An Incident At Bloodtide

by George C. Chesbro

  "We're investigators working for your insurance company!" I shouted as I pushed the tiller hard to starboard to initiate the maneuver that would bring us around. "Just wait there! We'll be right back!"

  "This is a waste of time, Mongo," Garth said evenly as he pushed on the boom, and I struggled to get us under sail. "Maybe worse than a waste of time."

  "You could be right, but sitting around on your deck and watching the river flow was getting to be a waste of time too, wasn't it? You wanted to do something, remember? We're doing something. At the worst, we can always go to the Coast Guard with the photographs when we get back. The only way we can get a murder investigation started is to catch somebody else's interest. If we can't interest the police or Coast Guard, then we have to try to interest the captain — and hope he says or does something incriminating."

  Garth merely shrugged. "I didn't say I disagreed with your reasoning, and I wanted to come out here even more than you did. We gave it a shot, but now I think we're wasting our time. I'd like to see Jefferson's reaction too, but we're not going to get on board."

  "Ah, but we don't know yet how the powers that be on board that ship are reacting to my insurance investigator ploy. I say we make one more pass."

  "Go for it."

  We went around the horn again, with Garth making only an occasional disparaging remark about the believability of insurance investigators conducting official business on a fourteen-foot catamaran. The sallow-faced crewman with the rumpled cap had been left alone at the rail to chart our progress. However, after we'd gone into irons and once again begun to drift with the current alongside the ship, the Greek suddenly appeared at the railing.

  "Go away!" he bellowed in his resonant baritone, gesturing angrily. He paused, glanced toward the south, then looked back at us. "You're crazy! Get out of here!"

  I once again held up the green plastic jug. It was time to let out all the stops. "This jug contains samples of water flushed from this tanker into the river. It proves you've been polluting. We can also prove that you've been taking on river water, in violation of the law, shipping it somewhere else and selling it. This sample was collected by the man who was killed under your ship. Now, we're trying to be fair about this. This is absolutely the last chance your captain is going to have to tell his side of the story before his picture and the Coast Guard's version of what happened get splashed all over the newspapers. It's in his interest to talk to us. We won't take up much of his time." I paused, waiting to see if my words would have some effect. They didn't. The two men remained where they were at the rail, but they were no longer paying any attention to us; both crewmen were now looking to the south. And we were once again almost out of earshot. "At least bring him up on deck to talk to us!" I shouted. "He's being accused of murder! Let us — !"

  Suddenly both men turned and abruptly walked away from the railing.

  "So much for rattling cages," Garth said in disgust. "Let's get out of here. We'll call the Coast Guard and the CFA, turn over what we've got, and be done with it. We've done everything we could, and we're at a dead end. Maybe we can leak some information to the papers, see what happens. There's no way we can do everybody's fucking job for them."

  "When you're right, you're right," I said with a sigh, and pushed the tiller hard to starboard. "But Tom was your friend, and I had to hear you say we'd done enough."

  From somewhere in the distance, from the south, the low rumble of a powerful engine could be heard. Garth shifted his weight toward the stern, uncinched the boom, pushed it out. I jiggled the tiller, trying to kick the stern around, but the wind had increased in velocity; we kept getting sucked back into irons, while at the same time being pushed ever closer to the tanker.

  "Let's goose it out of here, Mongo," Garth said tersely, glancing back at the steel hull behind him at the same time as he pushed the boom even further to starboard.

  "I'm trying, I'm trying."

  The rumble of the powerboat's engines had become a roar; the boat was not only coming in our direction but sounded unusually close to shore, not out in the middle of the river where you would expect a large powerboat at full throttle to be. I turned, squinted, and could see a black shape on the surface with a large rooster tail of wake rising into the air behind it. The airplane-like sound the craft was producing indicated the boat was carrying an engine — maybe two — generating upwards of 350 horsepower; that would make it a cigarette boat, or an equivalent model. On its present course, it was heading right for the tanker — and us.

  The breeze shifted slightly, and a puff of wind kicked our stern to port. I quickly sheeted in the mainsail and straightened the tiller. We began to slowly move away from the tanker as we stayed just on the edge of going back into irons. We were heading directly into the path of the approaching powerboat, but at the moment I was more concerned with avoiding being pinned against the hull of the tanker than with the powerboat and its cowboy driver. There was no way the man or woman at the helm of the black boat could avoid seeing our sail sticking up into the air; since anything under sail always has the right-of-way over powerboats, the driver would turn away. There was going to be some pretty powerful wake to contend with, but we'd been in rough waters before, and I was sure we could handle it. I eased the tiller over a bit, putting us on more of a port tack that would enable me to steer across the boat's wake at a forty-five-degree angle.

  The problem was that the driver of the black boat wasn't bearing off; he was heading for us straight amidships.

  "Son-of-a-bitch!" Garth said sharply. "The guy's crazy! He's coming right across our bow!"

  I pushed the tiller hard to the right, trying to bring the bow of the catamaran to an angle that would enable me to head into the other boat's wake head-on — our only chance, under these circumstances, to keep from capsizing. I anchored my feet in the hiking straps, firmly gripped the handle of the tiller with one hand, and the steel frame behind me with the other.

  "Hang on!" Garth shouted as he laid himself out flat across the trampoline, spreading his arms and legs out to his sides.

  With a deafening scream of engines more familiar to an airport than a river, the thirty-foot-long, jet-black cigarette boat shot across in front of us, not more than six feet from our bow. In the quarter second before its bow wave hit us, I noticed that the name of the boat painted on the hull had been covered over with silver, water-resistant duct tape. The driver, only his head and shoulders visible from where he sat in the cockpit, was wearing a black ski mask.

  Since it was a tad warm to be wearing a ski mask, my master investigator's instincts told me that the boat's close passage was no accident, and that the driver clearly intended to kill us.

  That was all the time for thinking I had. The bow wave hit only a split second before the spray from the rooster-tail wake washed over the cat, blinding me. The bow wave rolled under the pontoons, lifting us high up in the air, then throwing us back toward the tanker. I leaned forward as much as possible, for at that moment the critical danger was of flipping over backward. In the next moment, the danger was the reverse as we shot down the face of the bow wave; if the tips of the pontoons nosed into the water at the bottom of the wave's trough, we were sure to pitchpole. Garth had rolled back toward the stern to bring the bow up. The nose of the cat did disappear into the water at the bottom of the trough, and for one sickening moment I thought we were going to be catapulted forward. But then the nose came out, and we rode up and over another wave.

  In our situation, the cat's raised sail was worse than useless, for there was no way to harness the wind blowing at us in order to sail away; the Mylar sheet was flapping violently, causing the steel boom to bang back and forth over Garth's head and only inches from my face. The result was that we were turned ninety degrees, and the waves were coming at us broadside.

  With the passage of the bow wave, and the next two or three that rolled under us, the worst of the wake was spent, and we had not capsized. However, we were turned broadside, caught in irons, and
the cigarette boat was making a very tight turn in order to make another pass at us. And we were no more than a few feet from the steel wall that was the hull of the tanker. There was no way of getting the cat under control before the powerboat came back at us, and I braced for the inevitable collision with the hull of the tanker as I looked out over the water, searching for other boats; there were two other sailboats in the area, but they were some distance away, across the river and to the south, and it was impossible to gauge if they could see what was happening — not that it would make any difference to the man in the cigarette boat; we were likely to be dead long before any kind of help could arrive. When we whapped up against the side of the tanker, we could either be knocked unconscious, and unceremoniously drown, or be forced underwater and carved up by barnacles on the hull that could slice like millions of tiny switchblades.

  Without having any idea of just what I intended to do with a length of rope when I had it, I released the boom, grabbed hold of it, then untied the knot securing the sheet to the traveler's car. Garth saw what I was trying to do, rolled over on his back, reached up, and gripped the boom with both hands, holding it steady. I reached out for where the other end of the line was tied to a clew at the heel of the mainsail. I broke three fingernails, but finally managed to pull the line loose just as the powerboat, and its deafening wall of sound, roared past once again, this time only a yard or so from our starboard pontoon. The bow wave lifted us, hurled the cat back against the tanker's steel hull. The tip of the mast hit first, and there was a sound like a gunshot as one of the steel shrouds snapped, and the deadly end of the wire whipped through the air just inches from my face. The mast snapped at its base. The hull of the catamaran banged once more against the hull with a force that I could feel in every bone of my body, then flipped over, dumping us into the churning water.

  I clawed my way to the surface, felt a moment of heart-freezing panic when my right hand touched Mylar; the sail was over us. With my heart pounding, terror consuming all the oxygen in my system, I jackknifed in the water, forcing myself to dive deeper, the only direction I could go if I hoped to survive. I flattened out, began desperately pulling with my arms and kicking with my legs, unable to see anything in the murky, silt-roiled water. With my lungs bursting, I shot up for what I hoped was the surface, knowing I would never have a second chance if I still came up under the death shroud of the sail. My head broke the surface only inches from the edge of the floating mass of Mylar. Pent-up breath exploded from my lungs, and I just managed to gulp some air before a wave washed over me, driving me back under the surface. The water carried a troubling new threshing, metallic sound that throbbed in my ears.

  The ominous, deep growl was the tanker's engines rumbling to life, ripping the river with their giant talons of shaped steel.

  I came back up, gulped more air, desperately looked around for Garth, and finally spotted him. One of the cat's pontoons had cracked open and sunk below the surface, but the other was still afloat, and Garth, blood from a gash on his forehead streaming down over his face, was draped over it, feebly moving his arms in an effort to hang on. But he was losing the battle, slipping. Fifteen feet beyond him, the water at the stern of the ship was frothing and churning from the thrust of the mighty engines far below the surface. That's where the current was carrying us both.

  I clawed at the sail, pulling it into me, and it finally caught on the tip of the floating pontoon. I pulled myself hand over hand to the pontoon, heaved myself up on it, straddling the tiny island of fiberglass. Garth's head was slipping below the surface. I grabbed the back of his polo shirt, gave a mighty heave, and managed to pull him back up. His head lolled back, and I could see that his eyes were out of focus.

  "Garth!" I screamed. "Garth, you've got to hang on! I can't haul you up! I can't do it alone, Garth! Hang on! Get your arms up!"

  His right arm slowly came up out of the water, dropped over the pontoon. I gave his shirt another tug, then let go, quickly reached down, lifted up his left arm, draped it over the pontoon. The roar of the powerboat was rising, behind me and slightly to my left, as the driver came at us once again. The sail was now billowing in the water all around us, and the rope I had pulled loose from the rigging was floating on its surface. I grabbed it and pulled it in, gathering it in loose coils around my waist, looking for an end. I found one, and quickly formed a loop around Garth's chest, under his arms, and tied it off with a bowline.

  The airplane-engine scream of the cigarette boat swept past behind me, and I braced for the thunderous wake and spray, gripping Garth's shirt collar tightly with one hand while holding a coil of rope in the other. I twisted around on the pontoon and stuck out both feet to fend off as we were swept up once more against the tanker's hull. I knew the shock might very well break my legs, but it was better that my legs be broken than Garth's back. Where there was life, there was . . . something, even if I couldn't quite recall at the moment what it was. I certainly preferred it to death.

  The bow wave hit, lifting the catamaran, turning it, smashing its stern end into the steel hull, and saving my legs. The second wave turned us once again, and this time it was my head that smacked against the steel, barely a foot above a field of barnacles that would have scalped me. I felt the shock through my entire body, but, incredibly, there was no pain. For a moment everything went dark, but I managed to stay on the pontoon and maintain my grip on Garth's shirt collar. Knowing that to lose consciousness meant death for both of us, I screamed inwardly at myself, concentrating in the prickly, star-streaked darkness on the tactile feel of Garth's shirt, the fiberglass under me, the water pounding all around and over me; if those sensations went away, we went away.

  Then my vision cleared, just in time for me to see that we were inside the frothing circle of water at the ship's stern, nudging up against the great steel rudder. I could feel us being sucked down.

  As the shriek of the cigarette boat faded into the distance, heading back south, I looked around for something to grab hold of. There was nothing. With the water frothing all around us from the churning propeller blades below, I looked in a different direction — up. Throughout the attack by the powerboat, the tanker had apparently continued to off-load its cargo of oil, for the stern was now perhaps a foot higher in the water than it had been, exposing even more of the squared-off top of the massive rudder blade. It was the only angular surface in town, and it was the one I was going to have to reach if we were to keep breathing for more than another minute or two.

  I checked to make certain that the loop around Garth's chest was secure. I had no idea where the other end of the line was, nor time to find it. What I did have was a coil of rope in my left hand, with the rest of the line floating in the white water around me. I stood up on the pontoon, flexing my knees for balance, then gathered in more rope and flung the coil over my head, trying to catch the edge of the rudder blade. I missed by an inch, and the rope fell back into the water. Swaying unsteadily on the slippery fiberglass surface of the sinking pontoon, I gathered up the rope, flung it aloft once again. This time a loop caught on the edge of the rudder. I began to draw in the slack, hoping with some fervor that I wasn't simply pulling up the loose end. Then, suddenly, the rope went taut. I pulled even harder, and Garth's torso rose a few inches out of the water. It would have to be enough, for I was running out of time and in imminent danger of losing consciousness. I tied off the rope in the loop I had already knotted around Garth's chest. As the ruined catamaran was sucked under the boiling water, I leaped onto Garth's back, wrapping one arm tightly around his neck below his windpipe and using my free hand to cup his chin and tilt it back in order to keep his head above water.

  If we could just survive for another five or ten minutes, if the rope held, I thought there was a chance we could make it. The tanker was continuing to unload, and rising ever higher in the water as it did so, lifting us with it. The crew and captain of the tanker couldn't see us, but two men dangling on a rope off the rudder of their ship should cert
ainly attract some attention from the crew of any other boat that passed close enough to see us.

  I thought I felt the rope slip a little. I looked up to try to determine if the line was slipping over the edge of the rudder, and was amazed to find that I couldn't see that far. My field of vision was filled with sparkling red, blue, and green dots surrounded by a shiny black border that kept growing, swallowing up the dancing points of light. I tasted blood, but wasn't sure whether it was mine or Garth's, since I had my cheek pressed against his.

  I tightened my grip around Garth's neck, closed my eyes. The rope was going to hold, I thought; I just had to make sure that I held. We weren't going to drown, we were going to be lifted clear of the water, I was going to be able to maintain my grip, somebody was going to see us dangling, and we were going to be rescued. I kept repeating those thoughts in my mind like a mantra, and I was a third of the way through the third rerun when I passed out.

  Chapter Nine

  It must have been a pretty decent mantra, because, sure enough, I woke up in a hospital bed; I had a blinding headache and a taste in my mouth like rotting fruit, but the evidence seemed incontrovertible that I was alive. Garth was in the bed next to me, his eyes closed and his head swathed in bandages. Mary, her chalky pallor accentuated by the dark rings around her eyes, was sitting between us in a straight-backed chair. She smiled wanly when she saw I was awake, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek.

  "Hello, Mongo," she said.

  "Garth?" I asked anxiously.

  Mary nodded. "He has a severe concussion, and he may not be awake for another day or two, but the doctors think he's going to be all right." She paused, shook her head. "Somebody on a sailboat saw the two of you hanging on a rope off the rudder of a tanker across the river, and they radioed the ship. A couple of crewmen went over the side on a rope ladder, rigged up a sling, and hauled you aboard. The Sheriffs Patrol brought you to the hospital. You saved Garth's life, didn't you, Mongo?"