Close Reach (2 page)

“I remember them,” Kelly said. “I met the girl, anyway. Lena. She’d heard I was a doctor and came to see me. She was afraid to go to a Peruvian.”

Lena’s problem had been chlamydia, and she’d been horribly embarrassed. Kelly had given her a treatment of azithromycin from
Freefall
’s vast first aid kit and had sent her back to the Brit with a pat on the back, enough pills for both of them, and a warning to be a little more careful. She hadn’t told Dean any of this, but she closed her eyes and remembered the girl’s voice saying,
I’m so sorry to bother you, but I think I need a little help.
She thought of Lena at the marina in Peru, young and teary and lost. But a good kid. Then she thought of the terrified voice on the radio.

“It might’ve been them. You remember the boat’s name?”

Dean shook his head.

“No, but I saw it. It was a custom steel job, maybe a Bill Gardner design. Smaller than us. Fifty feet or so, with a cutter rig.”

“I’ll take the watch now,” she said. “You should get on the SSB, see if anyone knows where this guy is.”

“I’ll come up and tell you if I learn anything.”

He stood and pointed at her chest.

“Harness.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

She took the yellow safety tether he handed her and clipped it to the chest harness on her inflatable life jacket. The other end of the tether was secured through an eyebolt beneath the instrument panel. Dean unclipped his harness, opened the hatch doors, and went below. When he was gone, Kelly took his empty seat to be closer to the instruments. She was still warm, but it was just a matter of time before the cold sank like a blade through the layers of her foul weather gear and found her. When it did, she’d drink the tea from the thermos. For now, she just watched the instruments. The autopilot worked so well and the wind was so constant that she did not need to lay a hand on the helm or trim the sails. She could have done either without getting up, as there was a second steering station in front of her and all the sheets were led back to electric winches on the cabin top within arm’s reach. So she sat and watched Dean’s marvel of a boat cut through the sea as she carried them north and listened to the wind and the sound of the breaking waves. After a few moments, she saw the radar screen dim briefly. Dean was transmitting at full power on the SSB.

* * *

There was a waterproof aluminum box beneath the compact chart table to her right. She opened it and took out her logbook, thumbing through the pages till she found the most recent entry, from four hours earlier when she’d finished her last watch. She took the ballpoint pen from the spiral binding and braced herself against the chart table to write. Her handwriting was a shaky scrawl because of the thick rubberized gloves she wore and
Freefall
’s constant motion. But she could read it. Kelly knew when she began the entry that she would get sidetracked, but she began as she always did: she logged the weather and the falling pressure, noted the sail plan and
Freefall
’s speed, heading, and current position. She copied the instrument gauge readings so that they would have a record of them.

Then she stopped and looked for a long moment at the radar screen on the lower console. It showed heavy bands of clouds forty miles to the west. Probably the leading edge of the low-pressure system. The set’s sensitivity was dialed up so that she could read the weather, but the consequence was a screen filled with ghostly green radar returns. She knew these were waves over fifteen feet. She switched off the target enhancement, and when the screen refreshed, much of the clutter was gone.

There were two strong returns fifty and fifty-five miles directly behind them.

Vessels of some kind, five miles apart, following in
Freefall
’s track.

She watched those two returns for a long while and then slowly bent back to her logbook.

She thought of the girl on the radio. She was now sure it was Lena’s voice.
It’s coming
, she’d screamed. But Kelly thought what she said after that might be more important.
It saw us and it’s coming back! Oh, God, Jim, hurry, please hurry!

Why would Lena call Jim on the VHF if they were on the same boat?

The answer was obvious. Jim hadn’t been on the boat. Kelly thought of all the hundreds of times either she or Dean had gone ashore in the dinghy and the other had stayed aboard. Hadn’t they always taken a handheld VHF in the dinghy, just in case? So Jim was in the dinghy with a handheld, and Lena was calling to him. She’d seen something. Something she’d seen before and didn’t want to see again. And it was coming for her.

Kelly looked up from the logbook and scanned the horizon. It took her almost a minute to make a 360-degree check because she had to wait for the moment when
Freefall
was at the crest of a wave. Down in the troughs, all she could see was gray-green water.

Maybe Lena and Jim had ducked their boat into a tight cove or a narrow fjord to try to hide. There were plenty of places like that: narrow cuts in the ice and rock, just big enough for a careful skipper to maneuver into. But in such a tight anchorage, Jim would have had to drop the bow anchor and then lead stern lines to shore to keep the boat from swinging in the katabatic winds that blew down from the mountain passes and valleys of the islands. So he would have taken the dinghy and gone ashore with the lines, and Lena would have stood watch. Waiting in the cockpit with the VHF and binoculars, watching for whatever had chased them into their hiding place. A hiding place that hadn’t worked.

And what was chasing them?

Kelly penned the last of her thoughts into the logbook and then looked back to the radar screen. The two vessels were still out there, but they were seven miles apart now. The lead vessel was leaving the other behind, and it was closing on
Freefall.
It had gained a quarter of a mile in a little more than ten minutes. She flipped the logbook over and did the rough math on the back cover. They had a good lead. If the other boat maintained its course, it would take thirty-two hours for it to catch
Freefall.
Almost a day and a half. They’d be in the middle of the Drake
Passage when they met, midway between the tip of Chile and the Antarctic Peninsula. Three hundred miles from land in either direction.

Kelly looked back at the instrument panel and saw that the barometer had ticked down another millibar: 979. She looked out at the western horizon. The sky overhead was a dim and hazy blue. But in the west it was darkening. The low-pressure system sweeping in from the west would reach
Freefall
in far less than thirty-two hours. But she’d seen the storms down here and knew what to expect. Storms lasted for days. They lined up one after another like beads on a terrible necklace, and you could weather one and survive only to be hit a few hours later by the next.

She was certain of one thing: they’d still be in the middle of a storm when the other boat came. And that thought left her as cold as the sea spray pelting the pilothouse glass.

By the time Dean came back into the pilothouse, the cold had found her and she was drinking tea from the thermos. It was five in the morning. Though it had never gotten dark, the day was growing brighter as the sun rose to make another low transit of the sky. She handed him a harness tether, and he clipped in after he sat in the second pedestal chair.

“None of the SSB nets get going till later in the day, so I didn’t learn anything on the radio,” he said.

“I should’ve thought of that before you went down.”

Dean waved it off. “But I used the satellite link and got on the Internet.”

A wave hit them broadside, and
Freefall
lurched in her forward progress, then pressed on at greater speed into the trough. Dean went on: “Lena and Jim were definitely in Antarctica. Lena updated a website pretty regularly.”

“You found it?”

He nodded. “Yeah. It had pictures of both of them, of the boat. The boat’s named
Arcturus.
They were anchored on the southwest end of Adelaide three days ago. Lena even put in the GPS coordinates. They were seven miles from us.”

“So it was them.”

“But that’s where it gets weird. The last entry is dated two days ago at one-thirty in the morning. Almost five hours before we heard the transmission. She said they were sailing nonstop to Easter Island, that they’d left that afternoon. She signed off with their coordinates, and I plotted them on a chart. The position was over a hundred miles west northwest of Adelaide, in the open ocean.”

“But you said the max range was five to ten—”

“There’s no way we could’ve gotten a VHF transmission from them if
Arcturus
was where she said it was.”

“If they turned around for some reason, right after she did the update, couldn’t they get within range of us?”

He shook his head.

“Not enough time. And that’s the other thing. I don’t see how they could’ve gotten to that position in the first place. The weather’s all wrong for it. Her coordinates were a hundred and ten miles dead upwind of where they were anchored the day before. No way they could’ve gotten to that spot in under twelve hours, fighting the wind and the waves. Tacking back and forth
would’ve added another hundred miles for them. There’s just no way.”

“There’s a low-pressure system out there, coming at us. I think it’s a big one. If they were headed west, they’d have gone right into it,” Kelly said. She tapped the barometer to make her point, and Dean nodded.

They sat in silence again and watched the boat ride the waves. Kelly scanned the horizon in quadrants, searching for ships. Or ice. The little broken bits of icebergs—growlers—were her biggest fear. They floated just inches above the waves and could punch a hole in the hull if they hit one dead on. Then she remembered the radar and told Dean about the two targets she’d been watching. She explained her quick calculations. Dean listened, then looked at the screen. The radar was in target tracking mode, and so the two targets left ghostly trace lines marking their paths.

“Follow the tracks backward and where do they point?” Dean asked.

She looked at them. They pointed to the southeast. To Adelaide Island.

They looked at each other, and that was all it took to show him she understood.

“Yeah,” Dean said.

Kelly thought to herself:
What’s going on?

But she didn’t ask it. She wasn’t in the habit of asking Dean questions he couldn’t answer. Instead, she looked at the chart. They were six hundred nautical miles from Puerto Williams, the southernmost town in Chile. The GPS was telling her they’d reach it in forty-two hours, but she knew that was wrong. Somewhere along the way they’d slow down. They always did. Headwinds, chop, countercurrents. Something would keep them from making a steady fourteen knots. So whatever was coming up from the south would catch them. And that was the question she wanted to ask Dean.

“Should we do anything or just hold course?”

He didn’t have to think long before he answered.

“We don’t know enough that it makes sense to change course. All we know for sure is there’s a low-pressure system coming at us. We’ve got good wind now for going north, so we should make as many miles north as we can. When the system hits in the next ten or fifteen hours, we can ride it east, right into Puerto Williams.”

“And the radar contacts?”

“We’ll watch them. And we’ll set a proximity alarm.”

“When the storm hits, if the waves go above twenty feet, we’re not gonna see much on the radar except wave faces.”

Dean shook his head.

“We can’t do anything about that. And besides, if we can’t see them, they won’t see us.”

“So we hide in the storm and ride it into town.”

“That’s right.” He reached across and put the back of his gloved hand against her cheek. “For now, you want some more tea?”

“Sure. And then get some rest.”

They passed another day and a sunlit night as they had those before: alternating their watches and taking what sleep and food and warmth they could get in the off watches.
Freefall
pounded steadily north in the building seas. The sun never set, but they never saw it, either. The wind strengthened and brought clouds with it. The dark band of rain Kelly had seen on the radar filled in the sky from the west like a closing eyelid. They were sailing in gray storm light, light without shadows. The waves were green and steep but not high enough to be a real danger.
Freefall
was seventy feet from bow to stern; it would take a thirty-five-foot breaker to capsize her. So Kelly wasn’t worried yet.