Buried At Sea (18 page)

When he tried the starter, it ground over but wouldn't fire. Again he pushed the starter button. Nothing. He glanced back: there were more people on the dock. When Will started the engine, an alarm sounded first. The fuel alarm. He was so rattled, he had forgotten to flip the fuel

switch. He cranked the starter again, and the diesel rumbled to life. He steered for the narrow opening through which they had entered the lagoon. He had gotten comfortable steering under sail, but under power, in these close quarters, the boat seemed extraordinarily long—the bow far, far away. She was slow to respond to the steering wheel and the creek mouth was coming up fast.

Then the boat was in the creek, the trees hanging close and darkening the sky. Hustle's exhaust echoed in the tunnel-like space.

Standing on tiptoe to see over the cabin, he was distracted by motion down the companionway. The dead woman seemed to be moving. He locked the wheel, started fearfully down the companionway, and stopped abruptly when he saw what was moving. Her bloodied chest was carpeted with flies.

How long would they have to carry her body? A cold voice from deep inside his head spoke firmly to that topic. He couldn't throw her overboard so close to the village. They'd have to wait until they were far out at sea. How far out would the flies—and the Nigerian police—follow?

Suddenly, directly ahead, something large hung suspended inches below the water's surface. The ominous dark cylinder of a huge waterlogged tree trunk. Jim spun the wheel, but it was too late. A loud thunk slammed through the decks and echoed from the cabin. Hustle staggered. The impact threw him against the spokes and the boat veered toward the forested creek bank, bumping along the heavy log.

What had he done? Had he damaged the hull? Terrified of sinking, he ran down the companionway, edged past the dead woman, and raced forward to the forepeak, where the extra sails were stowed.

He grabbed a flashlight from its charger and, wrestling with the heavy sailbags, probed the cramped space praying all the while that the beam wouldn't reflect the gleam of water. Nothing. He cocked his ear, listening. Nothing. No gushing water; no dents or cracks. He couldn't believe that the hull would survive such a hit unscathed. He backed out of

the forepeak, pulled up the floorboards, and shined the light in the bilge. There was water, dark and oily, but no more than he had last seen under the floorboards while helping Will rewire the depth finder.

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Then he heard a distant muttering. A chain saw? No. The noise was an engine approaching—like the high-pitched whine of the outboard canoe he'd last seen heading out of the creek.

Jim ran back through the main salon, jumped over the dead woman, climbed the companionway, and looked out. The sound was loud, close, coming from ahead. Just ahead to the left he saw an indent in the bank. He engaged the prop and swung cautiously into the opening, which led a hundred feet into the mangroves and then stopped at a wall of trees. High overhead, one of the spreaders jutting out from the mast caught on a hanging branch and the boat slewed to the side. An instant later, he felt the keel plow into the mud and then the sailboat was standing stock-still in the near darkness cast by the forest canopy.

Jim shut the engine. How stupid could he be? In his panic he had trapped himself in a dead-end canal.

As the outboard pulled abreast of Hustle, a glance in the creek mouth would reveal her white stern reflected on the water, or her mast rearing straighter than the trees. He looked up. Would the vines obscure it? Could he pull them over the boat? No time? He saw a flicker of motion through the mangrove forest; the canoe sped on the main creek, bearing down on the inlet. What had he told Will when Will razzed him about bulking up? Muscle came in handy. Do it! He scrambled up the backstay, climbing the steeply inclined wire cable hand over hand. Fifteen feet above the deck, he let go with his right hand, gripped the wire with his left, and lunged for a thick, leafy vine.

The vine and several attached to it swung closer to the mast. Giddy with fear and flying on adrenaline, he almost laughed at the sight he cut, suspended between the backstay and the vine like a crucified monkey. Then a huge ant

crawled off the vine onto the back of his hand and started down his arm. And Jim saw to his horror that the rough bark he clung to was filled with them. The canoe pulled abreast of the inlet. Jim watched through the leafy scrim. There were three men in the boat: one standing in the bow, one driving, and one seated between them dragging on a blunt that was as fat as a cigar. The driver glanced down the inlet. The man in the middle reached back and passed him the smoke. The canoe flashed past and was gone.

When the noise of the motor had faded to a quiet buzz, Jim let go of the vine, frantically shook the ants off his arm, and slid down the backstay, burning his hands. Something was crawling inside his shirt. He stripped it off and slapped more ants from his back and chest. The canoe had left in its wake the stink of gasoline and oil, which lingered in the thick air, sweetened by a whiff of marijuana.

Jim started Hustle's engine and engaged reverse. The propeller churned. Mud roiled and darkened the water. But the boat wouldn't move. Jim increased the power. She shuddered, decks vibrating, and threw mud. Then with a heart-stopping series of hesitations she began to move. Shoving the dinghy, bumping bottom with her keel, and dragging her spreaders through the branches, she backed out of the inlet. As soon as she reached the main channel, Jim shoved the throttle forward and drove her as fast as she would go toward the Calabar River. The equatorial night was closing in quite suddenly, even more abruptly than it had at sea, abetted by the Harmattan haze and the storm clouds. It was dark among the trees, but the slot of sky he could see above the creek began to glow from the distant offshore oil well flares. And it was by that fiery orange and red light that he finally saw the creek open into the Calabar River. Breaking out of the trees, he steered for a string of lighted buoys, which marked the channel through the flat expanse of the estuary that led to the Atlantic. An expanse, he knew from their morning passage in, that was an illusion. The water was shallow, the channels treacherous.

THE FAIRWAY BUOYS appeared sporadically, and many were unlit. But ship lights moving downstream gave him a clue to the deepest water. He could follow a ship out to the main channel. Except that the Sailing Directions said that local pilots were mandatory for ships traveling on the river. What if the river pilots saw the sailboat? As soon as they knew a police manhunt was on, they'd radio his position.

He was getting ahead of himself. No one had seen the dead girl yet. Even if her friends realized she was missing, nothing he had seen ashore suggested it was the sort of place you dialed 911.

I'm overthinking this. Just sail away. No one would know until he was a hundred miles at sea. Unless, of course, Will's mysterious "they" really had sent the girl to kill him or distract him until they caught up. "They"—who, if Will were to be believed, could sic the cops on them, or the Nigerian army, or the oil company helicopters, or all three. Now I'm going mental as Will. Jim was so scared he couldn't think straight. If only the night were truly night. But with the gas flares reflecting enough light from the low clouds to read by, night offered no cloak. To his right along the broad estuary he could see the low shore rise abruptly to the bluffs of Tom Shot Point, and anyone there could see him. To his left, a tall container ship and a low-slung tanker were passing on a main channel of the Calabar.

A dozen miles beyond the ships—invisible in the fine, gritty dust of the Harmattan—

Cameroon lay on the far shore. Another country, but surely as strange. Will was right. Only the open ocean guaranteed sanctuary.

Jim ran below for the Sailing Directions and brought the book up to the cockpit. The channel that Will had used to enter the Calabar was described as a minor channel. Local knowledge was strongly recommended. Even Will had run aground. There was no way Jim could pilot it at night. But the main channel was too busy.

A secondary channel crossed the wide flats where the river met the sea. It ran between the shoals formed by Tom Shot Bank and Bakasi Bank to the east, and was too shallow for large ships: vessels drawing more than three meters, ten feet, were warned off. Will had steered it on the way in, before he cut across Tom Shot Bank. Jim switched on the depth finder—he kicked himself for not doing it earlier—and steered a new course that would bring him across the main channel to a less populated route through the flats. He crossed behind the two ships. Suddenly, lightning flashed and turned the red-orange sky bright white. Everything stood in stark clarity and Jim saw a third vessel between the tanker and the freighter. It was smaller, low-slung, and moving fast. Patrol boat? He studied it with the binoculars.

A gun was mounted on the bow. Army? Or an armed oil company boat? Neither was a friend.

They hadn't seen him yet, because the sailboat was so low to the water. Surely they were tracking with radar. Will had claimed that Hustle was "invisible." She better be. He ran the motor at top speed, spotted a buoy marking the secondary channel, and turned south, toward the sea. He held that course for more than an hour. Once he glimpsed the patrol boat's silhouette, tearing north at high speed, vaporizing in the fire-lit haze. Then things quieted down and the sailboat was alone except for the distant ships plodding seaward in the parallel channel. They, too, faded in the strange light as the channels veered apart. Ahead, he saw a lighted oil well to the left of his channel. To the right he saw an angry white line on the water.

His stomach clenched with the memory of the line storm that had almost destroyed them in the Atlantic. As the sea began to roll the waters of the estuary and the line got closer, it grew thicker. A foamy white line bordered the channel. He checked the Sailing Directions and stopped the engine to listen.

Muted thunder confirmed that he was seeing surf—huge Atlantic waves fetching a thousand miles from Cape Town were breaking on Outer Reef. He was almost out. Now all he had to do was get past Outer Reef, skirt the oil fields, whose flares he could see dancing against the horizon, and break for the open sea.

He locked the wheel and went below to check on Will. Ignoring the body on the floor, he went into Will's cabin and played a flashlight over his face. The old man was sleeping. His lips looked parched, so he dribbled a little water on them and then more as Will licked hungrily at the bottle.

"What's happening?"

"We're passing Outer Reef?'

"Well done, kid! . . . Which side?"

"We're east of it, in the second channel?'

"Steer clear of the oil rigs on the left. Have you seen any patrols?"

"One?'

"Call me if they get close."

"You bet," said Jim. That's all they needed: Will hemorrhaging all over the cockpit. He took a fresh water bottle up to the helm and looked around. Far behind he could see the two ships, stopped. He recalled something in the Sailing Directions about night transits not allowed in the fairway.

A couple of miles to his left the oil field Will had mentioned sparkled with hundreds of electric lights. To his right, heavy seas pummeled Outer Reef. He steered a little closer—the Sailing Directions showed deep water on this side—

to give the oil field a wider berth. He passed the reef, and when next he looked, several miles of orange-and red-smeared water lay between him and the foaming breakers. His heart jumped. A helicopter—a cascade of blinking red and white running lights—

was racing out from the now invisible shore. Helplessly, he watched it home in on Hustle as if they were attached by a wire. But in the final miles it stopped, midair, and hovered over Outer Reef, its lights rotating slowly as it turned three-sixties, watching the channels. Jim stopped the engine. The boat lost way and began rolling on the swell. He went back down to the after cabin. "Will!"

The old man had fallen back to sleep. But the boat's clumsy roll woke him. Groggy and confused, he asked, "What's up?"

"Helicopter. What do I do?"

"Jesus . . . Hide."

"Where?"

"Where . . . where are we?"

"Three miles past Outer Reef."

"Right . . . right. . . . Listen to me. You have to fox their radar."

"Radar? You said radar can't see us."

"Airborne radar can. Looking straight down, they can pick up the steel in the engine. Listen . ."

"I'm listening. I'm right here."

"Remember the wreck I showed you on the way in?" "The masts."

"Right. The masts. Get inside the masts."

"What do you mean?"

"Drive the boat among the masts. Use your depth finder. Get a bowline ready. Make your approach from downwind, real slow. Tie onto something solid and let her drift back a few yards. Keep watching your depth finder."

"There's a heavy swell, Will. Huge waves."

"I am goddamned well aware of that. Be careful so it doesn't pick you up and slam you down on solid steel."

Jim ran back to the cockpit and steered a dubious course outside the eight meters of dredged channel. Immediately, the depth finder showed a rolling bottom beneath the keel, five meters deep, then four meters of water, then five, six, four—and suddenly, some distance ahead, a wall. It had to be the sunken wreck, but he couldn't see it and he didn't dare turn on a spotlight, which would give away his position to the helicopter and anyone else watching.

The wind had turned southerly and brisk—the cause, he realized belatedly, of the suddenly greater visibility—and he smelled the wreck before he saw the masts, a coarse, lively odor of seaweed and barnacles exposed by the tide receding down the rusty flanks of the sunken ship. The masts jutted from the water in a dark and menacing cluster. When he slowed the engine to maneuver, he heard the sea sluicing furiously in and out of the steel pillars.

How in hell was he going to get close enough to attach a rope without smashing into the main body of the wreck? He slowed and circled, studying the depth finder, trying to form a picture in his mind of the shape beneath the surface. Will was confused. This was not possible. The boat was lurching around on the swell; it was almost uncontrollable. Of course Will was confused, half out of his mind with pain, shocked by trauma, and terrified of dying.