Close Reach

by Jonathan Moore

  Then she went up into the cockpit and sat on the edge of the boat, taking out David’s satellite phone. He’d already ripped all the communications equipment from Freefall, and even if the delicate gear hadn’t broken when he dropped it on the rocks, she wouldn’t know where to begin rewiring it. But there was his phone. She turned it on and looked at the screen.

  BATTERY TOO LOW TO TRANSMIT

  POWERING OFF

  The green-lit screen went dark.

  “Goddamit!”

  She wanted to throw the phone off the boat but stopped herself. She turned it around and pulled off the plastic panel covering the back. It had some kind of custom lithium rechargeable battery. Nothing she had aboard Freefall. A rubberized plug protected the recharging port, and she yanked it out. To charge this thing, she’d need whatever cable had come with the phone. She wondered why everything had to be so fucking complicated. Why there couldn’t be just one kind of battery, one kind of cord.

  “Fuck you, David,” she said.

  She climbed back into the Zodiac and started the engine. This time, instead of going ashore, she motored over to Arcturus. If Lena had been maintaining a website while at sea, Jim must have had good communications gear aboard. She didn’t see any antenna domes on the mast or the stern arch. Maybe they had something smaller, such as a handheld phone that hooked up to a laptop. She tied off alongside and jumped aboard.

  * * *

  They’d had more time with Arcturus and had stripped her nearly to a bare hull. Everything worth anything was gone, down to the cutlery in the galley. All the electronics and instruments were missing. A series of holes in the panel above the navigation table hinted at what might have been taken. Now there were just frayed cables hanging in the empty space.

  She went up to the master cabin to check the drawers. There was a queen-size berth straddling the yacht’s centerline. The down blankets were wadded and had fallen to the floor. The fitted sheet was still on the mattress.

  It was smeared with blood across the middle.

  They’d been like the high school boys in New Haven—they’d started right away, before they even got her off the boat.

  “Lena, honey,” Kelly whispered.

  She sat on the end of the mattress and put her face in her hands. Arcturus was cold and offered nothing. She didn’t stay long.

  * * *

  Palida was worse.

  David’s men had taken the research ship by force, with guns. Some of the communications gear was still in place, but it was shot up and blood-spattered. She tried it all, but it was dead.

  So was the man tied in the captain’s chair on the bridge.

  They’d used an extension cord, then sliced him with a knife. The carpet around the chair was stained reddish black and was stiff underfoot. A ballpoint pen was still clamped in his hand. He’d been writing things down for David until he’d bled out.

  She left the bridge and searched the rest of the little ship, digging into the crew lockers, the bunk room, the wet lab. In the corridors she found blood frozen on the white-painted walls, dark holes in the plate steel where the bullets had passed. And in one of the bunks she found a long form covered by a sheet. Two pale fingers curled out into the light, the broken nails painted pink. She stood silently and stared at them, listening to water lap gently against the hull.

  She didn’t lift the sheet.

  When she left Palida, she sat in the Zodiac for five minutes without starting the engine. She looked at the dark water, the soot-colored sky. The island was a dead-silent ring of rock, the color of wet ash. She could leave David in his cage to die of cold or hunger, and she could take Freefall and ride the wind out of this hell. East and then north. She could tend to Dean and let Freefall do what she did best—fly off the wind and surf down the waves until they came to a gentler and warmer place. Some tropical island where she’d have to invent new words for all the colors. A place she could smell thirty miles out to sea, its scent of ginger blossoms and fertile earth and growing things carried on a warm trade wind like a light beacon. A trail to follow home.

  But there was the bloody sheet in Arcturus, and the way Lena’s tears had pooled behind the dam of Kelly’s collarbone, and the way she had kissed the crown of Lena’s head, knowing they were marking each other. I don’t want any of it, Lena had screamed. Naked, trembling, and starving, the backs of her thighs still red and wet as she vomited.

  Kelly’s way home went through Isla Clarence, and there would be no warmth or hope or rest until she had gone there first. That was how she would have it and how Dean would have it, so that was the way it would be. She started the motor and went back to Freefall to get ready.

  David would have to answer for everything, for all of it.

  “Are you ready?”

  She was sitting on a folded blanket she’d brought from the bunk room, and she had a mug of steaming coffee. David raised his head off his knees and looked at her with his black eyes. The diagonal slash across his face was swollen and oozing.

  “Yes.”

  “Twenty questions. Lie even once, I’ll know. And you’ll die for it. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “You believe me?”

  He nodded.

  “Say it, goddamit!”

  “Yes! I understand.”

  She took a sip of her coffee and breathed out slowly.

  “Good. Besides you, how many men were with you on La Araña?”

  “Six,” he said. His eyes didn’t move left or right but stayed straight ahead.

  She nodded. Six plus David. Seven cots in the bunk room. He could tell the truth and look her in the eye.

  “Here’s a harder one.”

  She took his pistol from her coat pocket and clicked the safety off, then put it on the ground beside her, stroking its barrel with her fingertips.

  “I tested it twice, and it works just fine. I’ve got eight bullets left. Enough to kill you, your uncles. Your colonel. But maybe I want more. So where are they?”

  She stared at him, and he started to turn his face away.

  “Goddamit, David!” She picked up the gun and pointed it at him, her finger on the trigger. “You look at me when you answer. You don’t talk to the ground.”

  He met her eyes again, warily. She put the gun down, not sure how close she’d just come to shooting him. It must have been a near thing. She’d put pressure on the trigger, had felt it move back and butt up against its tipping point.

  “There’s bullets in the other house. In the back room. There’s a black chest next to the door. They’re in there.”

  Again his eyes didn’t move. She reached into her coat pocket and took out a new-looking cardboard box of Magtech bullets. Fifty bullets in the box. She put it on the rocks next to the pistol.

  “Correct,” she said. “Next question.”

  She drank more of the coffee, then balanced the mug in her lap so he wouldn’t see her hands shaking. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the box of bullets, understanding what it meant about her questions and the risk he’d take if he lied to her.

  “Where’s the charger for your satellite phone? I’ve only got two bars left on the battery after talking to the U.S. consulate in Santiago.”

  She said this evenly and without changing her tone. She said it with a shrug, like it was no big deal.

  “Look at me when you answer.”

  “It’s—if it’s not on the cot, it’s probably on La Araña. I could plug it in on La Araña. Because of the inverter.”

  His eyes didn’t shift, and what he was saying made sense.

  “What about keeping me in touch with Annie, for the sale? You stripped Freefall, didn’t have the charger for the phone.”

  He answered quickly, easily.

  “I’m good with electronics. I was going to hook stuff up in the other building. Rewire it, get your satellite dome and put it on the roof. We’ve got a generator back there.”

  “That’s what you were doing when I got you?
”

  “I needed to get the stuff anyway. To sell it.”

  “What about my EPIRB? It’s not on board. Where’d you put it?”

  He shrugged as if it were too simple a question.

  “First thing when we take a boat, we get rid of those. Smash them, weigh them down in a bag, and send them to the bottom. Emergency beacons are registered, so they can’t ever turn up. It’s not like we could sell them. And we didn’t want to risk accidentally setting one off. So my guys would’ve got rid of it.”

  Kelly picked up the gun and the bullets and walked out.

  She didn’t want him to see her think, and she didn’t want him to start getting comfortable. He might have been able to rewire the electronics, but she didn’t think she could do it. Most of the cable runs on Freefall were under the cabin sole, behind bulkheads, and up the mast. Even if she knew how, she’d spend days pulling the boat apart to find lost wires. She didn’t have days, and she wasn’t about to let David out of his cage to do it for her. If she’d had Freefall’s emergency beacon, she could have set it off and waited a few days for the Chilean coast guard to do a flyover, searching for her signal. But that wasn’t an option if David had gotten rid of it, and Lena might not be able to wait that long anyway. Freefall still had a VHF radio. If she got within range of a ship, she could make a call. But she wouldn’t count on it. Not out here, in this weather. Not with the chance La Araña might hear on an open frequency.

  It left her where she’d been all along: on her own.

  She took two of the jerry cans of diesel from the side of the building and carried them down to the Zodiac. The wheelbarrow was still there, half in the water where she’d left it. She pushed it back up and loaded it with diesel, then took it to the water’s edge. She made as much noise as she could just to keep David wondering. There were twenty fuel cans in various shapes and colors, but each held five gallons. She’d need as much as she could get and would siphon whatever she could from Arcturus and Palida.

  “Two more easy ones, Kelly,” she whispered to herself. “And then nail the bastard.”

  She came back into the building with the gun drawn and held at her thigh. She sat on the folded blanket and picked up her coffee mug. She sipped it, loving the sugar and the rich milk, then looked at David.

  “This is really good,” she said. “Nice and warm. I was so cold when I was in there. And after a few days, you get too thirsty to think.”

  She blew on the surface of the coffee to watch the steam carry off into the air and took another sip.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where was La Araña on the twenty-third of—look at me, David—the twenty-third of December?”

  He looked at her but didn’t fully meet her eyes. His gaze went up and to the left. He was thinking.

  “In the Bugge Islands. South of Adelaide. There was a Russian station there, I forget the name. Novogorosk or something.”

  “And then you came north.”

  “Yes.”

  He didn’t need to think for that one. It came right away.

  “Did you know Lena was the one you’d been looking for before you took Arcturus or only after?”

  This one was a mostly a throwaway. It didn’t really matter what he said; she knew why they wanted Lena and didn’t care when they’d figured out she was the object of their search.

  “Before.”

  She nodded and took a casual sip of her coffee.

  “The men who took Lena, those are your uncles? The Colonel’s sons?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’re they taking her? Where’s La Araña headed?”

  He started to answer and then stopped. His eyes darted down and to the right, and then he looked at her and held her gaze steadily. But she hadn’t missed the tell.

  “Ushuaia. That’s on Tierra del Fuego. I don’t know the address of the house, but if you take me there I can—”

  “Shut the fuck up! You lying sack of shit!”

  She jumped up and grabbed the pot of diesel. David raised his arms to shield his face, but it didn’t matter. She drew back and doused him with the fuel, a gallon of it into his face and down his chest and all over his blanket.

  “Kelly, please!”

  She backed up ten paces and reached into her pocket, coming out with the bright orange flare gun from Freefall’s signaling box. She pointed it at David.

  “I said if you lied to me, you’d die. You’re fucking lying, and I know it.”

  She pulled back the hammer, and David fell to the floor of the trap, screaming and digging at the ground, as if he could escape that way. She waited until he looked up at her, and then she pulled the trigger. His shrieks drowned out the sound of the flare. She’d aimed it high, raising her wrist at the last second. The shot rocketed over the top of the trap, smoking and flaming. It went out the open door on the other side of the building, flew across the beach, and hit the dark water. It burned and bubbled as it sank.

  David was curled on the bottom of the cage in a ball, screaming and gagging on the diesel. Kelly came back to him, broke the flare gun open, and pulled out the smoking shell. She dropped it on the ground and took another from her pocket and loaded it.

  “Last chance, David.”

  He was crying too hard to answer. He got onto his knees and retched, then looked up at her, utterly broken.

  “David.”

  She held the flare gun close to the cage so he’d hear the sound as she cocked the hammer. Vomit and pink fuel ran off his chin in greasy strings.

  “Isla Clarence! Okay? Clarence Island! There’s a fjord on the southwest. It’s on the map. Please don’t. Kelly. Please don’t. Please.”

  She got up and left. His crying carried all the way down the beach and went on until she started the Zodiac’s outboard. She could hear him again faintly when she killed the engine and drifted to a halt alongside Freefall.

  Kelly bathed and changed clothes before she went to Dean.

  It would be wrong to go to him when she was so unclean, so dirtied by what she’d done. Her anger was radioactive, and it was decaying into shame. She sat on the teak bench in the shower and used all the hot water, drinking another half ounce of the Bunnahabhain while steaming away the diesel residue and the stench of David’s fear. It was so easy to cross over. To twitch her finger or bend her wrist and in an instant do something that could never be undone. At least with the first two, she’d killed in the heat of a fight. She didn’t even want to think about the third man. That was too awful. And now David was in a cage and at her absolute mercy. She didn’t know what she was going to do with him. She closed her eyes and emptied her glass, letting the little bit of whiskey sit on her tongue. It burned down her throat and warmed her nose as she breathed out.

  If only he’d find a way to hang himself in his trap and take it out of her hands.

  Afterward, she dressed again and went to her husband. He stirred when she touched him, but he never really woke. The little bit of urine in the catch bag was dark as ink. That could be nothing. Maybe just a bladder infection and not the start of a reaction to the antibiotics she’d given him. Too much was riding on those drugs to stop using them.

  “Dean, honey,” she said. She was kneeling next to him, her hand on his forehead. “We’ll set sail soon, go north. I know where they’re taking Lena. So we’ll find her. You made me promise. Remember?”

  She waited to see if he’d wake and answer, but he didn’t. He was too far away with the codeine and the fever. At least he was comfortable.

  “It’s what you wanted. So I want you to know we’re doing it.”

  She kissed him on the forehead and then leaned close to the mattress to whisper in his ear. Gentle words that might find him wherever he was.

  * * *

  In the cockpit, she unscrewed the deck fill cap, slid a filtering funnel into the opening, and began pouring the diesel she’d brought from ashore. It was slow going because of the filter, but she didn’t know
where David had found the fuel or how old it was. She couldn’t afford to seize the engine by gumming its fuel lines. It took over an hour to transfer the hundred gallons. By then she knew La Araña was out of radar range, probably seventy miles from Deception Island. She could leave at any time, but it would take a while before she was ready. She took a rubber hose from a cockpit locker and went below for a collection of basic tools: screwdrivers and socket wrenches, a few sizes of pliers. She figured she might have to take things apart inside Arcturus and Palida before she could easily siphon fuel from their tanks. She motored over to them with the pile of empty jerry cans stacked in the bow of the Zodiac.

  Dark clouds rode high overhead, flying east with the wind. Beyond the protective rim of the crater, she could hear the big ocean swells battering the rocks, the crash of growlers as they raced in on the breakers and hit the outer cliffs, shattering to slush that would ride back to sea on the backs of receding waves.

  She couldn’t know for sure what the weather would be like in the middle of the Drake Passage when she reached it. But she could guess. She’d already started a log of the barometer, and the mercury was dropping.

  * * *

  When she’d transferred as much fuel as she could, Freefall’s tanks were half full. She went ashore and looked in on David. He was squatting miserably in the corner, his knife-cut hair plastered to his white scalp, his blanket reeking of fumes.

  She took the flare gun from her coat pocket and pointed it at the cage, hating the way he cringed, hating everything about him and what she was doing.

  “Passports,” she said. “Where’d you put them all?”

  She knew they’d keep them. A valid U.S. passport would be worth something to someone.

  “Duffel bag under one of the cots.”

  She went to the bunkhouse. It was cold in there now that the heater had gone out. She found the black duffel bag and opened it. Inside were a handful of unopened Eldoncard blood-typing kits and saliva-based HIV tests. She took them out, tossed them aside, and next found the rag they’d used to gag Lena. Then David’s stethoscope. Finally, at the bottom of all this, she found a battered plastic zipper bag with the passports. Twenty-three of them from a dozen countries. An international coalition of the dead.