Blank Slate (A Kyle Jackle Thriller)

by Hamric, Zack

  Next I turned my attention to Tasha.

  “You doing OK?” I asked. She had been fairly quiet since the attack a couple of hours before.

  “Yeah, just a little shaky. I really thought we were going to die today,” she said wrapping her arms around my chest.

  “We’ll be fine. Just enjoy the night and try to stop thinking about it. You were great-seems like it’s not the first time you’ve run into trouble.”

  “I was raised around three brothers and had a father in the army,” Tasha said. “I can handle a gun pretty well-used to go on hunting trips with my father when I was younger.”

  I was still trying to wrap my head around how that could possibly make her familiar with the operation of an HK-5, but decided to leave it alone for now.

  Cruising at night can either be a magical experience or completely terrifying. This was the former-the only sounds were those of the water slipping under our keel and the sound of wind blowing through the rigging. Tasha was asleep, curled up with a blanket and pillow in the corner of the cockpit. I kept the radar alarm set for twenty miles to give us plenty of warning in case there were any commercial ships steaming in the vicinity. By eleven o’clock, the moon was a barely discernible crescent on the horizon and the only visible light was from the instruments. I began to see a faint glow surrounding the bow wave and trailing behind in our wake. I woke Tasha.

  “You don’t want to miss this,” I said pointing to the water behind us. “Phosphorescent plankton.” The glow was bright enough that we could actually see each other’s faces illuminated in the light. Suddenly, three dark shapes broke from the water and started trailing a brilliant streamer of phosphorescent water behind them as they rode our bow wave. “Dolphins-a sign of good fortune for mariners,” I said as I held her to my side.

  “Good fortune indeed,” she murmured sleepily as she inclined her head and kissed me deeply.

  Later, I had a chance to reflect while she slept. She looked beautiful in the soft glow as she slept in the cockpit while I kept an eye on our course. I let her stay there until four o’clock in the morning when I simply couldn’t fight the growing exhaustion any longer.

  “Tasha, I need to catch some sleep before morning. Can you take over the helm for a while?”

  “Sure, how long do you want to sleep?”

  “Just a couple of hours or so-if our course changes or the radar sounds an alarm, just wake me up.”

  There is nothing more relaxing than sleeping on a sailboat underway when the wind is on the beam and the seas are calm. I slept until almost six in the morning and only awakened when the motion of the boat suddenly changed. The wind had shifted to the Northeast and I could feel the seas building.

  A quick check of the chart plotter. We were approaching an area marked on the chart as Cay Sal Banks. Looking at the navigation notes revealed that it was a large submerged atoll with dozens of low islands barely breaking the surface of the water. I wanted to stay in the Straits of Florida and just skirt the North side of the Banks. Too easy to be trapped sailing into an area I didn’t know anything about and not have an easy exit especially with some heavy weather coming in.

  “I’m a little worried about what I see behind us,” I said to Tasha pointing to the building wall of clouds coming from the north. “Why don’t you put a reef in the main-I think we have some nasty weather coming in. Might as well reduce sail before we have to. I’m going forward and dowse the spinnaker before the wind picks up any more.”

  “Aye,aye my Captain,” she said with a little flip of her hand as she eased the main and started reefing the sail and securing it to the boom. I clipped back into the jackline and moved forward to drop the spinnaker. Pulled the sock down over the flowing sail and dropped the sail on the deck. Quickly rolled up the sail, stuffed it through the forward hatch and scrambled back to the cockpit holding onto every available grip I could find in the turbulent seas.

  Looking at the radar, I could see the angry cells of the storm clouds about fifteen miles away and closing rapidly. At this point, we had still had several hundred feet of water beneath our keel but I was really concerned about what would happen when the deep ocean swells hit the thirty-foot shallows around the Cay Sal Banks. We didn’t have to wait long to find out. Within thirty minutes, the winds had picked up to forty knots and the seas were running ten to twelve feet with the spray blowing horizontally off the tops of the waves creating a blinding mist.

  “Tasha, close the hatch on the cabin,” I said gripping the wheel tightly and bracing against the violent pitching motion of the boat. “While you’re at it, you might get an extra safety harness for yourself. They’re in the port locker just forward of the nav station.

  A moment later she returned. “Got it. How bad do you think it’s going to be?”

  “Looks very nasty for the next thirty minutes, hopefully this will blow over in the next hour or so.”

  I focused on keeping the boat powering forward. The massive waves that were coming in from the stern quarter hissed under the hull as they piled up into steep troughs of churning water over the shallows. It looked like the waves were finally beginning to ease when a massive wave rolled in and rolled the port side of the boat into the water. The main sail went under water and as I scrambled desperately trying to ease the tension on the rig, the halyard broke with a thunderous crack. We rolled upright and the sail, no longer secured at the top of the mast by the halyard, dropped onto the deck and in the water in a tangled mess.

  “Tasha, take the wheel,” I yelled over the howling of the wind and waves. She moved to the helm and I scrambled forward sliding along the jackline. Standing on top of the cabintop and trying to secure the flailing sail in these conditions was a complete nightmare. I managed to get one sail tie secured around the middle of the boom and then disaster! Dolce Vita had turned sideways to the wind after the sail dropped and I was hit by a wave from the starboard side and washed into the sea. Another wave as large as the first one broke over the deck knocking Dolce Vita on her beam ends until her mast almost touched the water. She quickly rolled upright snatching me in my harness until I smashed against the side of the boat. The harness tightened mercilessly around me as I was towed beside the boat at eight knots gasping for air in the foaming water. My foul weather jacket had bunched around my neck and was slowly choking me as I tried to get a grip on the lifeline to scramble back aboard. I felt Tasha grab me by the back of the harness and pull just as another wave lifted me up the side of the boat. With the last of my strength, I made a desperate grab for the lifeline and flopped back into the cockpit beaten, bruised and much the worse for wear.

  Coughing and trying to clear the last of the seawater from my lungs, I managed to choke out, “Thanks, just for that, I’ll cook you dinner tomorrow night.”

  “Just for scaring me like that, you’re cooking for the next week,” she said trying in vain to muster a smile.

  The storm passed as quickly as it appeared. In the early morning daylight, we surveyed the damage to the boat. “Not as bad as it could have been,” I said after coming back from the bow. “The anchor banged around on deck a little-my fault for not having it secured. The only real problem is we lost the main halyard.”

  “Can we fix it?” asked Tasha.

  “Sure, if we have enough line for a new one. I can’t remember where I kept all my spares.” That started a search from stem to stern that was finally rewarded when I found a roll of line in the forward sail compartment. I rolled off a little over one hundred feet into a coil and looked with dismay at the top of the sixty-foot mast still pitching from side to side in the heavy swell.

  “I think we’ll have to put in behind Cay Sal. It’s one of the larger islands in the area and should give us some shelter from the waves. I hate the idea of climbing a mast when we’re rolling around at sea.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Tasha said. “I’m in no mood to lose you overboard again on this trip.”

  Three hours later, we safely anchored in the le
e of Cay Sal. “Not exactly a Club Med,” I said looking around at the desolate coral outcropping with it’s scraggly growth of vegetation that looked like it could wash away in the first major storm.

  “Actually, I count twenty seven palm trees, a couple of falling down buildings, a broken down tractor, and some rusty fifty five gallon drums,” Tasha said as she stood on the bow and surveyed the landscape. It was desolate, but still beautiful in its remoteness. The sunlight flashed off the rainbow colored sides of the fish as they flashed in and out of the coral heads that were faintly visible in the crystal blue lagoon. This was as far from nowhere as you could get-exactly the kind of place we wanted to stop for repairs.

  “Can you give me a hand with these straps,” I asked Tasha as I struggled to remember how to rig the climbing apparatus that would get me up the mast. I clipped the ATN Climber on a spare spinnaker halyard that ran to the top of the mast, slipped my feet in the loops and started up the rope. It went quickly-pushing up the top clip, bending my knees, standing, sliding the bottom clip up and within five minutes I reached the top of the sixty-foot mast.

  “Beautiful view-you should come on up,” I yelled to Tanya who was watching intently from down below.

  “No thanks,” she said smiling sweetly. “I like it just fine down here. And if it’s not too much trouble, please don’t fall off that damn thing.”

  I had secured one end of the new halyard to the harness and after only a couple of attempts was able to run the halyard down inside the mast for Tasha to fish out and secure to the mast. The job almost finished, it was time to inspect the masthead for any other hardware that might need replacing while I was aloft.

  My attention was diverted when I saw a vessel arc into sight ten miles away at the very edge of the horizon. After a few minutes, I could make out enough detail to recognize it as a cutter. No way to tell what government it belonged to-technically, I was in Bahamian waters, but the US Coast Guard was known to patrol the area on the lookout for drug smugglers. Hell for that matter, the island is only twenty miles north of Cuba. Could have been anyone.

  I scrambled down the mast and reached the bottom just as the cutter came alongside and dropped anchor. I was relieved to see it was the Coast Guard even though I had a little bit of a twinge at the sight of the deck crew casually standing by the .50 cal gun on the bow. They rigged an RIB, launched it and gently bumped into the Dolce Vita as they tied up to our stern rail. “Welcome aboard,” I said with a relaxed easy smile as I unclipped the gate on the lifelines and extended my hand. A young Ensign scrambled aboard first, followed by two other Coasties hot on his heels. I slowly let out my breath-they were only armed with sidearm’s-obviously just a routine boarding for them.

  “I’m Kyle Jackle. This is my mate Tasha,” I said gesturing in her direction.

  If there was one thing Tasha knew from her job at the club, it was how to make a man feel welcome. She turned on a killer thousand-watt smile-that combined with the tiny shorts and tight top she was wearing was enough to guarantee they would be focused more on inspecting her rather than the vessel.

  “Just a routine vessel check, I’m Jackson” stuttered the Ensign. “Could I see your passports and boat registration documents, please?”

  I stepped below. I breathed a sigh of relief that the documentation I needed had been pulled out of the hidden compartment the night before and prepared for just this possibility. “Here you go,” I said as I reached up and handed both of our passports to Ensign Jackson.

  “What are you guys doing out here?” asked Jackson. “You are supposed to clear customs at the Bahamas-the station is about one hundred fifty miles in that direction,” he said pointing to the east. It was a fair question-this desolate landscape of coral and stunted palms was last on most cruisers choice of places to cruise in the Bahamas.

  “This was an unplanned stop-we had a little problem last night-lost our halyard in the storm,” I said holding up the frayed end of the line to emphasize my point. “This was the closest place to put in for repairs.”

  “I understand; last night we had a distress call from another boat thirty miles north of here. What a nasty night! I’ll call your location and a report in to our counterparts with Bahamas Customs and let them know what happened. Might save you another boarding. We’ll just do a quick check below and be on our way.”

  Jackson clambered down the narrow ladder with one of his crewman trailing behind while the other waited above decks with us. We could hear closets and cabinet doors banging as they searched the boat for any contraband that might be on board.

  “Captain, could you come down here for a minute?” called Jackson from the cabin. “I wanted to ask you about something.” My blood froze and I slowly made my way below.

  “Just curious about where this came from?” Jackson asked pointing at an old picture of the Dolce Vita hanging on the wall. The picture was faded and obviously thirty or forty years old. There was a full racing crew of eight on board standing on the rail with a large trophy.

  At the last second, I spotted the CYC flag in the background of the picture. “Long before my time, but that was a picture taken at the Chicago Yacht Club just after the boat won the Chicago-Mackinac race in the early 70s.”

  Curiosity satisfied, they disembarked and motored back to the cutter while we waved farewell. I looked at Tasha, “I don’t know about you, but I could really use my daily ration of rum about now.”

  “I’ll pour,” she said.

  At least the inspection had been a little break in the monotony of patrolling these god-forsaken islands, Jackson thought as they pulled up to the side of the cutter. And that girl-just smoking hot. The only thing he found a little strange was that when he had asked the Captain of the sailboat about the picture, it was almost like he was seeing it for the very first time.

  CHAPTER 18

  “Hey, Tasha. I’m not really excited about trying to navigate through these coral heads at night,” I said pointing at the shallows and narrow channels running through the area. “Just too damn risky. Why don’t we wait until morning until we head south?”

  “I think that’s a great idea,” said Tasha. “I, for one have had enough emergencies for one trip. And besides, I think after I fished you out of the ocean last night, I heard something about a promise to cook me dinner tonight.”

  “I can tell already, you’re going to be very difficult,” I said with a smile. “So what would madam like the chef to prepare? Possibly a nice medium-rare steak,” I said thinking of the fat filets we had below in the freezer.”

  “Fish,” Tasha said.

  “I think that’s the one thing we didn’t buy at the store,” I said, but was cut off before I could elaborate further when she reached into the side lazarette and handed me a light saltwater rig. Thirty minutes later after catching some pinfish, I rigged a circle hook and sinker, hooked one of the pinfish and cast into about thirty feet of water. I didn’t have to wait long before the rod tip bent over. “Tasha, this one’s all yours,” I said handing the rod over to let her land the fish.

  “What is it? It weighs a ton!”

  “Hard to tell, probably a red grouper. Whatever it is, you can call it dinner.”

  Within a couple of minutes, Tasha cranked the fish to the surface where it was lying on its side occasionally making a feeble attempt at a run for freedom. I reached over, grabbed the leader with a gloved hand and threw the fish in the cockpit. I quickly dispatched the thrashing fish with a club and made short work of filleting the grouper.

  “Watch this.” I said throwing the bones and remains of the fish overboard. There was a swarm as the small reef fish quickly dove in for the unexpected banquet. The party was cut short by the arrival of a large barracuda that glided in, snatched the entire remaining carcass, and disappeared into the depths of the lagoon.

  “Why don’t I give you a hand-we’ll eat sooner,” Tasha said as she smiled and disappeared below with a filet in each hand.

  Now it was my turn to go to work.
I broke out the propane grill, mounted it on the stern rail and somehow started it without creating a fireball. Timing was nearly perfect as Tasha reappeared with the filets seasoned with pesto and olive oil ready for the grill. I was just as pleased to see the wine bottle and glasses that she was somehow balancing as she climbed out of the cabin.

  “How do you like yours done?” I asked flipping the filets to let them sear on the other side.

  “I think it looks just right,” said Tasha leaning over my shoulder to inspect the process.

  There’s nothing better than fish cooked fresh from the ocean enjoyed with a good bottle of wine, a beautiful woman and a sunset filling the western sky. Dinner finished, we dropped the scraps overboard for the waiting scavengers and watched the canopy of the stars brighten in the sky as daylight faded into night. I wrapped my arm around Tasha and she looked at me expectantly.

  “I think you owe me the rest of that conversation,” I said.

  “OK, what do you want to know?”

  “I’m beginning to fill in some of the blanks about myself, but we didn’t have much of a chance to talk about you. How long had you been at the club?”

  Tasha paused, “I started working there maybe two months ago.”

  “Why? It’s pretty obvious to me that you are intelligent, don’t have a drug problem, and are an absolute pleasure to be around. So what brought you to Florida and why are you stripping?”

  “Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a job in this country if you have an accent?” she asked with a smoldering glare. “And it really pisses me off that you judge me for being a stripper. There’s nothing wrong with it. And as far as why I’m here, I’m trying to find my little sister-she went to Italy on modeling contract and disappeared. I got one phone message after she arrived there that was cut off just as we started talking..and then nothing. I’m only here because I heard Popov had bought the agency and thought she might have come here with him.”