palm.
“The instruments,” she said.
She turned and walked out of the building and didn’t look at him again.
Once she was outside, she took the pistol from the left pocket of her coat. She walked over to the building where the men had been sleeping and took a rock from the ground. The clapboard walls were unpainted and old, but when she dug in with the sharp edge of the rock, she was able to gouge a rough circle onto the wall. She backed up twenty paces and then looked at the gun.
She’d never held one, had never even thought of shooting one. They were supposed to have safeties so that you couldn’t accidentally pull the trigger. So that a child couldn’t pick one up and do something terrible. She thought you were supposed to cock them somehow, to engage a spring before they’d fire. There was a lever on the handle, and this ejected the magazine when she thumbed it down.
She pulled the clip out and looked at it. There was a bullet at the top, its lead sheathed in copper. It was fat and blunt-tipped. She took the bullet out, and another one slid into its place. Stamped into the brass around the rim of the shell casing were the words .45 AUTO. She took all the bullets out, counted ten of them, and then put them back. With the magazine out, she looked for the safety and found a switch near the gun’s rear. She toggled it down until the white line on the button lined up with a red F.
F for fire, she thought. She aimed the gun at the wall and pulled the trigger.
The hammer on the back of the gun drew back and fell, but nothing else happened.
She slid the magazine back in, clicking it into place by slapping it with her palm. Again she aimed at the wall and pulled the trigger. Still nothing. She reengaged the safety, then felt along the top of the pistol, seeking out the edges between the metal parts. The top half could slide back. She pulled it until she heard a series of clicks, then released it, knowing she’d drawn the top bullet up and into the firing chamber.
Now she spread her feet on the ground and held the pistol with both hands, aiming at the circle. She clicked off the safety and pulled the trigger. The bang was incredible. Like a car accident. There was a flash and much more smoke than she’d expected. She saw the shell casing fly out to the right and bounce across the rocks. The shot echoed around the island, and the storm petrels went wild in their roosts.
She looked at the side of the building.
The bull
et hole was three feet from her target. She aimed again, telling herself the gun was just an instrument. A tool no different from a scalpel or an endoscope. Or a flensing knife. This time, when she pulled the trigger, she didn’t flinch.
She hit her circle dead on, punching a hole in the wall and the one beyond it so that she could see daylight clear through the building. She put the safety back on and put the pistol in her pocket, knowing the gun was loaded and cocked.
She was trembling as she walked back to the Zodiac, the pistol heavier in her pocket now than it had been before. Shooting it felt wrong and dangerous. Now it was something she could use and not just show. Its weight tugged at her jacket and told her what she’d known all along, what she’d told David: once you showed the instruments, there was a vow to use them. A solemn pact between two people. She knew it was there, and she didn’t like it at all.
She pushed the Zodiac into the water, jumped aboard, and started the engine. Let David stew a while, she thought. She wasn’t ready to question him yet. It would have to be soon but not yet. La Araña was still within radar range, so there was time before she could leave.
* * *
Dean was still sleeping.
She scrubbed herself clean and changed his empty glucose bag for one of sterile saline. If she got him hydrated again, she’d have to worry about keeping him clean. She gave him a urinary catheter and hung the collection bag just above the cabin sole, taping the tubes so they wouldn’t catch on anything once she was under way. She listened to his chest again and tried to think what she would do if the antibiotics didn’t work.
Close Reach Page 14
