Buried At Sea (42 page)

"Then let's eat in—Jim, the albatross winked at me." "He's Argentine. What do you expect?"

"I'm going to name him Carlos. Hey, where are you go-ing?"

"I'm going to get a clean sail and see if we can catch some rainwater."

"I'll get the tools."

With Jim's help she had rigged a line from a clamp on the backstay that she used to swing herself from the back of the cockpit to the companionway. There she fastened the line for when she came up and lowered herself down into the cabin. Handhold to handhold, she flew to the tool chests and fished out some shackles and twine while she caught her breath. She stuffed them in a canvas bag, slung it over her shoulder, paused at the nav station drawer that held wooden hull plugs and various keys, took the key to open the water tank intakes, and got back to the cockpit ahead of Jim.

"At last!"

Alone in the war room, Lloyd McVay exulted out loud.

It had been two days since Will Spark's yacht had disappeared under cloud too thick for the space-borne sensors. Suddenly, the monitors were finally springing to life, suffused with color, as new data streamed in like fresh blood.

"There we are!" He reached for a phone. "Sonia!" Where the schematic of Will Spark's yacht had been tumbling about the monitor was sudden evidence of a new data stream. Hustle? POS: 45 ° 18' S, 61 ° 11' W. SPEED: 5.0 knots. COURSE: 191. Sonia hurried in, hair askew, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "What happened?" McVay demanded. "There's still cloud."

Sonia spent a full five minutes studying the displays. Finally, she nodded her head with the satisfaction of an engineer who had added to her knowledge. As one of Val's protégés she projected the same irritatingly cocksure confidence.

"First, Mr. McVay, if you read the data you can see that the cloud has thinned by eighty percent. Second, you see the temperature. Air temperature has been dropping as they sail south. It's getting cold. You see these ships—here, here, here, and here?" Each ship icon she activated with her laser pointer spewed position, speed, course, and identification. A Taiwanese bulk carrier, two British, and a Russian—one of Admiral Rugoff's, a twentythousand-ton container ship WorldSpan Czar Peter

"We 'see' them by high-resolution infrared because they are steamships. Their smokestacks expel sufficient heat to penetrate the thinning cloud."

"I know that. But there is no smokestack on a sailboat. Even if they run their engine to charge their batteries and their refrigeration, the engine exhaust sits near the waterline, washed by the seas, thus creating a minor, intermittent heat source. What happened?"

"It's getting cold. I would postulate that they have a heater venting through the top of the boat. As their speed and course and likely position match the boat we've been tracking, it is almost certainly them. They're holding their course for the Falkland Islands."

"Fire?" Lloyd McVay peered intently at the monitor. "We see the heat of their fire?"

"Yes, Mr. McVay. From their heater. Burning diesel or bottled gas. I don't know much about boats."

"One recalls Melville."

"Yes, Mr. McVay."

" `The try-works.' The whale rendered in Pequod's fiery furnaces!" Lloyd McVay rubbed his hands together:

"The burning ship drove on as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful deed."

"Yes, Mr. McVay."

McVay stared her down and said, "The last time one of Val's protégés attempted to patronize me, the woman found it impossible to land another job in our industry." He went to the privacy of his own office to call Val on the encrypted satellite phone. When she didn't pick up, he left Will Spark's course and position in her voice mail.

"Obviously, they unshipped their heating stove, which burns diesel fuel and vents through a stack in the cabin roof. And just so you know, it appears that Admiral Rugoff has a freighter headed for Stanley Harbor. If you're not quick off the mark, he'll catch Spark first—in which case we will have to pay him an obscene amount of money. So, be

'Winged Mercury,' Val, not 'some tardy cripple,' or Rugoff's fee will be assessed from your account."

HELLO. STOVE. GOD bless you," said Shannon, swinging down through the hatch to the bottom step of the companionway, where she sat to remove her dripping foulweather jacket. "Oh, it's so cozy down here. It is awful up there—what's this? Tea with honey! I love you, I love you, I love you."

Shannon had found the owner's manual before they even knew they had a stove. As the wind grew colder they'd gone hunting. They discovered that Will had shipped the chimney and stowed it behind the same mahogany panels he had installed to hide the heating unit when it wasn't needed in the tropics.

She took the mug and drank deep. "It's gorgeous up there."

"I thought you said it was awful."

"Well, it's cold and wet, but the rain stopped and it's so beautiful. The waves are like giant whales."

Jim went back up with her. The wind was rising: time for another reef in the main.

"Stars!" A pale sprinkle marked the Southern Cross, the first stars they'd seen in four days. The cloud scrim was finally breaking up. The barometer was rising. The wind was backing a little south of west and picking up, while the current they'd been butting into was definitely easing.

Jim saw eight knots on the knot meter, and the GPS showed they were keeping most of it, traveling over the bottom at nearly seven and a half. At this rate they would clear the last hundred miles by midday tomorrow, and be off Stanley Harbor the following morning.

He was not prepared for Shannon's reaction.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't want it to end."

"Don't you think we should get home safe, as soon as we can?"

"Yeah, but I don't want to."

"Well, we need food and diesel."

"We're okay on water."

With four days of steady downpour to develop rain-catching skills, they had filled Hustle'

s tanks to the brim, along with dozens of empty plastic bottles.

"We've got two months of emergency rice. And a ton of beans."

"We'll get tired of rice and beans."

"But we won't starve."

"We could freeze if we run out of diesel."

"I sounded the tank while you were sleeping. We've got about five gallons left."

"We won't get very far on five gallons."

"But if we just use the engine to charge the batteries, the heater doesn't burn much. And we don't have to run it all the time. And if we sail somewhere warm, we won't even need that."

"Why don't we wait and see what we find in the Falklands? Maybe we'll find plenty of food and fuel. Then we can talk about maybe sailing home. If you really want to. Or maybe we can just fly home and come back in the future."

"That will never happen. That's the kind of thing people talk about but don't do. Besides, what would we do with the boat? Just leave it?"

"Store her in a yard?"

"That sounds expensive."

"Maybe we could anchor her at Will's friend's place."

"Not to mention ten-thousand-mile airplane tickets back and forth. Money that could go into maintaining her instead of abandoning her."

"You're talking about her like she's your cat."

Shannon turned away and wrapped her arms around herself. "She has a soul. Maybe you don't feel it, but I do."

If Jim had any doubts about the real subject of their talk, he got it later, belowdecks, when he saw Shannon seize the ceiling handholds, swing off the bed, and launch herself smoothly out of the cabin, along the corridor, and up the companionway. He lay there, reading descriptions of the approach to Stanley Harbor in the Sailing Directions and worrying about the inherent fragility of this rich man's toy they were sailing in: all the hundreds of parts that the sea seemed to take pleasure in wearing down. Just this afternoon the little foot pump that supplied seawater to the galley sink had stopped working. Maintaining the boat would be like getting nickel-and-dimed to death trying to keep an old car going—a hundred old cars. . . What if he replaced the saltwater foot pump with the freshwater foot pump? Or—better yet, much better—installed one of the extra valves in Will's plumbing box to act as a shunt between the two? Then they could use one pump to pump either fresh or salt.

Shannon rapped on the cockpit port. Jim opened it a crack but caught a faceful of spray anyhow. "What's up?" "The cat would love this, you know." It was not a moment, he decided, to talk sense. "Maybe Nancy could FedEx her." Nancy was cat-sitting, but Jim had forgotten that, when determined, Shannon lost all sense of irony. "You're right! FedEx or UPS. I read somewhere that one of them does cats."

"I'm going to close this before the bed gets wet."

While mulling over ways to keep the boat, Jim began to get a bad feeling about sailing into Stanley Harbor. There'd be too many officials in the capital. But what were their options? He went to Will's desk, and opened his old logs for Runner and the yacht he had named Cordelia. It was ten

years since Will had sailed in from Plymouth, England. Would the approach to Cordi's home on West Falkland Island be the same? Kelp beds might have gotten bigger or smaller. On the plus side, the minefields sown during the Falklands War would be cleared by now, or at least marked.

Will had recorded the courses so meticulously you could probably go in at night with the GPS if you absolutely had to. By day, if the weather wasn't too hairy, it was a precise road map off the ocean, into a bay Will had dubbed Cordi's Bay, and "Cordi's Cove" within. Will had noted landmarks—a very tall rock at the entrance, an abandoned jetty half-submerged by breaking seas—even a range mark into the inner anchorage, where he lined up a white house with the peak of a rocky hill behind it. He found Will's chart. His ten-year-old course was penciled on it. Ten years. Did Cordi even live there anymore? On the other hand, with Will's notes and chart, this would be a lot easier and safer than trying to land anywhere else in the rock-bound islands. What if they got caught? According to the Sailing Directions a military commissioner maintained security in the British Crown Colony, as well as defense, obviously a holdover from the war. On the other hand, the two main islands and hundreds of smaller ones had an eight-hundredmile coastline and a landmass the size of Connecticut, but fewer than three thousand people farming sheep, processing wool, and fishing for squid. An excellent place to get lost. Who would even notice a single sailboat? He took final heart in a Sailing Directions note that the legal system was based on English common law. So getting lined up against a wall to be shot wasn't going to happen. He brewed some tea and brought it up to Shannon in the cockpit. She greeted him with a big smile. The wind was blowing hard and Hustle was starting to labor even with three reefs in the main and the jib rolled into a sliver.

"I've been thinking," he said.

"So have I," she said. "I've been thinking about Stallone. Can you imagine being so completely destroyed and still making a life?"

"Some life. He's living in a garbage dump."

"But he's made a life. Those children—it's awful the way they live, but he's made some kind of a home for them. And given them more of a family than I'll bet any of them ever had. I mean, he could still be festering in some slum hospital. Instead he's a kind of daddy to a whole village."

"Well, 'Daddy' saved our asses. That's for damned sure. Listen, I've been thinking, too."

"What?"

"Umm ." He looked around. The light was fading already, though it was only three in the afternoon. "Maybe we better raise the storm sail. Let's head up and crank in the jib." They reduced sail. Jim clipped on and went forward to raise the storm sail. When he got back to the cockpit, Shannon said, "What?"

"We could have problems in Stanley."

"What kind of problems?"

"Your passport was stamped in Argentina, so I can't say we sailed in from Nigeria or Barbados. Barbados is my last stamp. In. I never even got one going out. So if we try to clear customs we could have paperwork hassles, and they could lead to where-is-WillSpark hassles."

"They'll figure it out. I mean, you didn't kill him. He died."

"I've got the log and Angela's e-mails and his will. Of

course, with Angela dead, her corroboration isn't worth

squat. But yeah, they'd figure it out eventually. Problem is,

when they do, they might seize the boat." "why?"

"I told you. Will said he was wanted for fraud in the UK. The Falklands are part of the UK."

"We didn't think of that."

"I was too worried about the McVays and food and diesel and all."

"So what are you thinking?"

"What if instead of going to Stanley, we just 'popped in' on this Cordi friend of Will's?

Show her Will's will—she gets everything but the boat, whatever that is. Maybe she could sell us food and diesel and we could just get the hell out of here and head north. She's way down on the southwest

coast of West Falkland Island. Stanley's to hell and gone a hundred miles away on the northeast side of East Falkland."

Night was nearly fifteen hours long this far south. Jim thought that they could mask most of their approach in darkness, timing their arrival so as to navigate the dangerous coastal waters in the light of dawn.

"I've got Will's charts and his sailing notes from his old log. The forecast is heavy cloud and fog. Maybe we could just slip in 'under the radar.' We'd have a short day there, loading up, and slip out just before dark."

"Slip out on the boat?" Shannon asked.

"Well, yeah, that's what I'm saying."

"Stay on the boat?"

"Isn't that what you wanted?"

"I would love that so much."

When the depth finder, which had been registering three and four hundred meters, suddenly clocked in at 180, the shallower water told them they were within sixty miles from the north coast of the Falklands. The first sign of civilization, however, was a surprise. Instead of the low, rocky islands dotted with white sheep and surrounded by fishing boats that they had been expecting, their first sight—while still thirty miles out—

was of a multistory oil-drilling platform looming out of the fog.