Buried At Sea (49 page)

All of which Jim hoped meant that they were nearing the edge of the Drake Passage. Out of one misery and into another. He unclipped from the pulpit and clipped onto the jackline to head back to relieve Shannon at the helm.

He saw two Shannons in the cockpit. Ice crusted his eyelashes. They looked like they were dancing.

He moved closer, feeling his way over the slick deck. God, he was going nuts. Two Shannons, still dancing. Locked in each other's arms, the Shannons 'lurched out of the cockpit and fell against the safety lines.

"Jim! Help me."

"Jesus."

He scrambled aft, slipping and sliding. Shannon was down on her back. Val McVay was climbing on top of her. Jim grabbed her and tried to pull her off. "Let go, Shannon. I've got her."

"Hold her! She's trying to jump overboard."

"Let me go!" Val shouted. "You have no right to interfere. Let me go!"

"Val!" Shannon screamed. "Tell Jim what you told me." Val stopped struggling, then turned to Jim and repeated, "You have no right to interfere. I know what I'm doing and why." She looked utterly sure or utterly crazy. He didn't know which, until she exploded into action, fighting to get to the rail. Shannon said, "Sony, hon," and belted her in the jaw with all her considerable strength. Val McVay went limp in Jim's arms.

"Help me get her below. I'll tie her up. Can you handle the boat alone?"

"For a while. Get some sleep; I'll need relief. What did she tell you?"

"More babbling Like she's in school or something. Something about not getting an Aplus. Whatever the heck that's supposed to mean. She's pretty traumatized from all that time in the cold water. . . . I am so tired I'm going to die. I just need to sleep half an hour. Then I'll relieve you."

Three days later, halfway across the Drake Passage, the wind dropped and the sea smoothed and they cooked their first hot meal. Shannon brought Jim's to him in the cockpit.

"Did she eat?"

"I got her to drink some water."

"We have a nut on board."

"No, she'll get better. She's just doing a lot of thinking." "Did she talk?" For three days the woman had not spoken a word.

"She thanked us for saving her life. . . . I've been doing a lot of thinking, too. . ."

"About what?"

"I have a question. If Will Spark threw Sentinel overboard, why did he insist you put his head in the freezer?"

IF WILL KNEW that Sentinel was sitting on the bottom of the ocean waiting to be salvaged, there was no point in putting his head in the freezer. But if you did put his head in the freezer, what's the one thing you would really, really hang on to and protect."

"The freezer!"

"Yes!"

"Why?"

"He must have hidden a device to signal the microprocessor to surface in the freezer."

"See if you can get Val to come here. I'll look for it." Jim left the ELF underwater radio transmitter hidden where he found it, beside the freezer's compressor. It was bigger than a brick and weighed as much, as it consisted mostly of a powerful battery, which Will had hard-wired through the freezer to keep it charged.

Jim entered into the GPS the exact location from the log where Will threw the heart-rate monitor and the microprocessor overboard. Then he consulted Ocean Passages and Jimmy Cornell and worked out a course to set Hustle toward that point off Saint Paul's Rocks 3,540 miles to the north. They told Val that they were sailing to Florida. The Saint Paul's Rocks were a logical waypoint. Her only comment was that they would arrive in the Caribbean in time for the hurricane season. She made it clear that she couldn't care less if a hurricane blew the boat onto a reef.

Val proved a placid shipmate. She made no attempts to communicate with the outside world. She stood her watches faithfully, and her racing sailor skills paid off in startling boat speeds. While off watch she worked hard, cleaning and maintaining the battered sloop. When the GPS failed, she repaired it with a soldering iron. At the same time, she coached Jim and Shannon on how to use the sextant and the Nautical Almanac, remarking that it "boggled the mind" that Jim had sailed so far without learning to navigate without electronics.

Otherwise, she was solitary. Never intrusive, she appeared to have shut down emotionally. She slept long hours in the forward cabin. Her only complaint was the cold, which lasted well north of Buenos Aires; her only request was that they keep the stove burning for warmth.

Shannon, with her gift for taming solitary souls, befriended Val. Jim didn't trust her, though clearly the two women seemed to be becoming shipmates.

"Why don't you ask her how she tracked us for two weeks?"

"I did. They had some kind of high-tech military radar that her company had developed. She said it was so powerful it could pick up our engine when Hustle climbed up a wave."

"On a sailboat? Where'd they get the juice for such a unit? Will said they really eat electricity."

Sometime later Shannon reported back that the radar unit had been developed for foot soldiers and consumed very little power.

"Do you think she's beautiful?" Shannon asked one night when they were alone in the cockpit.

"Not my type."

"I think she's really beautiful."

"I'm a blond hair, blue eyes, bulked-up pecs man myself."

"It is not necessary to say things like that to make me feel secure."

"I'm saying that because I love you and the way you look. . . . Yes, Val is beautiful. In a strange way. Probably interesting as all hell in bed."

"In a strange way?"

They laughed quietly.

Jim said, "If she brings all that intensity into the sack, wow. . . . If I weren't in love with you I might try to hit on her. But I am in love with you, so it's not going to happen."

"She's rich."

"You're rich. Or your father is—though he's probably cut you off by now."

"No probably about it. If I'm not home it's going to be out of sight, out of mind. But I was never 'rich' like her. Not even close. We were talking a little. She's unbelievably rich. Power money. It's like they own their own country."

"By my standards, you're both rich." He winked at her. "But you're the best I can do."

"What?"

"You heard me. That thing you said to me off the Rio de la Plata? The best I can do? You are the best any man could do." "You're just saying that because—"

"Because I'm in love with you. You ate -the absolute best

I can do." "Why?"

"Why?" He took her hands in his. "Shannon, if I could tell you why I love you, it probably wouldn't be love. It would be like a job description."

"You could try."

"Before I met you I don't think being so far away on the boat would have bothered me the way it did. I was never an adventurer—like you—but if I had been far away I wouldn'

t

have cared because I wouldn't have missed anyone. But this was a kind of torture—all I know is I get excited to see you when you come up on watch. I like the world with you in it. Everything is fun—hey, relax, I'm not going to bug you to marry me. The only woman I'll ever marry is going to be a volunteer."

"What if we find Sentinel?"

"I think we should split fifty-fifty. You do what you want. I'll do what I want. Maybe someday we can do it together."

Shannon sat quietly digesting that. Then she gave him a teasing punch on the arm. "Hey, Muscles, what's the first thing you'll buy when you're rich?"

"A refit for poor Hustle. Her sails are stretched. Val was showing me where the stays are corroding. And I found three soft spots that the ice bashed in her bow. The hull's delaminating. . ." He squeezed her knee. "What will you buy first?"

"I don't know. Maybe a new spinnaker pole."

WITH THE THREE of them sharing watches and Val helping Jim and Shannon hone their skills, Hustle made a fast passage to the equator. Despite encountering uncooperative winds in the Variables, the broad belt of light and variable winds that they had to traverse before they picked up the powerful southeast trades, they covered the distance in less than a month—averaging a very respectable 165 miles a day, a little under seven knots.

Jim and Shannon had pushed the boat very hard on their last several watches, their excitement growing as they neared the spot where Will had deep-sixed Sentinel. As it turned out, it was on Jim's watch that they turned Hustle into the wind and backed her jib to heave to over the exact spot.

It was nearing noon. The sky was heavy, the water opaque. The heat would have been oppressive were it not for a light breeze and the fact that they still carried an Antarctic chill in their bones. Jim rigged the stainless-steel dive ladder off the stern and was about to lower it into the water when Val came up the companionway.

She was tugging on the long-sleeve shirt she always wore in the sun. Like Jim and Shannon, she was wearing sunglasses and sunblock and had a long-billed crew cap on her

head. She glanced at the backed jib. Then she took the binoculars from their rack on the binnacle and focused on the western horizon.

"What do you see?" Jim asked.

Val handed him the binoculars. Jim exchanged a puzzled look with Shannon and raised the glasses. His hands started trembling. There was a hard spot on the horizon and very soon it grew soft, white edges.

"What is it, Jim?" asked Shannon.

"A very fast ship, coming this way?'

Shannon's face fell. "Val?"

"What, Shannon?"

"Did you betray us?"

"Only by omission," said Val.

"What omission?"

"I omitted to tell you that I designed a system to track this boat with satellite data. At first I didn't give a damn whether my father continued using it or not, as you well know. But then it became obvious that Will had not taken Sentinel to his watery grave."

"How?"

"Most coincidences can be explained by the data. You two were beelining for the Saint Paul's Rocks like your lives depended on it—very near where Will got away from me last winter."

"Val, we saved your life."

"Did you expect me to say, 'Oh, by the way, my father is tracking your course. Be on the lookout if you are attempting to retrieve what was stolen from us'?"

"We saved your life twice," said Jim. "We should have let you drown yourself."

"I thank you for the opportunity to reflect on my future. In return, I promise to continue putting my life to important use."

"But we connected. I thought we were friends."

"Shannon!" Val said sharply. "I'm a hermit. I've always been a hermit. I live in my mind. I don't mingle. I don't connect. I excel."

Shannon looked as stunned as Jim felt. They had led the

McVays straight to their goal. There was no way their sailboat could outrun the highspeed ship, which was soaring on skirts of spray and approaching so swiftly that it was like watching an airplane land. As its features grew clear Jim realized that it was not a true ship but a seagoing ferry, bigger than the Montevideo ferries he'd seen in the Rio de la Plata.

It swooped in a tight bank. The thunder of its engines ceased. The ship came to a stop a hundred yards off and drifted down on Hustle. Seamen rigged ladders down the hull. Armed men appeared on the stern deck in diving gear. A steward in kitchen whites struggled through the door with two big buckets.

"Who's the tall guy in the bow tie?" asked Jim. "That is my father, Lloyd McVay." Jim focused the glasses on the "poetry-quoting thug" who had hunted him across three oceans. Minus his gunmen, Lloyd McVay looked almost quaint in his bow tie and lightweight suit, like an older Westport gentleman boarding the midmorning train to New York for a set of squash at the club. With his bowed head and rounded back and shoulders, he appeared to apologize for his height. But his was the stance of a stork poised to impale. And the binoculars told Jim that the aloof expression on his face was also a lie. McVay was gripping the railing so hard that his powerful hands were corded with strain.

Jim shifted the glasses and got another shock. "Your Rottweiler Nickels got rescued, too. Something happened to his face."

Jim handed Val the glasses. Shannon, he noticed, had recovered. She looked mad enough to throw Val overboard. Not that it would make a difference. The big-time threat was on the ferry.

Val's jaw tightened. But all she said was, "It looks like Andy lost his nose to frostbite."

"He's lucky to be alive—just like you."

Luckier than you think, Val thought. He's had a month to worm his way into my father's good graces. She was going to have serious problems with the two of them if her father had come to believe that Andy filled his uncle's shoes.

Her father called down at the sailboat, concealing emotion as always. Was he happy to find his only child was still alive? Or disappointed that his demanding daughter was still vying for his crown?

"Is that you, Val? My goodness, I feared when you lost your boat you lost your life."

"I hope you didn't grieve too deeply."

"You put me through hell, as it were. The uncertainty was devastating. But I took comfort in my hymnal and never lost hope:

"And while the lamp holds out to burn The vilest sinner may return." In other words, he would never forgive her for blowing him off in the middle of the search and striking out on her own.

"It appears you also took comfort in my tracking system." His answer confirmed her fears. "Andy is due much of the credit. He did some judicious digging and discovered that our old friend Will had an alias. In an earlier incarnation, he stashed ill-gotten gains on the sea bottom. Course projections for this boat led Andy and me to draw the obvious conclusion. Young man," he called to Jim. "Will Spark took what was ours. I want what's ours now."

"We don't have it."

"You have stopped Will Spark's boat at a position that is precisely where he escaped from me last February." "So?"

"So if you don't have Sentinel, you had bloody well better have a way to retrieve it."

"It was in Will's head when I buried him at sea."

McVay gestured. Seamen scrambled down rope ladders, caught mooring lines, and secured Hustle fore and aft. Andy Nickels descended to the foredeck and steadied the ladder for the older McVay, who loped back to the cockpit with a sailor's easy gait. Lloyd McVay leaned down and brushed his daughter's cheek with his thin lips. "High marks for survival, at least."