Landfall: Islands in the Aftermath (The Pulse Series Book 4) (12 page)

Russell knew teenagers well enough to know that the girl was probably shut up in her cabin and would not come out until her mother insisted, when it was time for dinner. As long as he could get on board without her knowing it, she wouldn’t be a problem. He’d been correct in thinking he could do just that. When he swam out to the boat, he approached it from the side opposite the island, just in case one of the others ventured away from their work on the catamaran and glanced that way.
 

The Tartan 37, with its relatively low freeboard, was easy enough to board from the water. Russell pulled himself up and crawled under the lifelines, keeping low as he peered inside through one of the port lights. The girl wasn’t in the main salon, so that confirmed his hunch she would be in her cabin, probably reading or sleeping. He eased down the open companionway, dripping water onto the teak steps as he went, until he could see that the door to the forepeak was indeed shut. Russell glanced around the salon until he found a small coil of spare line hanging on a bulkhead hook, then he crept forward to the door. It was a simple matter to lash it shut from the outside, as there were convenient tie-down hooks on the adjacent bulkhead. The girl didn’t even know it was happening, and when she figured it out, it would be too late. A strong man could probably kick the teak door apart, but Russell doubted this skinny 14-year-old could.
 

With the door secured, he went back on deck and quickly made his way forward to the ventilation hatch over the V-berth. It was easily big enough for even a full-sized adult to exit through, so he had to secure it too before she discovered what was going on. When he reached it, he could see her lying on the bunk with a book obscuring her face. He quickly reached into the opening and loosened the lock-down knobs on the hatch supports. The hatch was design to be dogged-down from the inside, not locked from outside, but he would figure something out. Rebecca either heard his movement or sensed his presence this time though.
 

“Hey! What are you doing? What’s going on?”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetie. Just getting ready to go for a sail, that’s all.”

“What? A sail? Where’s my mom?” Rebecca put her book aside now and was climbing out of her bunk, reaching for the hatch. Russell slammed it shut just before she put her fingers onto the coaming.
 

“Hey! That’s not funny! Open it back up!”

Russell stood on it instead. She wasn’t going to budge it while he scanned the immediate decks around him for something with which to secure it. A long piece of quarter-inch Dacron that had been used to lash the dinghy in its deck chocks would do the trick. Russell kept a foot on the hatch while he reached for the coiled line. One end was already tied off to one of the chocks. It was a simple matter to pull it across the hatch and pass it around the nearest lifeline stanchion. From there he crisscrossed the hatch cover several times, pulling the slack out of the line with each pass until it was good enough. If she had access to a knife, she might be able to push it up enough to get at the rope, but he doubted she did, and he would keep an eye on it until they were out to sea.
 

Russell’s next step was to haul in the anchor. It was slow work with the manual windlass on the foredeck, and he was afraid someone on the island would see him before he was done, but at last he had it up in the roller and then he rushed to the mast to haul up the mainsail. He had just cleated the halyard and jumped back into the cockpit to haul in the sheet when he heard the first scream from the beach. It was Tara, the girl’s mother, and he knew he didn’t have long before they would do their best to reach him in the dinghy. Russell cleated the mainsheet and worked to get the jib up. By the time he had it set, the dinghy was coming his way with Grant at the oars and Tara and the captain on board with weapons. Russell had noticed the SKS secured in a rack on the main bulkhead when he’d gone below before. He climbed down quickly to retrieve it and was delighted to find it loaded. He wouldn’t shoot to kill, unless they fired back and he had to. All he needed was to buy a little time by slowing them down, and a few rounds fired in their general direction did exactly that.

Fifteen

G
RANT
PUT
HIS
BACK
into the oars and made for the beach, glad he was facing aft so he didn’t have to see Tara falling to pieces in the bow while Larry tried to comfort her. Seeing her boat sailing away with her daughter aboard in the hands of a lunatic like Russell had to be devastating. But as soon as they all realized that they could accomplish nothing by sitting there adrift in the dinghy, watching the sailboat grow smaller on the horizon, Grant set to work to get them ashore. Larry was determined to catch this guy, and Tara would pull herself together as well. She would have to because it would take all of them. They would get the
Casey Nicole
into the water as fast as humanly possible and they would find the
Sarah J.
 

Grant grew more and more furious as he rowed. What he would give to have another face-to-face encounter with this Russell character! He would have beaten him to a pulp last night if he’d had the slightest inclination to believe he would pull something like this.
What a lying, worthless, sack of shit!
And after they’d shared food and drink with him, and even offered him a way off the island! He was going to pay for this. Grant was as determined as he knew Larry and Tara were.
 

He ran the dinghy onto the sand and they all leapt out. Artie and Casey and Jessica were all there waiting, and without hesitation helped pick up the dinghy and carry it across to the other side of the island where the
Casey Nicole
was beached. It would be needed to carry out the anchors they would use when the time came to pull the catamaran back into the water, and they would take it with them of course, when they sailed. When they put it down next to their other gear and supplies, everyone looked to Larry for orders on what to do first and how to do it most efficiently.
 

“The tide won’t be in for another five or six hours, but we don’t have to wait for the peak going in. We’ll have gravity working for us this time. We need to get the rig up first while we still have daylight to see. All I’ve got to do is finish the new splices on the upper ends of the shrouds. The other stuff I wanted to do can wait until next time.”

“What about the hull repairs?” Artie asked. “Don’t we need to finish the fiberglass over the new patches?”

“No time. The cracks are filled, and the plywood patches glued in place are solid. The epoxy will be fully cured before the water reaches them again. There’s no time to glass over them. We’ll just have to haul out again somewhere else and finish it then.”

“It’s going to be tricky getting back out over the reef in the dark though, isn’t it?” Jessica asked.

“A little. But it’s doable. I know where the cuts are now after swimming out there yesterday. And we won’t have the squalls like the night you guys came in. I think this breeze will calm down quite a bit after midnight. We can’t afford to wait. The tide will be highest around 1:00 a.m. Even though it’ll be harder to see, that will give us a better chance of getting out to deep water without touching the reefs again.”
 

“I just hope we can find him,” Casey said. “He’s getting a heck of a head start. And we have no idea where he’s going.”

“I’ve got a pretty good hunch though, Casey. He kept talking about the Exumas. That’s where he wanted to go, and he left here sailing east after he tacked. Of course he could have changed course after he was out of sight, but there aren’t a lot of options. I don’t think he’s a good enough sailor to beat to weather any length of time singlehanded. He’ll fall off to the east or northeast because that will take him directly to the middle of the Exumas on a beam reach. I know that’s what I would do if I were him.”

“He must know we’ll be coming after him though,” Artie said.

“Yeah, but he probably figures it’ll be hard to find him with so many possible anchorages over there. He’ll think he’s got time to go somewhere else before we can come after him. He knew it was his chance to pull this after he helped us take the masts down, the sneaky son of a bitch! It may not be easy to find him, but we will. And he’s going to pay dearly when we do! That bastard is keeping me from going back for Scully.”

Grant felt sorry for Scully, but finding the
Sarah J.
and Rebecca had to take top priority. Hearing Larry talk, he didn’t doubt that they could do it. Before this experience, Grant had no idea how much of a role the prevailing winds played in determining routes through these islands. He’d always assumed boats could go most anywhere at a whim, but now he knew it wasn’t so. Even under power it would be uncomfortable bashing a long distance against the wind and accompanying waves. The good thing about this revelation though was that it narrowed down the list of possible escape routes and destinations, leading Grant to believe that they really did have a chance of finding the
Sarah J.
, in this trackless expanse of water and far-flung cays.

Tara Hancock didn’t have a lot to contribute to the discussion. She was clearly experiencing a range of emotions, but as they worked her face was set in grim determination. She just wanted to get going a fast as possible, and to that end she was working to help Larry finish sorting out the standing and running rigging. When it was time to step the two masts again, the entire crew was needed. The girls were stationed on the beach on either side of the boat holding the halyards as steadying lines while Grant and Tara took turns at the winch and Larry and Artie manhandled each mast high enough off the deck to get them in position to hoist to vertical. The process worked in reverse the same way it had during the unstepping. First they raised the foremast and then used it as a crane for hauling up the mainmast aft. It took a good hour for Larry to adjust and inspect the tension on all the shrouds and stays, but once everything was tightened up, the two masts were in column, properly raked and looking good.
 

Their work was hardly over though. The next job was to move anchors and mooring lines in preparation to reverse the haul-out operation. The two biggest anchors were buried ashore now, but they needed to move them out to seaward as far as the longest rodes would reach and set them so they could use them to pull the catamaran backwards into the water. This took another hour and half of hard work using the dinghy, but when they were done the two anchors were approximately 200 feet off the sterns at slight angles, and all the gear that needed to go back on board was stacked on the beach near the bows. They would begin loading it as soon as the boat was afloat again.
 

“It’s going to be a lot easier going back in than it was coming out.”

“Gravity is on our side this time, right Uncle Larry?”

“You got it. All we’re waiting on now is the tide. We should eat while we have a chance, because we’re going to be plenty busy until we get well away from this island and all its reefs.”

Tara was the only one among them with no appetite. While they were cooking fish and waiting on the tide, she paced back and forth across the island between the beached catamaran and the spot from which she’d last seen her daughter and her parents’ boat.
 

“She’s been through hell already,” Larry said. “I hope this doesn’t send her off the deep end.”

“She looks pretty determined to me,” Grant said. “After she broke down once in the dinghy, she’s been holding it together pretty well.”

“That’s because this is different than when Rebecca was missing overboard at night. That was horrifying because the weather was so awful, it was pitch dark out, and Tara knew very well the odds of finding someone out there in that were slim to none,” Casey said.

“Yeah, that’s a fact,” Larry said. “That we did was a bit of a miracle.”

“She has more hope this time because it’s not the merciless ocean that has her daughter. It’s a man she can put a face on.”

“A man who ought to be
shot
in the face!” Jessica said.

“And he probably will,” Grant said. “If one of us doesn’t, Tara might.”
 

The tide was sufficiently high to begin the process of relaunching the
Casey Nicole
about an hour after sunset. Going in backwards, more care had to be taken with the placement of the fenders to keep the rudders clear of the sand. As when they hauled out, Grant did most of the grinding on the winch, with Artie taking a turn here and there to give him a break. Larry was in the water with Tara and the girls this time, helping with the fenders and checking progress. Once the catamaran was afloat, the next step was to spin it around 180 degrees using the anchor rodes and a couple of extra long mooring lines Grant and Artie handled from the beach. It took some time to accomplish, but Larry said it was essential because of the reefs they had to get through. He wanted to go out bow first, using the anchor lines, but with the boat in position to sail away as soon as they were clear of danger.

“It sure would be a good time to have that outboard that got lost,” he muttered.

Grant said nothing. Jessica was standing right there and he knew the outboard went to the bottom of the Pearl River when Scully rammed the boat it was mounted on. Jessica’s ex-boyfriend, Joey, likely drowned there when it happened. Scully didn’t know for sure, but they’d never mentioned the incident to Jessica.
 

They left one stern anchor ashore after the turning was complete and Grant stayed behind with the dinghy to pick it up and bring it out to the boat when he came. He was also going to pick up the last bow anchor once Larry cast off the final rode and sailed out to deep water. It made him nervous to watch the catamaran slowly pull away from the beach. If they got it stuck on the reef at high tide, getting it off again would be nearly impossible. He trusted Larry’s judgment, but he knew it was risky to attempt this in the dark. He understood that they needed to go after Russell as soon as possible though, so the risk was worth it. It wouldn’t do to give him more of a head start than he already had, even if the catamaran was a much faster boat than Tara’s monohull under most conditions. Even though Larry was relatively confident of the direction Russell would go, Grant knew there was always a chance he would do something really radical or unexpected. If he did sail straight for the Exumas like he wanted to do, he had to know that they would be coming after him as soon as they could relaunch the catamaran. He wouldn’t stay anywhere long, even if he believed it would take them several days to get underway and on his trail.