Hurricane (11 page)

“
You came awful fast,” Julie nodded her head toward the speedboat.

“
I was worried,” he said. “I thought something might have happened to you.”

“
No.” She decided not to question him further. “We just wanted to be alone for a few days. We’ll be back in the yacht club by day after tomorrow,” she lied.

“
I’m really sorry about what happened.” He sounded pure Trini now and she had a feeling that by dropping the false accent he was reveling a part of his true self.

“
Are you all right?” she asked.

“
I’m fine.”

“
You look…” She paused for a second, searching for the right word. “Devastated.”

“
It’s how I feel. We all loved you guys. Your loss is our loss.” He seemed so sincere, but Julie thought the only love he had for Hideo and her was their money.

“
It’s hard to accept,” Julie said, starting to revise her opinion about him. Victor was shaking and she sensed that he was about to come apart.

“
In the five years that I’ve been in business I’ve never made friends with a customer, not till Hideo. I loved that man like my father.”

Julie thought of the long arguments the two of them got into almost every night. She knew that both men enjoyed the verbal fencing or they wouldn’t have kept it up for the last three years. They disagreed about everything. Politics, religion, technology and most of all the price of yacht repairs at Drake’s. That was why TYS got half their business, and that was the source of some of their most heated arguments.

A light wave rocked the boat. He steadied himself by holding on to a shroud. Then he said, “You’re going away, aren’t you?”

“
Yes,” Julie said.

“
You don’t have to go.”

“
Yes we do. If we stay we lose the boat. TYS has a lean against it. Apparently Hideo owed Dieter money that I didn’t know about.”

“
Maybe he didn’t. It would be just like him to phony something up, it wouldn’t be the first time he took advantage of a situation. You should stay and fight. I’ll help.”

“
You know how it works. They’ll impound the boat. Justice is slow here. The boat could be on the hard for over a year, maybe two. I can’t take the chance.”

“
Can the two of you sail it? I could at least help you with that.”

“
It’s wonderful of you to offer, but it’s something we have to do by ourselves.”

“
It is not,” he said, and Julie heard a spark in his voice that she’d never heard before. “You aren’t very experienced and I happen to know that Meiko has never sailed a day in her life.”

“
We got the boat here,” she said, her eyebrows arching. The wind started to pick up.

“
It’s one thing to motor ten miles and set anchor and quite another to sail all night to Grenada. The two of you will never make it, not with this boat, so let me help.”

“
What’s wrong with this boat?” Julie had to fight to keep from stamping her foot.

“
Not a damn thing, but it’s too big for someone who’s as inexperienced as you. Look, let me help. I’ll not only see that you get to Grenada safely, I’ll show you guys how to sail this thing in the process. You need my help and I’m offering, so take it.”

“
We accept,” Meiko said.

Julie slapped her with a look, but Meiko ignored her and she finally surrendered, “Okay, you win. And thanks.” Now that it was decided she was secretly grateful for his help.

“
When were you planning on leaving?” he asked.

“
We’ve already checked out. We were going to leave at first light.”

“
I’ll tie Speed Demon to the old pier. We’ll leave right away.”

“
Aren’t you afraid someone might steal it?” Meiko asked.

“
Steal from me? Nobody would dare.” Julie was again struck by the contradictions in the man. So nice and so arrogant, like his sister.

“
I’ll follow you to the pier,” Julie said.

“
I can do it,” Meiko said.

Julie looked at her daughter and caught the small smile and the slight way she was shifting back and forth.

“
Okay, darling,” she said, and she watched as Victor climbed back into his boat, and Meiko slipped over the side and into the dinghy. The rumbling of Speed Demon’s inboard covered the sound of the dinghy’s small outboard, but it didn’t cover the way Meiko stared at Victor. She was in love, Julie knew it and she wondered how long it would take Meiko to figure it out, and what Victor would do about it.

Back on the boat, Victor was a whirlwind. He laid the chart out on the nav table and spent a few minutes explaining how to chart your position using lines of longitude and latitude. He showed them how the GPS worked, a wonderful instrument that used satellite information to tell them not only where they where, but what course to steer to get where they were going, and how far away their destination was.

“
But then you don’t need a compass,” Meiko said.

“
What if the GPS fails? You should still know how to navigate by the stars, with a sextant, and of course you should always be able to find your way around with a compass.” His British accent was back, and he was being condescending, but Julie just nodded her head along with her daughter.

An hour later they hauled anchor by moonlight and Victor steered the boat out through Boca Grande and into the churning sea. “It’ll be a little rough for the first fifteen minutes or so,” he said, “but after we’re away from the land it should calm down.”

Julie thought she was going to be sick. The boat was rocking and jumping as Victor raised the main, and it heeled over to port when he unfurled the jib. The sounds of the wind in the flogging sails, the big American flag flapping overhead, the waves slapping the boat, the banging halyards all combined to terrify her. Her queasy stomach was about to give up her late lunch when the sea calmed as Victor promised it would. The halyards stopped clanging and the wind magically filled the sails and the boat slid through the water the way an ice dancer glides over the ice.

“
It’s wonderful,” Meiko said.

But Julie still felt ill. The best thing to do would be to throw up over the side, but she didn’t want Victor to see her being sick.

“
I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, and she started to go below.

“
Be careful,” Victor said as Julie went down the hatch. It was a challenge with the boat heeled over and she found that being below was worse than being on deck. Her eyes told her the floor was down but the her mind and body told her differently. Up and down were out of kilter. She grabbed onto the salon table to make her way to the bathroom, when she noticed both bilge pump lights glaring at her from the electrical panel.

They only glowed red when they were pumping water, and they only pumped water when there was a leak.

“
Help!” she yelled, still holding on to the salon table for support, all traces of her seasickness gone.

“
What?” Meiko stuck her head down the hatch.

“
Get Victor.”

A few seconds later Victor came below. He saw the lights on the panel straightaway. “We have to find the leak,” he said, and he started pulling up the floor hatches in the salon. Water was rushing under them, coming from the stern and flowing down into the deepest part of the engine bilge, where the two pumps were pumping it back out into the ocean.

“
It’s too much water,” he said, “we have to stop it.” He opened the door to the aft generator compartment and crawled in under the cockpit. “Hand me a torch,” he called out and Julie got the flashlight and passed it back to him.

“
How bad is it?” she asked.

“
Water is pouring in all around the rudder post. We can’t stop it from above,” he said.

“
Does that mean we’re going to sink?” she asked, as he crawled back out.

“
If we don’t stop the leak.”

“
How can we do that?”

“
Do you have any packing material?”

“
I don’t even know what it is.”

“
Then you probably don’t. We can probably use rags instead. The rudder post is in a tube that comes up through the boat. The tube is welded onto an aluminum plate that’s bolted to the fiberglass hull. Someone has drilled through the plate and water’s leaking in. We can cram rags up the tube and slow down or temporarily stop the leak, but first we have to stop the boat.”

“
Someone did this on purpose?” Julie asked.

“
Let’s stop the boat first, then we’ll talk about it.”

“
Okay,” Julie said.

“
What we’re going to do,” he told the two women, “is called heaving-to. We’re going to sheet in the main as tightly as possible and then we’re going to backwind the jib.”

“
Won’t that make the boat heel over in the opposite direction and push us around in a circle?” Meiko asked.

“
Not really,” Victor answered. “The sheeted in main and the keel will try to force the boat to go one way, the backwinded jib will try to force it to go in the opposite direction. The result will be that we won’t go anywhere at all. We’ll just sit here.” And in five minutes time they were sitting calmly, bobbing along in the four foot seas.

“
Wow, this is great,” Meiko said. The boat was perfectly balanced and there wasn’t a cloud in the star-filled sky.

“
Yes, it’s nice,” Julie said. “Now what do we do about the leak?” She wanted to ask who would do such a thing, but Victor wouldn’t know any more than she would, and besides, stopping the flow of water was the most important thing right now.

“
Let’s go below and check,” Victor said. They followed him below and once again he took the flashlight and crawled into the generator room under the cockpit.

“
Is it still leaking?” Julie called in after him.

“
A little,” he said, “but not as bad as when we were sailing, We have to stop it and I can’t do it from in here.” He came back out. “If we were at the dock it would be simple, but we’re not. Someone has to go down there and jam some rags up that tube.”

“
You’re not serious?” Meiko said. “We’re in the middle of the ocean.”

“
We’ll lose the boat otherwise.”

“
We’ll lose more than the boat,” Julie said.

“
No,” Victor said. “We can call for help on the SSB. We’re only an hour out of Trinidad. We’re pleasantly hove-to, all we have to do is sit here and wait for help to arrive.”

“
SSB?” Meiko said.

“
Single sideband radio,” Victor said.

“
Not so simple,” Julie said. “We don’t have an SSB.”

“
Sure you do, just above the VHF, in the nav station.”

“
No SSB,” Julie said.

“
I’m seeing it from here.” The British accent was gone. Victor was pure Trini now.

“
That’s the control head, it connects to the radio via a fiber optic cable.”

“
So?” Victor said. The muscles on his neck started bulging and his Adam’s apple started bobbing.

“
The radio was damaged during shipping. We didn’t find out till after it was installed. Hideo sent it back just before he left. We should be getting a new one any day now,” Julie said.

“
That’s not going to do us any good,” Victor said.

“
But the radio works, Mom. I’ve seen you talking on it,” Meiko said.

“
That’s the VHF, it’s used for short distances. For long range you need an SSB.”

“
Oh,” Meiko said.

“
Which means that we are in deep trouble,” Victor said. “We should think about getting out the life raft.”

“
You can’t be serious?” Julie said.

“
If we don’t get help in the next couple of hours the boat’s going to sink. Those bilge pumps are handling the water now, but if we try to sail the extra pressure will overpower them. We’re stuck, the life raft is our only way.”

“
The current will take us half way into the Atlantic before anyone even knows we’re missing,” Julie said.

“
Do you have any better ideas?” Victor asked.

“
We could just wait here. You said if we don’t sail the pumps will keep the water out. We’re in a major shipping channel. Someone will see us in the morning and we can call them on the VHF.”

“
That same current that would take the life raft out into the Atlantic will take Fallen Angel as well,” Victor said. He seemed to be a little more together than he’d been in the last few minutes. For a second or two Julie thought that he might be afraid, but that didn’t make sense, not Victor Drake.

“
Every half hour or so we could turn the engines on and motor against the current. That would keep us in the shipping lanes, wouldn’t it?”

“
Yeah, that would work,” Victor said.

“
Won’t they tow us back to Trinidad?” Meiko asked. “You’d lose the boat anyway.”

“
But we won’t lose our lives,” Victor said.

“
We’re not going to lose the boat either,” Julie said, “There is no way we’re going to let some creep sink us.” And for a second she thought about the intruder, then she said, “We’ll just have to fix the leak and get on to Grenada.”

“
We can’t go down there,” Victor said.