Close Reach (23 page)

When she was done, she knelt in front of him.

“I’m doing this for Dean. Letting you come. But if you complain once or cry, that’s it. If you ask for anything more than what I’ve given you so far, you’re done. I’ll let you stay on the boat. But you’ll make the crossing to Chile the way you carried Jim. Hanging by your feet off the bow. You only get to say one thing on this trip, and that’s whether you changed your mind about Isla Clarence.”

“I’m not changing my mind.”

“We get there and I don’t see
La Araña
parked out front, you know it’s over, right?”

He looked at her, his eyes swollen and red from the diesel.

“It’s Isla Clarence. There’s a branch off a fjord on the southwest side. That’s where the cabin is.”

“It’ll happen there, in the cabin?”

He nodded.

“You have doctors coming in?”

“They’re already there. Prepping the Colonel.”

“All right,” she said. “Now shut the fuck up. Try to stay warm. We might need to talk in three days.”

She stood and went to the side deck to untie the Zodiac, tossing the painter line into it so it wouldn’t foul
Freefall
’s propeller. The little orange boat drifted slowly away. Maybe it would just lodge on the near shore; maybe it would bob on a current through Neptune’s Bellows into the broader sea to circle the Southern Ocean like an albatross. It didn’t matter much to Kelly.
Freefall
had a Zodiac of her own stored in the dinghy garage beneath the cockpit. When she needed to go ashore, when she found the Colonel and his cabin, it would be there for her.

As she knelt at the bow to pull the anchor, she prayed for Lena. That she wouldn’t be too late to help her. She knew that
La Araña
’s lead was significant, that unless she could gain ground on it crossing the Drake Passage, it might reach the island a full day ahead of her. And if that was too late, she prayed that Lena wouldn’t suffer. That she didn’t know what was coming, didn’t know how they planned to swap her life for the Colonel’s. She fed the anchor chain into the windlass’s wildcat, hit the control button, and watched the chain feed into its hawser pipe. When the anchor broke the surface and came up, she shut off the windlass, knocked the purple starfish
off the shank, and locked the anchor into its chocks.

Back in the pilothouse, she put the drive in gear and throttled to 2,500 rpm. As
Freefall
gathered momentum, Kelly brought her about, pointing at Neptune’s Bellows. She watched the spray rise from the base of the cliffs and from the battered pinnacles offshore, watched the storm petrels swirl and dive from their high-ledged roosts. The barometer’s mercury was down another millimeter, and she noted it in her log along with the time. She’d brought the flensing knife aboard and had strapped it to the overhead grab rail in the pilothouse, where it would be out of the way yet close at hand. She held on to it as she steered out of the island and into the colder sea, the whale knife’s hardwood handle solid beneath her gloved grip.

There’d be a use for it yet if she wasn’t too late.

When they were into deeper water half a mile from the cliffs, Kelly set the autopilot to steer to the first waypoint. She went below and sat with Dean for a few minutes, weighing the risk of giving him more codeine. In the end she decided not to: he needed to wake and start coughing to clear his chest. It would be painful for him and hard for her to watch, but it needed to be done.

There was spare foul weather gear in one of the hanging lockers. She suited up, tightening a chest harness over the jacket and tossing its tether over her shoulder. In the galley, she made a thermos of tea and put it into her jacket pocket. Then she climbed back into the pilothouse and looked at the instruments.
Freefall
was slicing through disorganized seas. Eight-foot swells rolled out of the west and clashed with bigger ones filtering down from the north. But waves like this were nothing.
Freefall
was moving at a stately nine knots, and that was without the sails.

David was sitting with his back to her, as close as he could get to the protection of the pilothouse, watching his island recede in the wake. A few hours ago she’d been throwing rocks at him when he turned his back on her and didn’t see her coming. Now there was no need. The only thing holding him together was the blanket. Without it, he’d fall to pieces.

Kelly clipped her harness tether to the jackline on the side deck and went forward, past the pilothouse. She stepped onto the cabin top to the base of the mast. She stood facing the west wind to feel its strength. For now it wasn’t blowing hard. Twenty knots, maybe. When the sail was ready, she went back into the pilothouse, disengaged the autopilot, and hand steered into the wind. She used the electric winch to raise the mainsail to its full height. Then she fell off the wind toward the northeast and reset the autopilot. The cold air cut across the wing of the sail, giving it shape;
Freefall
heeled to starboard, and Kelly watched the speed tick up on the knotmeter.

Eleven knots, then fourteen after she trimmed the sail by loosening the topping lift and tightening the mainsheet.

Freefall
picked up another four knots when she unfurled the genoa. Now they were heeling steeply, putting the starboard toe rail into the water with the gusts. Spray started coming over the weather rail, white-blue foam that hit the pilothouse windows. She looked back at the cage and saw David bracing himself with his feet against the lower wall. He clung to the side of the cage with his good hand, his fingers clenched into the chain link, white as carved marble. He’d clearly never been on a sailboat. This was a day sail on a calm lake compared with what lay
ahead.

Kelly went below to check on Dean. He was on the downwind side of the boat, but the straps were holding him in well. He opened his eyes and focused on her.

“You’re—”

The coughing stopped him, a long spasm of it. He fought it, wanting to speak to her.

“Let it come, Dean. Just cough.”

She used her palm to slap his chest on either side of his heart. She worked with him a long moment, helping him bring it up. At the end there was no air in his lungs at all, and his face was dark purple.

“Don’t fight it. That’s it. Just let it out.”

She walked to the galley, an upslope climb on this angle of heel, and came back with a roll of paper towels. She wiped the phlegm and blood from his lips and chin. He breathed again shallowly, and then he looked at her.

“You’re sailing?”

“Just getting started. We’ve got a long way to go. It’ll be mostly upwind. Rough for at least two days. If you’re not up to it, I can turn us around. We’ll anchor until you’re stronger and then we’ll go.”

He shook his head.

“Doesn’t matter if I’m up to it. Lena—she can’t wait on me.”

She nodded. It was wrong for her to have given him this choice. She was the doctor, and he was too sick to make any decisions at all. He’d told her what to do because he knew they had to do it at any cost, and he wanted to take from her the burden of making choices as his caretaker. Or as his wife and his lover.

That was Dean.

But it hurt all the same. The sailing was fine now, but it might not be in six hours. She’d seen the barometer falling, the dark band of clouds in the northwest casting their shadows on the sea like a shoal of black rock. There was no way to know what they were sailing into, what waited ahead, or how Dean would take it.

“You should go up, keep watch.”

“But—”

“You’re doing everything you can—and you can only do so much. The boat … then Lena … then me. That’s your order of priority.”

She squeezed his hand and nodded. She knew he was right, and it hurt.

“Go,” he said. “Keep watch.”

“All right,” she said. She kissed his forehead. “I’m sorry for all this.”

“Don’t be. I’m not.”

She stood then and went to the medical supply cabinet. It held things that would keep her awake and alert. There would be no breaks on this watch. With the barometer falling, with the sky swelling shut like a punched eye, and with David behind her, caged with his dark thoughts, there could be no rest. As she climbed back into the pilothouse, she heard Dean explode into a fit of coughing, harder than anything she’d heard before. She paused on the companionway steps, the cold air rushing into the cabin. She started to go back to him, but then she stopped. There were growlers and icebergs out there. Inside, there nothing she could do for Dean. He’d told her as much.

She climbed the rest of the way to the pilothouse and slammed the doors shut.

According to the clock on the chart plotter, it was 1 p.m. on Tuesday, the thirty-first of December. It meant nothing to her, although later she would remember the date with absolute clarity. Just then, the only measure that had any meaning was
La Araña
’s lead. She had to be cutting into it. She’d been running the engine and sailing hard, keeping the sheet lines as taut as iron bars. When the wind seemed to hold at just twenty knots, she unfurled the staysail, presenting all of
Freefall
’s canvas to the wind. In the big gusts, she pointed upwind to depower the sails and level the boat, knowing any extra distance she bought toward the west would be like money in the bank later, when the storm hit. She shut off the autopilot and worked as close to west as she could go. The sun was transiting behind the northern storm clouds; when she raced into their shadow, the gusts were stronger and carried cold knives. But she didn’t shorten sail until the last minute.

She didn’t want to give up any ground.

She and
Freefall
hit the low-pressure system at 6:30 p.m., when they were just past a hundred nautical miles northwest of Deception Island. She saw it on the radar twenty minutes before it hit. The leading edge of the system curved from one side of the radar screen to the other, a moving wall of wind and frozen rain the size of Connecticut. There’d be no dodging this. She could turn and run from it, but she’d be in the Atlantic, east of the Falkland Islands, before she escaped it. She used the autopilot to steer up into the wind and then went to the mast to reef the mainsail.

The wind was already picking up.

Her heavy tether line lifted in the air and curved down to the jackline in a trembling, gravity-defying arc. Spray and foam whipped across the deck. Water on the cabin top blew sideways in clean lines like raindrops on the window of an airliner. She put three reefs in the main, working back to the pilothouse along the boom, tying in the knots so that the reduced sail would hold its shape.

Back in the pilothouse, she rolled in the genoa. The first of the real winds came right after that. She saw them coming over the face of the sea, a moving line on the water, ripples turning to froth, waves bowing and flattening as if prostrating themselves to the greater force of air racing toward her.

The cold wind hit like a sledgehammer.

“Come on!” Kelly screamed.

Freefall
kicked over on a forty-degree heel. The wind was screaming through the rigging, but the sails weren’t flapping because Kelly had them trimmed and tight. She looked behind her and saw that David had tumbled to the low end of the trap. He was in a foot of foaming green water. The spray was coming into the cockpit like a running river, draining out the open transom exactly as Dean had designed it. The rain came next: wind-driven, half-frozen drops that hit the pilothouse windows like gravel. David’s screams caught in the wind and were carried away to the east. The anemometer showed a sustained wind speed of forty-nine knots, and in a minute it built well past fifty. Kelly was standing in front of the helm seat, her right leg cantilevered against the pilothouse wall to prop her body against the extreme angle of heel. At first, the waves were almost flat in the face of the storm, but as the wind built, the seas organized into long-period swells.

She scanned the instruments.
Freefall
was hitting twenty knots in the gusts. She could point just west of her landfall in Chile without losing any power in the sails. The engine was turning steadily at 3,500 rpm, just under its optimal running temperature, because the seawater in the heat exchanger was so cold.