Long Voyage Back (49 page)

It was good to see Jim and Lisa looking so happy and well. They were sleeping together now in the forepeak, Jim joking

that he was determined, to share everything with Lisa, even the plague. Macklin now roomed with Frank. Tony had taken up with a young woman named Mirabai, apparently stealing her from Gregg, the young man with the broken arm. Janice, Oscar's girlfriend, was the only other woman aboard Scorpio, a third female crew member apparently having chosen to join the commune at Salt Point just before they left. They met no ships their first six days out of Anguilla. They passed more than sixty miles east of Barbados and, after a week, were seventy miles northeast of Devil's Island off the coast of Guiana. The fear of the plague was receding. Jeanne was not only regaining her strength but her spirits, standing watch with Frank most of the time, playing more happily than usual with Skippy, even enjoying her food more. 01ly too seemed to have regained his high spirits. Frank sometimes spent a day aboard Scorpio as captain and, back aboard Vagabond, 01ly entertained his friends with exaggerated praise for the 'oldness' of Scorpio, claiming nothing became beautiful until it was 'at least sixty'. 'She's as bald and toothless as me,' he said, referring to Scorpio, 'but she can still bite.'

Olly was aboard Vagabond when they spotted their first vessel. Jim was alone at the helm in an overcast dawn little different from each of the last several days. Neil was curled up on a wheelhouse cushion behind him. In the galley Jeanne had just begun to parcel out the small bits of dried fish and dried fruit which would be their morning meal. Visibility was only about a mile, and Jim, sleepy at the end of an uneventful watch, with Vagabond ghosting along at only three or four knots in a light wind, glanced mainly at the compass. There was nothing to see out on the water except the same grey slate they'd been staring at for almost ten days.

And then, after exchanging a few idle words with Jeanne and yawning, Jim glanced ahead and saw, so large and clear and close it was as if a god had that very instant set it down in the sea in front of them, a long grey submarine. Vagabond was sailing forward, barely rocking, and there, ahead and a little to port, lay a submarine. With a red star. A Soviet submarine.

For several moments Jim stood staring in disbelief at this grey dawn's apparition. Then, almost unbelieving, he turned to Neil. 'Neil!' he hissed in a loud whisper, as if his voice might reveal the fifty-foot trimaran to the enemy.

Neil sat up slowly rubbing his eyes.

`Mmmhuh?' said Neil.

À submarine. Dead ahead.'

Groggy, Neil stood up and peered forward. 'Living God,' he murmured. Jeanne, aware of the suppressed sounds from above, came to the hatchway entrance and looked up.

`What'll I do?' Jim asked in a low voice.

`Hold your course.' Neil knocked on the wheelhouse floor to awaken 01ly who slept below.

Àll hands!' he called in a sharp but low voice.

`What's happening?' Jeanne asked from the hatchway, then climbed the three steps and looked: ahead and to the left, now only two hundred yards away was the submarine, fully surfaced, with a dozen men on the main deck and several in the conning tower. The boat was immense: almost two football fields long; it was like sailing past an island. Even as she watched, a gun - some sort of artillery piece - emerged from the forward deck. Several men clustered around it. She saw officers in the conning tower looking at them through binoculars.

In his underwear 01ly emerged next into the wheelhouse, hair dishevelled, sleepy-eyed, the bones of his ribs showing prominently. He blinked at the grey monster; they were going to pass within a hundred feet of it. He could see two sailors pissing off the bow, but also see the eight-foot-long cannon being swivelled into position to fire on Vagabond.

`Raise your arms!' Olly shouted at them. 'Raise your arms! It'll help their morale.'

Neil lifted his arms in surrender as did Jeanne. Jim adjusted his position so that he could steer with his thighs and chest and then he too raised his arms.

`Sheila, get on up here!' Olly shouted. 'And bring Skip. Mac!' He himself, arms raised, clad only in his underdrawers, walked into the cockpit closer to the enemy. When Sheila emerged she took in the scene in stunned silence and slowly raised her arms in surrender. As quiet and softly as a feather drifting in a pond, Vagabond was now gliding past the Russian submarine, less than ninety feet away. Along its deck stood almost twenty Soviet sailors staring in disbelief. In Vagabond's cockpit stood three men, two women and a child, all with their arms raised in surrender, facing the barrel of the cannon aimed directly at them. From the conning tower three Soviet officers were conferring with agitation. As Vagabond sailed gently by, the men at the cannon turned a wheel and kept the cannon trained amidships. One of them was looking to the conning tower for instructions. The submarine had quite probably discharged in the past two months up to twelve missiles and presumably killed hundreds of thousands, more likely millions, of people it had never seen. Now it had a puny cannon aimed at seven people it could see. An officer on the conning tower shouted something at Vagabond, seemed angry, and shouted again. Vagabond was now sailing serenely away from the submarine and was already a hundred and fifty feet off.

`Shouldn't we heave to?' Macklin asked in a whisper.

'Keep sailing!' Neil replied quietly, his arms still raised. Again the Russian shouted, this time to his own men, and there was a flurry of activity in the conning tower. A man raced down the ladder to the deck. Vagabond sailed on. The cannon swivelled to follow her. A single shot would blow Vagabond to bits.

'We'd better heave to,' Sheila said urgently to Neil.

But Neil and 01ly were both grinning. 'Keep sailing!' Olly shouted happily. They sailed on. Slowly, softly, as if tiptoeing past a sleeping giant, Vagabond bore away from the great metal whale which, commandeered by ants, threatened to destroy them. For a panicky moment Neil was convinced that the captain of the sub was going to wait until the distance presented a challenge to his gun crew and then blast them out of the water. Then that moment passed. The Russian gun crew, or most of it, disbanded, the men seeming to be working on a different problem. The strange other-worldly meeting of the great grey engine of destruction and the white sailing vessel was ended.

Still Neil and the others stood with their arms raised.

`Can't I put my arms down now?' Skippy complained.

`Yes,' said Neil with strange seriousness. `You can lower your arms. We've beaten them.'

As they all lowered their arms Jeanne stared at the distant smudge of grey on the horizon and then looked at Neil. `Beaten them?' she asked.

`No, not beaten them,' he said, correcting himself and still looking thoughtful. Tut we won the only way we could have.'

Olly slapped Macklin on the back and gave Sheila a hug and kiss.

`We showed 'em, didn't we?' he said, grinning wildly. `They didn't dare fire a shot. Totally bluffed 'em.' Vagabond ghosted on ahead.

All that day they celebrated their 'victory' over the Russian submarine, rafting themselves to Scorpio for over an hour to make sure 0lly could tell everyone the story. They broke out some of the last Mollycoddle rum and partied. They were less than seven hundred miles from the equator and began planning another celebration for that nautical event. They even caught a fifteen-pound fish, their first in four days. It was nine days since they'd left St Thomas and with the fear of the plague disappearing Jim and Lisa were even accepted as crew members back aboard Scorpio, Jim being a welcome fresh hand at the tedious task of pumping. And that evening Neil again made love to Jeanne.

He went to her cabin openly, Macklin and Sheila being up on deck on duty. The lovemaking with Jeanne was more tender than the first time, a long, quiet coming together, that, strangely, left them both in tears.

At eleven they returned topsides. Macklin had gone below to sleep and Sheila was steering. When Jeanne went below to check on Philip, Neil went aft to his cabin to radio Olly. There was something strange in Olly's voice when they made radio contact. After answering Neil's initial question about how badly Scorpio was leaking - it was taking fifteen minutes of manual pumping every hour to get it dry - Olly quietly lowered the boom: Lisa was sick. She had stomach cramps and a fever. She probably had 'that disease thing we been worrying about'.

So, thought Neil, after he'd given Olly instructions for isolating both Lisa and Jim in the forepeak of Scorpio, this was how it all ended. You could run but you couldn't hide. You could do everything you could think of to flee south as fast as possible and still Death, in unhurried omnipotence, overtook

you.

Sitting in his aft cabin in the darkness after the radio transmission he didn't feel like moving. He'd have to tell Jeanne, Sheila, the others. He'd have to deal with the panic here, and probably worse, aboard Scorpio. He'd have to decide what to do. What to do? He wondered how many thousand people, no, million people, in the last two months had looked up into the grey sky watching radioactivity grow all around them and asked what to do, asked it, knowing with horror, dread, gloom, or anger, that there was nothing to do but die.

Had they reached that point? Was Jeanne doomed, even when he felt he'd barely met her? Was Jim, who had gone from boy to man in two months, now literally to burn out at eighteen?

Lisa was sick, cramps and fever. There was an enemy to be fought. They had the advantage of an infinite supply of cool sea water to fight the fever and a good supply of aspirin from the Arcady. Lisa, while thin, was not yet weak or severely undernourished from their long weeks of short rations. She would begin her personal battle with youth on her side.

As for the disease spreading, Jim was probably infected, but whether others were or would be depended on luck and their discipline. The standing orders he'd given regarding food, sanitation and personal contacts had been taken with great seriousness . . . until today . . .

And who is to care for and try to save the sick? Olly would do it. He didn't know about the others aboard Scorpio. Over here on Vagabond Jeanne would do it, would insist on doing it. Frank maybe; the old Frank would have. Sheila would volunteer. Himself? No. It wasn't his type of suicide mission.

Well, time to go to it. He stood up, took a brush to his hair and beard, as if preparing for some formal visit, and left his aft cabin. From the kerosene lantern hanging down in the main cabin Sheila was visible at the helm. He could hear Jeanne's voice below in the main cabin. He stopped next to Sheila and impulsively put his arm around her.

`How are we doing?' he asked.

Èight knots southeast,' she said, glancing at him quickly, her small grey eyes looking at him slyly, like a cat, the lines of ageing around them crinkling nicely.

`How's Philip?' he asked.

`The same. A hundred and two.'

Neil frowned. 'Well, a hundred and two won't kill him,' he said. 'But it won't have him raising sails soon either.' `No, it won't.'

Òlly thinks Lisa has the plague,' Neil continued on abruptly. Sheila looked at him again and then half-leaned against him, taking her left arm off the wheel and letting it fall awkwardly on Neil's, still around her. Òh, Neil,' she said, slipping her arm around his waist. `What a bloody shame.'

`You don't catch Death napping.'

They stood beside each other staring forward another moment, then exchanged a warm look and a brief hug.

'I've got to tell ... the others,' he said, and went below. Jeanne was there with Frank drinking tea and caring for Philip who, now that Vagabond was pounding to windward again, was propped into position on his makeshift dinette berth. He lay under a light sheet, awake, staring at the ceiling. The panelled room had a warm glow from the kerosene lantern which hung from a hook right above Philip. Frank was seated on the edge of Philip's berth, Jeanne standing. Both looked at him intently when he entered. Seeing them, Neil had the same impulse to embrace each of them. He went up first to Frank, leaned down close to him and put a hand gently on his shoulder. Frank gazed back at him in surprise. Neil smiled.

`You're a wonderful man, Frank.'

Frank flushed. 'You're stoned,' he said. 'You've raided Mollycoddle's pot.'

`You still alive, Phil?' Neil asked, then straightened,

leaving his hand on Frank's shoulder, gently kneading it.

Philip smiled and turned his head slightly to look at Neil. Ì believe so,' he said. 'I just wet my pants again.' `Good sign,' said Neil. 'Corpses rarely piss.'

When he turned next to Jeanne he saw that she, like Frank, was staring at him in surprise. He went up to her and took her in his arms, caressing her lower back, careful of her left shoulder. Looking down at her he asked: 'How are you?'

Ì'm fine. What's wrong? Has something happened?'

Neil, not smiling, nodded in reply. Then he released her, glanced at Frank and paced to the companionway steps before facing them. Òlly reports that Lisa has cramps and a fever,' he said. 'He assumes it's the disease we've been worrying about.'

All three of them • looked at him without immediate response. He realized that his statement seemed so inconsistent with his earlier humour and affection that they briefly wondered if this were a sick joke.

`We . . . I chose this risk,' he went on, feeling embarrassed at the way he had acted earlier though it seemed so appropriate at the time. 'Now we have to pay. I think there's a good chance we can pull her through. But we've got to take absolutely insane precautions to keep it from spreading further.'

Ì'll go take care of her,' Jeanne said.

Neil felt his heart sink.

Ì'm not letting you go,' he said gently. 'I've already assigned Jim to care for her. I don't think she can give him now anything she hasn't already given him.'

Ìs Jim all right?' Frank asked.

Àpparently. Olly said only Lisa is ill.'

Ì'm going over to her,' said Jeanne

So this is how it ends, thought Neil again. Modern

technology finding ever new ways to kill brave people and brave people rushing to get their share.