Buried At Sea (19 page)

Something shook the air, a heavy vibration that whipped Jim's head up in alarm. The helicopter was moving again, its rotors beating the sky with a sharp thump thump thump as it swept a broad circle over the water.

He shot a desperate look at the companionway, half fantasizing, half praying to see a rejuvenated Will Spark hurry up the steps to take charge. Fat chance. Somehow he had to point the boat and throw a line at the same time. Then it struck him that Will himself would never tie the boat to the mast. Will would have run in close circles. But he didn't trust Jim, a novice helmsman, to maneuver close enough to blend the radar signature of Hustle's engine with the steel wreck without smacking into it.

Jim decided he liked those odds much better. Besides, was he supposed to sit tied up until daylight? Hell, no. The second the helicopter went the other way, he was out of here.

Picturing the submerged wreck in his mind, he concluded that the bulk of the sunken vessel lay inshore of the masts. Maybe, like the oil tenders he'd seen racing around the oil fields, it had a cabin on the front, on top of which stood the mast. In that case, the safer depths were in front of it, which the sonar confirmed.

He looked up at the helicopter thumping around the horizon and tried to place himself inside it. Will had devised a good hiding trick. A local helicopter pilot would be familiar with the wreck and recognize its radar position. He just had to keep the sailboat in its sphere until the helicopter gave up and went home.

But the swell was rising and falling sharply, which made controlling the boat extremely difficult. It was like dancing drunk at the junior prom: the rusty masts were his high school principal, guidance counselor, and favorite teacher clustered worriedly next to the dance floor; Hustle, the poor girl he had his arms around, holding on to her for dear life; the helicopter, his mother, who had volunteered to monitor.

No, it was really more like sailing with Will Spark—an illusion of control while everything was really going to crash. Shannon, I am so sorry I didn't run when I had the chance. I tried to save Will and lost myself.

Hustle was caught suddenly off balance. The helm went dead in his hands and she made a nightmarish lurch at the wreck. Jim felt something crunch underneath—the keel was scraping the wreck. He held his breath. If Hustle's keel hung up—or worse, her rudder—

the next swell would throw the boat into the masts and pin her in them until the swell pounded her to pieces. But she rose on the next sea. The propeller bit and drove her to temporary safety.

Jim battled the swell for an hour that felt like a long, long night, repeating over and over the nerve-racking, exhausting maneuvers to hold the boat within the target range of the masts, while praying that the helicopter would give up and go home. It kept swooping in wider and wider many-mile circles. Then it put down on a platform in the Kita pumping station. Jim steered away from the masts and tried to find the helicopter in Will's night binoculars. As he was scanning the myriad lights of the Kita field, the aircraft suddenly shot into the sky again. Jim raced back to the masts, his heart sinking as he saw the aircraft resume sweeping the Tom Shot Bank and realized that the helicopter had descended to refuel.

Suddenly, it dropped to the water. A pinprick of light below it revealed the familiar shape of the patrol boat. Not only weren't the crews stopping, they were coordinating to expand the search. Jim ran below.

"What's happening?" Will asked as Jim burst into the cabin. He had hauled himself into a sitting position so he could see out of the small oval porthole.

"The patrol boat just joined the helicopter."

"Bloody hell."

"They're not giving up."

"Get back to the wheel. Let me think?'

Jim ran back to the cockpit and circled closer to the masts. He saw the lights of the helicopter and the patrol boat diverge, the helicopter swinging west toward the main channel, the patrol boat's white masthead light lined up between her red and green side lights. Will had taught him what that configuration meant: the vessel had turned toward him. It was heading south, outbound in the secondary channel, on a course that would take it within eyeball range of the wreck.

A red flash lit the sky behind the patrol boat.

They're shooting, thought Jim. They've seen us.

A second flash seared the clouds. A third turned the orange flare-lit sky vermilion red. The high bluff of Tom Shot Point was suddenly etched black against the brilliant sky. The water flats of Tom Shot Bank and Bakasi Bank turned red as deserts. The red light stretched to the Bakasi Peninsula, rimming the breakers with color. An immense din rumbled across the water, three massive explosions spaced like the flashes. A pillar of fire rose behind Tom Shot Point.

"Jim!" yelled Will. "What happened?"

The helicopter and the patrol boat wheeled toward land. Jim immediately steered away from the masts, regained the channel, and headed south at full speed.

"What happened?" Will yelled again. Somehow he had managed to reach up and unlock one of the ports that opened into the side of the cockpit. His voice came at Jim's feet.

"Hang on, Will." The water had deepened, and Jim was concentrating on trying to line up a course between the lights of two distant oil fields. When he got it, he set the autopilot and went down to Will's cabin.

"What happened?"

"Something blew up?'

"Oil rig?"

"No. I think it's back behind the village. They were scooping—stealing gas from a pipeline. It could have been them."

"Happens all the time, poor bastards. Where's the patrols?"

--"It looks like they

went to help."

"God bless 'em," said Will.

"It was like a big party. Everybody laughing and dancing and running around with buckets of gas:'

"Probably smoking dope, too . . . Jim?"

"What?"

"I'm afraid I have to ask you to dump our friend?' "What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. I can't move. You have to throw Margaret's body overboard." Which meant picking it up. "I can't do that."

"This is no time to be squeamish."

"I won't do it," said Jim.

"You won't and I can't," Will replied slowly. "But may I suggest it will be easier before she rots?"

"I didn't kill her. You did."

Will sank back and closed his eyes. "That is true but useless information." Jim looked forward up the corridor that led to the main salon, which was bathed in redtinged darkness. What remained white of her dress glowed like an angry glance. Will started in on him again.

"You've done yourself proud tonight, Jim. I don't know anybody who could have gotten us out of that mess like you did. But you have to finish the job. There is no way we can sail all the way to South America with a rotting corpse."

Jim pushed back on the door frame. "We're sailing to North America," he said firmly, and went to finish the job.

"Give yourself a break," Will called after him. "Wrap her in one of the big garbage bags."

"I already thought of that."

"But don't seal it. You don't want her to float."

He hadn't thought of that.

Will had warned him repeatedly about not wasting fuel, and there came a point when Jim realized he had to, whether he wanted to or not, stop depending on the engine. When the wind swung, dragging the African dust with it, Jim raised the main and unfurled the jib and set a course south. Once the sails were pulling reasonably well, he shut the fuel valve, and in the deep silence that ensued, he felt the boat come alive again. He sat in the cockpit all night, dozing by the wheel, afraid to go below with the big ships converging on the oil fields.

At dawn the GPS indicated they were crossing latitude 3°30' north—sixty miles from the coast. The depth finder showed no bottom, which the chart promised lay twelve hundred meters under Hustle's keel. The air had cleared in the night and Jim was stunned to see looming on his left two mountains, shockingly steep compared with the flat, green swampy Niger coast he had fled in the night.

The taller was a precipitous volcanic cone that trickled a menacing twist of smoke. Jim located a drawing of their silhouettes in the Sailing Directions that identified the two peaks as capping Isla de Bioko. The island belonged to Equatorial Guinea, whose territorial waters the Sailing Directions advised avoiding.

Quickly, he turned the boat away from the island and headed west, checking his position repeatedly on the GPS. When Isla de Bioko was a safe twenty miles behind, he altered course again, turning to the southwest, aiming for the point nine hundred miles ahead where Africa jutted into the Atlantic. Will woke and called his name. Jim brought him water and a glass of long-life ultrapasteurized orange juice. The old man looked awful.

"How are you?"

"Hurt like hell. Can't catch my breath. . . . She did something to my lung. . . . You have to douse my shoulder again. Infection will kill me."

"Let me see if the bleeding has stopped."

"It has," Will snapped, drawing the bloodstained sheet tighter to his chest.

"Hey, I have to see it when I douse it, right? Let me see." Will lay back reluctantly. Jim stared at the wound, astonished. Somehow, sometime in the night, while he was in the cockpit, Will had gotten up, walked to the first-aid kit in the main salon, and repacked the wound. The pain must have been torture.

"You're like a wounded elephant that goes off to nurse itself."

"Elephants hang with the herd. I'm a warthog'

"Well, I'm impressed. And you're right, it's not bleed . - ing"

"Thing is, what's going on inside? Douse me again. Give me some morphine and some penicillin. Let me sleep it off."

"First you're going to help me work out a course straight across the Atlantic Ocean to Florida."

Will said, "Listen, Jim. You have to hydrate me. There's a ton of saline and glucose bags in the medicine locker. Do you know how to hook up an IV?"

"I've had plenty stuck in my ann. I'll figure it out."

"I'd do it myself, except I'm so shaky. It's easy. I have good veins." Jim hung the plastic bag from the clamp that held Will's ceiling compass. Then he wrapped a short length of elastic

shock cord around Will's arm like a tourniquet. A fat vein popped up inside Will's elbow. He swabbed the skin with alcohol and attacked the vein with the sterile needle.

"You just have to line it up with the vein."

The boat's constant motion was the real problem. A sudden lurch took him by surprise and he accidentally pushed too deeply, through the vein and out the other side into the muscle.

"Margaret was gentler than you are, for Christ's sake." "I'm not laughing, Will." He tried again and missed.

"Collect your spirit," whispered Will. "Just calm down. You can do it." He got it, finally, taped the catheter to Will's forearm, and hurried to attach the clear tubing.

"Try not to send any air bubbles into my heart. I'm in no mood for an embolism." Jim checked again to make sure the IV tube had no bubbles. The solution began to flow. Will sagged back on the sheets. "Now, what's this about Florida?"

"Safe American territory."

"They will kill us in Florida," Will said flatly. "And they won't bungle it like the Nigerians. They'll send professionals."

Jim sat on the edge of the bed. "Is it possible," he asked gently, "that Margaret stabbed you for her own personal reasons?"

Will's laugh came out half snort, half painful gasp. "Crime of passion? Are you kidding?"

"You said you left her."

"Margaret lived in a country where men who can afford them keep a minimum of two wives, plus a cutie on the side. We're not talking about Latin passion in Nigeria. Nor are we talking about any kind of equality of the sexes. Besides, I didn't do anything terrible to the poor girl. We had a few laughs and then I left. She'd been with a Texas petroleum engineer before me. And after I left, she told me yesterday, she hooked up with the captain of an anchor handler. Jim,

how the hell old are you? Where've you been? This is life. These are poor people. Poor people do what they have to do. They offered her enough money to do it."

"If 'they' are real."

"As real as death," muttered Will. His eyes were glazing over. "I need another morphine." Jim gave him two. "Sleep tight."

It had taken a week to sail nine hundred miles into the Gulf of Guinea. So if the wind held, maybe another week to sail out. A week before he had to commit to a course for Florida. A week to read Will's books on navigation. A week to get some rest for the long, long haul back across the Atlantic Ocean.

Unshaved.

Harborless

Immensities

ADMIRAL RUGOFF! SO pleasing on the ear—as Homer sings—to hear your voice again. . . . Your daughter is better? . . . Excellent. Excellent . . . Yes, yes. Young people have to find themselves, but no permanent damage done. . . . No thanks are necessary, we were delighted to intercede. Now, Admiral .. ."

Lloyd McVay described Will Spark's sloop, Will himself, and Jim Leighton, then gave Boris Rugoff Andy Nickels's guesstimate of their position in the Gulf of Guinea. Rugoff—formerly admiral of the Soviet navy's auxiliary merchant fleet and now president of WorldSpan, Russia's largest privately held shipping conglomerate—said, "I have four tankers passing through that area this week, several freighters bound for Cape Town, and three for the Med. But it is a very big ocean, my friend."

"Well, with the shores of darkest Africa to the north and east, we're reasonably sure they can go only west or south."

"Perhaps with luck, my ships will get lucky. What do you want done with the yacht?"

"Can you trust your captains?" McVay asked.

Rugoff laughed. "They enjoy a little, shall we say, 'free trade' on the side. It makes them loyal."

"I want the yacht intact and Will Spark alive."

"The young man?"

"Of no consequence."

"And if my people happen to spot them in port?" "Watch them until my people get there."

"How valuable are they?" the Russian asked.

Like any ex-Soviet official, Rugoff was used to carving portions from the living beast. So McVay was confident that the admiral's greed would be tempered by good sense. He gave the newly minted shipping magnate what he wanted to hear. "Your captains'