Close Reach (5 page)

“Run, baby. Just run!”

He let go of her wrist, and her gloved hand was too slick to hold on to his rubber sleeve. She felt his wrist slip under her grip, and then she was just holding on to his fingers, and before they slid out of her grip she felt each one of them stretch and pop as his knuckles pulled apart.

“Run, Kelly!”

Dean tumbled off the stern and disappeared into the froth.

Freefall
raced ahead, so when Kelly first caught sight of Dean flailing in the wake, he was already over a hundred feet away. Then he was just an orange blur floating up a wave face that dwarfed him, the superstructure of the crab boat looming in the trough one wave back, reeling him in.

“Dean!”

Kelly was leaning over the transom, having let go of the wheel. With no one at the helm and without the autopilot,
Freefall
had swung past north and was now following her natural inclination to round up into the wind. But with two headsails and only the smallest scrap of main, she was too imbalanced to turn all the way into the storm. Instead she careened at a forty-five-degree angle to the wind and waves, coming diagonally back at the crab boat. Kelly slipped and fell to the slanted deck, rolling to the lee side until she slammed into a cockpit locker. She struggled onto her knees and looked over the rail.

Two men were using a long-handled fish gaff to haul Dean aboard. They’d hooked him behind his knee. Kelly knew he was still alive because she could hear him screaming even over the wind’s ceaseless shriek.

Then
Freefall
fell down the backside of a wave, and she lost sight of the crab boat and of Dean. She crawled back into the shelter of the pilothouse and climbed into the helm seat. Dean must have hit the volume knob on the radio when he fell. It was soaked in blood, and the cockpit speakers were blasting
La Araña
’s loop tape of metal. Kelly switched it off. Dean’s nearly frozen blood was sticky on her fingertips.

Freefall
was still struggling to make headway upwind. The sails were sheeted out for a downwind run, not an upwind slog. They were flapping wildly, the sheet lines whipping and
tangling. She drew them in one at a time with the electric winch until they were tight. With two headsails working again,
Freefall
leaned over on her side in the blasting wind, the lee rail deep in the boiling water. Kelly nearly fell out of her perch at the helm but braced herself and used the furling gear to roll up half of the jib. When she cleated the lines off,
Freefall
was still heeling, but the rail was out of the water and she could steer closer to the wind. More efficient, more speed. She throttled the engine to 4,000 rpm and found she could point even higher. Then she looked back for
La Araña.
For Dean.

The crab boat had come about, bow into the seas, and was giving chase. Jim’s naked corpse still swung from a rope off the starboard rail. But there was no second corpse yet. So maybe Dean was still alive.

The crab boat was two or three hundred yards behind her. It wouldn’t take it long to catch up to her.
Freefall
could give any boat a run for its money downwind; upwind was another story. But Kelly knew
Freefall
could pivot as if she stood on a turntable. The crab boat would take longer, especially in seas like this. Maybe she could outrun it forever by waiting for it to close in, then running as fast as she could in another direction. That wouldn’t help Dean, but she didn’t see anything she could do for him. Maybe she could lead them in closer to the Chilean coast, zigzagging the whole way to stay out of their reach, and then signal the navy or the police or whatever they had down here. There was supposed to be a Chilean naval station on Cabo de Hornos, but she didn’t have high hopes for it. From what she’d seen so far of Chile, she guessed it was probably just one guy in a clapboard shack with a pair of binoculars and a radio.

When she looked around again, the crab boat was gone. There was just the sea and the gray horizon, the backs of the thirty-foot waves curling away from her and crashing into white spray and wind-driven foam. Then
La Araña
burst through the back of a wave a hundred yards back, an explosion of white water followed by the charging shape of the slime-coated bow, rivers of white foam pouring off its deck and its bridge, even its highest antennas whipping and tossing spray. And yet the man was there again, standing in the bow pulpit in spite of the raging sea, the harpoon rifle in the crook of his arm.

“Oh, Jesus,” Kelly moaned.

She locked the helm with the autopilot and turned again to look at the man. The man who’d taken Dean like a spider snaring its prey and hauling it away. But away to what? She pushed back a picture of Dean in the filthy hold of the crab boat, encircled by men in hooded foul weather gear and goggles. Men with long dirty knives and no spark of humanity and no mercy. Men who’d hold Dean down with their gum rubber sea boots and saw him up with their knives and hang him upside down over the side to bleed out or die of exposure. And if that’s what they’d do to Dean, what they’d do to her could have no description.

She slid off the helm seat and crawled along the floor of the pilothouse to the locker
where they kept supplies for the dinghy. She had to move or she’d lock up with fear and that would be the end of it. They had no weapons aboard—they’d be too much hassle in most foreign ports. But a year ago they’d sailed across the Indian Ocean from Sri Lanka to Djibouti before going on to the Red Sea and the Suez. Pirate waters. She’d spent her night watches sweating it out in the pilothouse, watching the radar blips of unlit dhows and Somali fishing boats. In three nights, three boats turned to follow, but none could match
Freefall
for speed.

They’d been enough to get her thinking, though.

If
La Araña
came close enough, she might have something for the man in the bow. Assuming he didn’t get her first.

She flipped back the top of the cockpit locker and dug inside. There was a yellow ditch bag in there full of things they’d want if they had to abandon ship. She ripped it open and dumped its contents. A first aid kit, a packet of fishing gear. She flung aside a ziplock bag packed with energy bars and space blankets and grabbed an orange waterproof box Dean had labeled in black permanent marker. His script, as ever, was tight and clean:

SIGNALING

She took the signaling box and went back to the helm seat and crouched behind it, wedged in tightly between the seat and the bulkhead so that she was hidden from the stern. The chair had a thick teak back, so maybe the harpoon wouldn’t be able to shoot through it.

But she hoped not to find out. She put the orange box on the chair and opened it. The 12-gauge flare gun was on top, but she took it out and set it aside. Then there was the old-fashioned signaling mirror in its velvet bag and a bundle of smoke flares and dye markers. Beneath all that was what she wanted. She pulled it out and felt the weight of the black aluminum tube. It had the shape and heft of a good D-cell flashlight, but this was something much better than that.

She peered around the side of the chair.

La Araña
was a hundred feet away. Too far for the harpoon but close enough for what Kelly had in mind. She turned the black tube in her hands and found the set of switches on the side. She remembered when Dean first had brought it home. She’d still been ambivalent about the trip, but she’d let him explain how to turn it on. Letting him show her the gear, letting him teach her about the new boat, was all a part of coming back to him. They’d never spoken about it, but they both understood it, and so she’d sat for this next piece of gear and its lesson the same way she’d sat for the radar manual and the Inmarsat troubleshooting practice.

There was a federal law, Dean had said, and all Class IV lasers needed a coded interlock switch. She was well aware of this fact; they used Class IV lasers all the time at the hospital. But she let him talk. The interlock was to keep kids from using them, he supposed. But he wanted
this laser as a signaling beam for distant aircraft. He figured if it ever came to using it, they’d be in a jam. Wouldn’t be thinking straight. So he’d brought it to a friend at the office, and they’d reprogrammed the interlock code to something easy to remember.

She punched it in now without looking at the button, instead watching
La Araña.

Dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot.

The international Morse code for SOS.

She looked down at the laser. The power button was blinking. According to Dean, at its highest power setting, this thing’s beam would be visible from space in broad daylight. In the breakfast nook, they’d used it to burn a hole through a paper napkin from ten feet away. Laser pointers had come a long way. She’d been impressed, even though what she’d really wanted was to finish her coffee and get to the hospital to scrub in.

She didn’t need Dean or his engineering skills to tell her what this laser would do to a man’s eyes at a hundred feet.

Or fifty.

La Araña
was coming in fast. The man at the bow was bracing himself with his legs spread wide against the pulpit railings, freeing his hands for the harpoon rifle. She still couldn’t see his face. But there was fresh blood splashed across the front of his foul weather jacket and spattered on the lenses of his goggles. That would be Dean’s.

“Son of a bitch,”
Kelly whispered. She aimed the laser and pressed the thumb button. What happened after that happened quickly.

In the dim Antarctic storm light, the air full of blowing spray, the beam was clearly visible: it was as thick as her finger and the electric-blue color of the sea-eaten ice at the base of a berg. Her aim was off, but she walked the beam up the man’s chest, the painfully bright dot surrounded by a brilliant corona the size of a saucer. She moved it up to his face until it hit his goggled eyes.

She had his eyes in the beam for half a second, but that was all it took. The man dropped the harpoon rifle in a frantic lurch to grab for the bow pulpit. The rifle spun into the sea and disappeared.

Kelly knew about eyes.

She’d sliced up eyes on wax-bottomed trays, had injected them with needles, had tunneled up people’s noses and through their sinuses with endoscopic hooks to operate on the stalks of nerves running from the eyes to the brain. She knew that if she tied this man up in a quiet room, gagged him so his screams wouldn’t block the other noises, and held a laser like this one to his eyes, she’d hear a low pop as the surface of his retinas flash-boiled and seared onto the face of his optic nerves. Ever afterward, his would be a world of pain and darkness and weird flashes in the shadows.

She hoped he’d heard them, those pops. Like a pair of ticks bursting deep in his head.

She watched the man grab a second time for the rail and miss it in his newfound blindness and then watched with cold wonder as he lost his footing in the next wave and went over the bow as if he’d been shoved hard from behind. He wasn’t wearing an exposure suit, but that wouldn’t matter much for him.
La Araña
never slowed or turned and ran him down the second he hit the water. Its propellers would suck him in and spit him back into the wake like a bucket of chum.

Kelly stood and pumped her fist at the crab boat and screamed above the wind with her rage and triumph, and then she took the laser and aimed the beam into the wheelhouse. The windows were too filthy and the bridge too dark for her to tell whether her aim was any good. And for all she knew, there was no one in the wheelhouse at all. But before she swept the beam across all eight windows,
La Araña
veered off sharply to the south.

Turning, it showed Kelly its stern for the first time, and what she saw there on the aft deck hammered her heart and pulled the strings from all her muscles.

She dropped to her knees on the pilothouse deck.

La Araña
had indeed been a crabbing boat: there were crab traps tied in a stack on the deck behind the wheelhouse, five deep and three high. Big traps like the ones they used up in Alaska for king crab. Steel wire cages half the size of elevator cars. In every trap there was a person. Most of them had long since frozen to death, naked and blue, their fingers caught like bony icicles in the wires of their prisons.

But others were alive. There was a young woman huddled naked beneath an old army blanket, rocking back and forth to keep herself warm.

Lena.

And above her in another cage was Dean, slumped and bloodied in his orange exposure suit. When he saw her, he put his hands to the wires. His lips moved, but she was too far away to hear whatever he screamed. As the boats drew apart in the waves, a moving mountain of green water came between them. She lost her balance and tumbled to the deck, the laser skipping and bouncing out of the cockpit and into the sea.