Close Reach (3 page)

Not about the weather, anyway.

On watch, she kept a close eye on the radar. The faster target was still coming up from astern, closing the gap more quickly now than it had the day before. If it was a sailboat, it had put out more canvas or sheeted in its main to draw more force from the wind; if it was a powerboat, it had throttled up during the night. They’d see it on the horizon in an hour or two and then would watch it pull in the last string of miles between them.

And then, after that, when it was close to them on the same piece of wind-tossed sea, they would find out. Maybe it would just steam past them, and then they would watch the white light on its stern slip under the northern horizon a few hours later. If it did that, they’d laugh about it at a bar in Puerto Williams, have a few drinks and a hot dinner, and forget the whole thing.

And then again, maybe it wouldn’t just steam past them. Maybe there was something seriously wrong; Lena hadn’t just been screwing around on the radio or getting the coordinates wrong on her blog because her boat was getting tossed like a rag in a washing machine as she typed.

Kelly looked at the radar screen and the little green track that stood for all she didn’t know. She whispered to herself:
“It’s coming.”

She thought of the girl on the radio, the rough thread of terror woven into her voice. The memory raked down her spine like ragged nails. She opened the compartment under the chart table and found a prescription pill bottle. She opened it and tilted one of the small white tablets into her gloved palm.

Modafinil.

She bit the tablet in half and swallowed the pieces one after the other, watching the bow slice the face of the sea. If she knew she wouldn’t be sleeping, she might as well stay alert.

Dean came up into the pilothouse then, clipping his tether to the eyebolt before he shut the companionway hatch.

“I went over the charts. We’ve made good progress north, so we can make our easting now.”

“Thank God for that,” Kelly said.

Sailing at a right angle to the direction of the waves was a maddeningly rough course to hold. When they turned east and showed their stern quarter to the wind and the seas, it would be easier. With the wind coming from astern, the boat would ride level instead of heeling at a steep angle, and they would surf the waves instead of rolling in them.

“I’ll trim the sails if you correct the autopilot,” Dean said.

“What’s the new heading?”

She still had the bottle of modafinil in her hand and offered it to Dean, but he waved it off.

“Sixty-five degrees.”

Dean stood at the winches, and she dialed in the new course.
Freefall
banked to starboard, picking up speed as the wind moved aft of the beam, and Dean eased the sails out to catch the wind coming from astern. When the turn was complete and the sails were trimmed, she looked at the GPS and saw they’d gained another three knots.

“We’ll know in about five minutes whether that boat is following us,” Dean said.

She looked from the GPS to her husband.

“How’s that?”

“I mean if it matches our new course. Maybe it’ll keep heading north.”

They watched the radar, the beam rounding the screen as the antenna swept the horizon. The target held course for three minutes.

And then it turned.

Kelly felt her stomach sink, felt the skin on her arms break into bumps.

“It could mean anything,” Dean said. “Maybe it’s going to Puerto Williams and needed to make its easting, same as us. Or maybe the waves were getting too big for it to take on the beam and it decided to run off in front of the storm.”

“Or maybe it’s following us,” Kelly said.

Dean nodded. She knew he had to agree with her. The timing was too perfect to be a coincidence.

“We’ll know pretty soon,” Kelly said. “It picked up six knots on the new heading.”

“Maybe I’ll take one of those, after all.”

She handed him the pill bottle and watched him struggle with the cap. She’d never seen his hands tremble like that. Finally she took it from him and opened it.

* * *

They first saw it that afternoon. They were both in the pilothouse, which was colder now that they were running downwind. The wind and sometimes even spray could blow directly over the stern and through the broad opening from the aft cockpit. Kelly was bracing herself against the aluminum frame of the window, leaning against her safety tether, pressing the waterproof binoculars against her eyes. She knew that it was within visual range and that she’d only have to wait and watch along the direction of their wake. She’d see it when a moment finally came when the other boat and
Freefall
were riding the crests of waves at the same time.

That moment came but didn’t last long.

She felt the deck pitch underneath her as they began to surf on the face of the twenty-foot wave that was overtaking them from the stern. They rode with it a while, their foamy wake curving up its green face and disappearing past its peak, and then as their momentum slowed, the wave slipped farther up their hull until at last they were balanced for a moment at its crest. She put the binoculars tightly to her eyes, listening to the rush of churning water, and that was when she saw it.

At ten miles, it was too far away to tell its color. Or maybe it had no real color at all but had just been left to rot in the sea like so many other working boats in the far corners of the world. Green slime worked its way topside from the waterline, where it mixed with fish blood and rust cascading from the gunwales so that the meeting place in between was left an indeterminate ocher. But she could see it was a big fishing trawler. Its bridge deck sat high near the bow to leave room on the aft deck for working gear.

Then
Freefall
began its slow slide off the crest and down the back of the wave into the swirling trough, and the motion made her lose sight of the other boat. She scanned with the binoculars and saw nothing but water and sky, each so gray and dark and roiling that it was almost impossible to tell the one from the other. She gave up and turned to Dean.

“I saw it. Maybe an old trawler. In Alaska, I’d say it was a crab boat, but I don’t know if they have crab boats down here.”

“They might,” Dean said. “You’re sure it’s not a cruise ship or a research boat?”

She shook her head. “No way it’s a cruise ship. It’s a working boat. And it’s too dirty to be a research boat.”

“Radar track showed it coming right out of Adelaide,” Dean said. “So if it was fishing, it was doing it on the Antarctic shelf. That’s illegal.”

The Antarctic Treaty System allowed commercial fishing near the continent but not directly over the shelf, and so the boat out there had several strikes against it in Kelly’s mind. It
was following them. Its track led back to the same area from which Lena’s desperate last broadcast had come. It probably was violating international law. That last part bothered her the most. On the high seas, international law was good only if everyone followed it. There was no one to enforce it, no help to call.

Dean was standing next to her now, taking the binoculars from her gloved hand.

“See if I can get a look at her,” he said.

Kelly stepped deeper into the pilothouse to give him space to brace himself where she’d been. She watched him, feeling a catch in her chest and a tenderness when she saw him slip and stop himself by using the overhead grab rail, and she thought how well it had worked, this cruise of his. Their boat had been piercing through weather systems and island chains and years, and though she hadn’t realized it at first, from the start
Freefall
had pulled a thread behind that had sutured them together.

As Dean had said it would.

They’d been bleeding when they started, and then for a year they’d still been raw and red, but now, more than three years in, they were healed. Only the tiniest scars remained. She hadn’t credited him with many good ideas four years ago, when he’d started fitting out the boat. But she’d agreed to the trip because she hardly had a choice. He made it seem like there was an alternative, but she’d known that there was none, that the narrowing of options was a thing of her own doing. So she took it, knowing it was the only thing to take.

A year in, when they were sailing across the Pacific, with Panama two hundred miles off their stern, she’d woken to a morning of calm trade wind sailing. Schools of flying fish, startled loose from the bow wave, were skittering over the sea’s surface like flashes of shattered blue glass. Dean had handed her a cup of coffee and a bowl of fresh fruit, kissing her before going below. Just like that, easy. In that kiss was a taste of something she didn’t recognize until an hour into her morning watch, when she finally placed it. It was forgiveness.

That morning was the first stitch. The hundreds that followed did the rest to staunch the flow, but the first stitch was when she knew it would work, and she had been happy again since that morning.

Until the transmission.

Dean put down the binoculars and carefully went back to the chair at the helm station.

“You see it?” she asked.

“Yeah. You’re right. Workboat of some kind. Looks like a crabber, those lights across the bridge deck. I might’ve seen traps on the aft deck, but I don’t know.”

“It’s fast,” she said. Most of the big crab boats like the one following them couldn’t go much faster than fifteen knots in big seas. This one was pushing past twenty.

“If it’s going that fast, it’s probably empty,” Dean said. “The holds, I mean.”

“So they weren’t down there fishing?” she asked without looking at Dean. She was looking at the cockpit locker where they kept the fishing gear. There was a knife in there. A big one. But she wasn’t sure if she should take it out, at least not yet. Maybe the ship was nothing.

“Probably not fishing,” Dean said.

“I don’t like this,” Kelly said.

She was relieved to have finally said it after more than a day of hiding the thought. She had no patience for people who knew there was a problem but didn’t do anything until it was too late, people who blundered into danger because they were embarrassed to admit something was wrong. The girl who accepts a ride from a stranger on a snowy night, never mind the driver’s vacant face or the coil of baling wire on the backseat. She’d left that girl on the side of the road twenty-five years ago.

“It’ll be fine,” Dean said.

For the first time in three years she wanted to hit him.

“We don’t know it’ll be fine.”

“Look,” Dean said. “It’s just a fishing boat. That’s all it is. A ship passing us. How many times has that happened?”

“Never like this. Something’s wrong.”

“We don’t know that,” Dean said. “And the weather’s getting worse. This is the safest heading to hold and the fastest course to port.”

Dean was right about the weather, at least.

The wind was blowing over forty knots now. The waves were growing. They were cresting at twenty-five feet and would pass thirty in less than an hour with the wind working on them. These weren’t anything close to survival conditions, not for a boat like
Freefall,
but she wondered what they might see in twelve hours.

“We could use the engine,” Kelly said. The engine had been off since they’d raised the sails. “Get some extra speed and stay ahead of it until we reach port.”

Dean shook his head.

“We’re too low on fuel—we stayed out too long and had to dip into the engine fuel to run the heaters. And we’ll need the engine to work up the fjords to Puerto Williams or if something goes wrong.”

“Shit.”

She sat down in disgust. She hated him being right, but he was. She’d wanted to outrun the other boat so they never had to find out if she was right to fear it. They could get more speed by putting out more sail area, but with the weather system coming at them, any more sail than they were flying would be suicide. The boat could be overpowered in an instant by a strong gust, broaching up into the weather like a frightened horse trying to throw its rider. Or they could get
knocked down by the wind and the waves, and if that broke the standing rigging or bent the mast like a soda straw, all bets were off.

She took the binoculars from the bulkhead bin and went to look for the other boat again. But she didn’t need binoculars to see it. It was closing fast.

* * *

The crab boat slowed and matched their speed when it was a hundred yards astern of them. There were no men on deck, and the bridge windows were filthy with crusted salt and oily grime from the exhaust stacks. The port exhaust plume was dirty white; it had some kind of problem with that engine. Kelly couldn’t see whether there was anyone at the helm. Its name was painted at the bow, barely visible through the running stains of rust and marine growth.

La Araña.

Whatever that meant.

For fifteen minutes it followed them at that distance, close enough that even when they were down in the troughs between the waves, they could see its superstructure. With the wind coming from astern they could smell the greasy stench of its exhaust and hear the thrum of its diesels.

“It’s not passing us,” Kelly said.

“Want me to hail it on the VHF?” Dean picked up the mike, his thumb over the transmit button.

“To say what?”

“I’ll ask if they want to pass to port or to starboard. So we can get out of their way.”

“Okay.”

He keyed the mike and brought it to his lips.

“
La Araña, La Araña,
this is the sailing yacht
Freefall,
one hundred meters off your bow. Come in.”

Dean let his thumb off the button, and they both looked at the VHF where it was mounted in the instrument console. They sailed for a minute, long enough for three of the big waves to overtake
Freefall
from behind, and the radio was silent.

“Maybe they’re not scanning channel 16,” Dean said.

“Try 20.”

Dean switched the channel and repeated his transmission, and again they waited. Kelly watched the crab boat off their stern, watching the white wall of water pushed ahead of its bow. If anything, it was a little closer now.