‘Going to be dark soon,’ Tomlinson said, ruining the petty officer’s reverie. The boy just didn’t understand, but he was only a brand-new ensign. Perhaps he’d learn someday. They mostly did, and Oreza hoped that Tomlinson would learn from today’s lesson.
‘Not soon enough, sir.’
Oreza scanned the rest of the horizon briefly. The French-flagged freighter occupied perhaps a third of what he could see of the water’s surface. It was a towering hull, riding high on the surface and gleaming from a recent painting. Her crew knew nothing of what was going on. A new ship, the petty officer’s brain noted, and her bulbous bow made for a nice set of bow waves that the other boat was using to surf along.
The quickest and simplest solution was to pull the cutter up behind him on the starboard side of the freighter, then duck across the bow, and then blow the boat up … but … there was another way, a better way …
‘Now!’ Oreza turned the wheel perhaps ten degrees, sliding to port and gaining fully fifty yards seemingly in an instant. Then he reversed his rudder, leaped over another five-foot roller, and prepared to repeat the maneuver. One of the younger seamen hooted in sudden exhilaration.
‘You see, Mr Tomlinson? We have a better hull form for this sort of thing than he does. He can beat us by a whisker in flat seas, hut not in chop. This is what we’re made for.’ Two minutes had halved the distance between the boats.
‘You sure you want this race to end, Oreza?’ Ensign Tomlinson asked.
Not so dumb after all, is he? Well, he was an officer, and they were supposed to be smart once in a while.
‘All races end, sir. There’s always a winner and always a loser,’ Oreza pointed out, hoping that his friend would understand that, too. Portagee reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and lit it with his left hand while his right – just the fingertips, really – worked the wheel, making tiny adjustments as demanded by the part of his brain that read and reacted to every ripple on the surface. He’d told Tomlinson twenty minutes. He’d been pessimistic. Sooner than that, he was sure.
Oreza scanned the surface again. A lot of boats out, mostly heading in, not one of them recognizing the race for what it was. The cutter didn’t have her police lights blinking. Oreza didn’t like the things: they were an insult to his profession. When a cutter of the United States Coast Guard pulled alongside, you shouldn’t need police lights, he thought. Besides, this race was a private thing, seen and understood only by professionals, the way things ought to be, because spectators always degraded things, distracted the players from the game.
He was amidships on the freighter now, and Portagee had swallowed the bait… as he had to, Kelly thought. Damn but that guy was good. Another mile and he’d be alongside, reducing Kelly’s options to precisely zero, but he did have his plan now, seeing the ship’s bulbous bow, partly exposed. A crewman was looking down from the bridge, as on that first day with Pam, and his stomach became hollow for a moment, remembering. So long ago, so many things in between. Had he done right or wrong? Who would judge? Kelly shook his head. He’d let God do that. Kelly looked back for the first time in this race, measuring distance, and it was damnably close.
The forty-one boat was squatting back on her stem, pitched up perhaps fifteen degrees, her deep-displacement hull cutting through the choppy wake. She rocked left and right through a twenty-degree arc, her big down-rated marine diesels roaring in their special feline way. And it was all in Oreza’s hands, throttles and wheels at his skilled fingertips while his eyes scanned and measured. His prey was doing exactly the same, milking every single turn from his own engines, using his skill and experience. But his assets added up short of Portagee’s, and while that was too bad, that’s how things were.
Just then Oreza saw the man’s face, looking back for the first time.
It’s time, my friend. Come on, now, let’s end this honorably. Maybe you’ll get lucky and you’ll get out after a while and we can be friends again.
‘Come on, cut power and turn to starboard,’ Oreza said, hardly knowing he spoke, and each man of his crew was thinking exactly the same thing, glad to know that they and their skipper were reading things the same way. It had been only a half-hour race, but it was the sort of sea story they would remember for their whole careers.
The man’s head turned again. Oreza was barely half a ship-length back now. He could easily read the name on the transom, and there was no sense stringing it out to the last foot. That would spoil the race. It would show a meanness of spirit that didn’t belong on the sea. That was something done by yachtsmen, not professionals.
Then Kelly did something unexpected. Oreza saw it first, and his eyes measured the distance once, then twice, and a third time, and in every case the answer came up wrong, and he reached for his radio quickly.
‘Don’t try it!’ the petty officer shouted onto the ‘guard’ frequency.
‘What?’ Tomlinson asked quickly.
Don’t do it! Oreza’s mind shouted, suddenly alone in a tiny world, reading the other’s mind and revolting at the thought it held. This was no way for things to end. There was no honor in this.
Kelly eased his rudder right to catch the bow wave, his eyes watching the foaming forefoot of the freighter. When the moment was right, he put the rudder over. The radio squawked. It was Portagee’s voice, and Kelly smiled hearing it. What a good guy he was. Life would he so lonely without men such as he.
Springer lurched to starboard from the force of the radical turn, then even more from the small hill of water raised by the freighter’s bow. Kelly held on to the wheel with his left hand and reached with his right for the air tank around which he’d strung six weight belts, Jesus, he thought instantly as Springer went over ninety degrees, I didn’t check the depth. What if the water’s not deep enough – oh, God… oh, Pam …
The boat turned sharply to port. Oreza watched from only a hundred yards away, but the distance might as well have been a thousand miles for all the good it did, and his mind saw it before reality caught up: already heeling hard to the right from the turn, the cruiser rode up high on the curling bow-wave of the freighter and, crosswise to it, rolled completely over, her white hull instantly disappearing in the foaming forefoot of the cargo ship … It was no way for a seaman to die.
Forty-One-Bravo backed down hard, rocking violently with the passage of the ship’s wake as she came to a stop. The freighter stopped at once, too, but it took fully two miles, and by that time Oreza and his cutter were poking through the wreckage. Searchlights came on in the gathering darkness, and the eyes of the coastguardsmen were grim.
‘Coast Guard Forty-One, Coast Guard Forty-One, this is US Navy sailboat on your port beam, can we render assistance, over?’
‘We could use some extra eyes. Navy. Who’s aboard?’
‘Couple of admirals, the one talking’s an aviator, if that helps.’
‘Join in, sir.’ .
He was still alive. It was as much a surprise to Kelly as if would have been to Oreza. The water here was deep enough that he and the air tank had plummeted seventy feet to the bottom. He fought to strap the tank to his chest in the violent turbulence of the passing ship overhead. Then he fought to swim clear of the descending engines and heavy gear from what had seconds earlier been an expensive cruiser. Only after two or three minutes did he accept the fact that he’d survived this trial by ordeal. Looking back, he wondered just how crazy he’d been to risk this, but for once he’d felt the need to entrust his life to judgment superior to his own, prepared to take the consequences either way. And the judgment had spared him. Kelly could see the Coast Guard hull over to the east… and to the west the deeper shape of a sailboat, pray God the right one. Kelly disengaged four of the weight belts from the tank and swam towards it, awkwardly because he had it on backwards.
His head broke the surface behind the sailboat as it lay to, close enough to read the name. He went down again. It took another minute to come up on the west side of the twenty-six-footer.
‘Hello?’
‘Jesus – is that you?’ Maxwell called.
‘I think so.’ Well, not exactly. His hand reached up.