Close Reach
Close Reach
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Hydra eBook Original
Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan S. Moore
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.
eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39094-0
Cover design and illustration: © David G. Stevenson
Illustration of the
S/V Freefall
: Robert Perry, Robert H. Perry Yacht Designers LLC
v3.1
This is for Maria Wang, Jon Wilson, and Nathaniel Boyer. I’d sail anywhere with the three of you.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Dead Reckoning
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part Two: Deception Island
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Part Three: The Flensing; the Harvest
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Part One
Dead Reckoning
The timer above the narrow pilot berth started buzzing at 2:50 a.m., but Kelly had been awake at least an hour, thinking about the last radio call. The signal had come the morning before, while they were still anchored off the Antarctic Peninsula’s Adelaide Island. She’d been making breakfast before they weighed anchor, when the voice of a young British woman came blasting out of the ether and into the bulkhead-mounted VHF.
It’s coming
, this girl had screamed.
It saw us and it’s coming back! Oh, God, Jim, hurry, please hurry!
And then her voice cut off.
What replaced her was more terrifying than her words. At first it was like someone had touched an arcing high-voltage wire to the British girl’s transmitter. But that sharp crackle had faded in a few seconds and was replaced by music. Not any kind of music Kelly listened to, but she thought she knew what it was called. Death metal. Or maybe black metal. Heavily distorted, pounding guitars. A singer screaming guttural lyrics that might not have been words at all. The music had gone on and on, with Kelly frozen in front of the stove, waiting for the girl’s voice to come back. Dean was on deck rigging the sails but ducked his head into the companionway. He’d heard everything on the VHF repeater in the cockpit.
“What’s going on?”
The VHF was set to monitor emergency channel 16. Kelly had put down the spatula, wiping her hands dry on the front of her polar fleece sweater as she stepped to the navigation station. She switched the VHF to channel 9, the backup emergency channel, but the music was there, too. Then she’d tried scanning all the channels up to 86.
The deafening music was on every VHF channel.
She looked at Dean, and he pointed silently at the single-sideband radio. She powered up the long-range SSB and ran through the frequencies from 2 megahertz to 26 megahertz. It was the same there. The terrible music was distorted on the extremely long-range frequencies at the high end of the SSB spectrum, but it was there.
“That’s impossible,” she said.
“Turn it off,” Dean said. “And get the engine started.”
He shut the hatch doors, and she heard his footfalls overhead as he went to the bow. In a moment she heard the electric whine of the windlass and the steady clink of anchor chain feeding into the forward locker.
* * *
They’d checked the radio thirty minutes later as they were motoring out of the lee of the island. The music had given way to a full spectrum of static and silence on the short-range VHF. On the SSB they picked up the usual chatter of faraway yachts. They listened to cruisers discussing the weather in the Marquesas and Galápagos, another pair of yachts arranging a rendezvous at coordinates that might have been the Minerva Reefs, off New Zealand. There was no interference and no music. This far south, there was no help to call on the SSB. Dean tried calling out on the short-range VHF, hoping to hail a nearby ship or the girl who’d cried out earlier.
But the only reply was silence and then static when Kelly turned down the radio’s squelch.
They looked at each other and at the glowing face of the radio panel, and Kelly knew there was nothing else they could do.
* * *
They set the storm staysail and tied a third reef into the mainsail before they broke out of the shelter of the island and into the open wind. Then they pointed the bow north, into the Drake Passage.
North, toward home.
* * *
Kelly hadn’t thought much of home in thirty-nine months of sailing, but now she wanted to be there badly. She lay in her bunk, listening to the buzzing alarm and wanting nothing more than to be back in Mystic under the covers of their bed in their house overlooking the harbor. To have this passage, and the eight thousand miles after it, finished. To have the
S/V Freefall
tied to her own dock, the miles a memory under her keel instead of a threat.
She thought of the young woman’s voice again, the terrible music that had drowned her.
It’s coming
, she’d cried before the electronic tide carried her away.
Freefall
was rolling in a heavy cross sea. Each wave tossed Kelly against the bunk’s lee cloth as the big yacht slipped sideways up the face of the swell. Then, as the boat fell down the back side of the receding wall of water, she slipped the other way across the narrow mattress until she banged against the padded hull liner. She could hear them out there—big, rolling ocean waves. They’d be frothy on top where the crests were breaking in the wind.
Kelly switched the alarm off and crawled out of the bunk. The pilot berth was just behind the companionway steps and aft of the galley. She went to the stove, hands moving along the overhead grab rails. She lit the gimbaled burner under the teakettle and then went to the hanging locker for her foul weather gear. The jacket and bib overalls were still wet and salt-crusted from her last watch four hours earlier. She pulled them on slowly to keep her balance in the rolling cabin and then put on her insulated sea boots.
When she was dressed, the kettle was whistling.
She poured the boiling water into a thermos and dropped in a tea bag and a packet of sugar. Then she slipped on her hat and waterproof gloves, put the thermos in the deep pocket of her jacket, and climbed the companionway steps to the pilothouse.
Dean was there to give her a hand when she opened the hatch doors and climbed into the semiopen pilothouse.
“I was gonna let you sleep another hour,” he said.
“You shouldn’t do that. Anyway, I was up.”
She turned and shut the hatch doors, sealing the heat in the cabin below. Then she sat in the pedestal chair across from Dean. The pilothouse was enclosed in aluminum and glass on three sides but was open to the stern, where the helmsman could stand behind the huge wheel and have an unobstructed view of the sails. Right now the boat was steering itself with the autopilot, with the wheel spinning by the force of an invisible hand. It was three in the morning, but the sun was up. They were below 62 degrees south latitude in the middle of an Antarctic summer. The sun hadn’t set for a week. Their wake trailed back across the steep faces of the waves, twin white trails of bubbles from their dual rudders. Kelly glanced at the instrument panel in front of Dean. The knot log showed fourteen and a half knots.
“What’s the weather been doing?” she asked.
“Wind’s been steady out of the northwest. Thirty knots. But the pressure’s dropping.”
She looked at the digital barometer readout: 980 millibars. It had been 985 when she’d
finished her last watch.
“We’ll see sixty knots before we reach the cape, I bet,” Dean said.
“What about the radio?”
They looked at each other for a moment, then Dean turned away and looked through the pilothouse windows. The bright orange storm staysail was iron-tight in the stiff wind.
“Nothing on the radio. Just static if you turn up the squelch.”
“On 16, or did you try all the channels?”
“I scanned everything on VHF. It’s quiet.”
She thought about that for a while, watching the waves hit the port side of the
Freefall
’s bow, the spray flying off to leeward with the wind in long green and white flumes.
“If we heard her on the VHF, she couldn’t have been more than fifty miles from us.”
“Probably more like five or ten,” Dean said.
She looked at him, and he shrugged. He pulled off his heavy fleece hat and ran the back of his gloved hand along the stubble of his cheek. The skin beneath his eyes was weighted and dark, and it wasn’t just the four-hour watch on a rough sea. Dean looked at the chart table and then back at Kelly, and when he spoke, his voice was measured and low.
“VHF is mostly line of sight. But we were right next to Adelaide. Think of the ice and cliffs. Unless her antenna was on top of a five-hundred-foot hill, she must’ve been pretty close,” he said.
“Jesus. Any idea who it might’ve been?”
It wasn’t a complete shot in the dark. Not many cruising yachts left the comfort of the tropics. The ones venturing south of forty-five degrees were closely knit. They knew boats on the radio nets and boats they’d met in ports working their way down the Chilean coast.
“I don’t know,” Dean said. “I looked through my log, going back six months, just to see. Four months ago, when we did the haul-out in Callao, I met a British guy in the boatyard. James something. Or Jim. He was going south. He had a girl with him. Like a backpacker he’d picked up somewhere north, maybe Costa Rica. Was bringing her as crew.”