Authors: Donald Hamilton
While I didn’t really look forward to handling the boat alone, I was gaining confidence with practice, and I didn’t think it would be quite the suicide voyage she’d described; she was just another old salt trying to scare the pants off a gullible landlubber. And quite apart from any tricks she might pull, I wasn’t anxious to share with this overpowering lady the cramped cabin of a twenty-eight-foot boat, particularly not this twenty-eight-foot boat, which carried strong memories of a girl I’d really liked.
But that was also irrelevant. This was what we’d been waiting for. I’d been sent here for bait, hadn’t I? I’d been sent to draw Minister, or his employers, out of hiding; and here was the top lady of the PNP kindly offering herself as deckhand and dishwasher. I drew a long breath.
“If you’re such a hotshot sailor, I suppose you can get us out of here in the dark,” I said.
“Why ever not? The harbor is lighted like a football stadium. Once we’re out of the land cut, all we do is head for the flashing buoy, leave it to starboard, and we’re free and clear, next checkpoint Great Stirrup Light at the north end of the Berry Islands, sixty nautical miles away. That’s assuming you do want to head for Nassau.” When I nodded, Mrs. Williston said, “Just give me a minute to stow my gear and change my clothes. You can get the sail cover off the forestaysail while you’re waiting…”
It was an overcast night, but the moon was lurking behind the thin clouds. We didn’t make very good progress across the Northwest Providence Channel because the lady was a sailing nut and didn’t believe the internal combustion engine was here to stay. Personally, in those light winds, I’d simply have fired up the diesel again—she’d turned it off after we’d cleared the buoy and set the sails—but she wasn’t having any of that. Instead she wanted more canvas. Well, Dacron.
I hadn’t paid much attention to just what sails had come with the boat, figuring I’d first master the basic threesome of mainsail, forestaysail, and jib; and probably, aided and abetted by the two-cylinder Yanmar, they’d do everything I needed done. Now we scrabbled around in the forepeak and found a couple of storm sails and a spinnaker—thank God the wind was in the wrong direction for that monstrous kite—and finally, hooray, a jib almost twice the size of the one already up. That one she called a jib topsail and didn’t think much of. This beautiful new discovery was a Genoa jib, affectionately known as Jenny.
Next, working under the spreader lights with darkness all around us, steering by autopilot with
Spindrift
pitching gently in the slow swells of the channel, we had to haul the big sail onto the foredeck and crawl out onto the precarious bowsprit—my job—to slide the smaller jib, flapping wildly, out of the slot of the roller-furling apparatus and slide in its giant replacement instead. Also flapping wildly, despite the light airs. It took half an hour to get the big sail up and organized to Mrs. Williston’s satisfaction; and she thought I was a pretty piss-poor sailor not to have worked out the proper locations for the strings and pulleys—excuse me, lines and blocks—ahead of time.
Finally we had to tidy up the foredeck and bring down the little forestaysail and furl it neatly again, because, she said after careful study, it was too small to pull worth a damn under these conditions and it disturbed the wind for Jenny. Then back to the cockpit, where she turned out the blinding decklights and disengaged the Tiller Master. Taking the helm herself, she had me crank in a bit on this winch and ease that sheet a touch—it took fifteen minutes more before she pronounced herself satisfied with all adjustments.
It’s the great sailboat fallacy, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a pleasant way of getting around on the water, it’s nice and quiet, and the wind is free although the sails damn well aren’t; but fast it isn’t, so why not just relax and glide along at three knots instead of beating your brains out to make three and a quarter? Hell, if this dame really wanted an extra knot or two, all she had to do was turn the Yanmar key instead of working my tail off.
Then I decided that this was the wrong attitude. After all, it was a useful educational experience for me, watching a real sailing expert at work; and if she felt compelled to treat a casual passage to Nassau as if it were the critical competitive event of the Southern Ocean Racing Conference, who was I to spoil her fun?
Having been exposed to a couple of her high-fashion shore-going costumes, I’d expected her to produce something equally tricky to sail in, but she’d fooled me. A pair of dirty white boat shoes with the usual death-grip soles, a pair of well-washed white jeans with old paint stains on them, and an old gray sweat shirt, the kind with a hood, was the uniform of the day, or night. Satisfied with the sail trim at last, she spoke without looking away from the luff of the ghostly mainsail barely visible in the night. “Three-hour watches, I think, don’t you? I’ll take her until oh one hundred. You’d better go below and get some rest.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, Helm…”
“Yes?”
“How the hell did you and that child ever manage to get this boat all the way across the Gulf Stream? It’s people like you who keep the Coast Guard busy, blundering out on the water without knowing a damn thing about what you’re doing.”
As I’ve said, you find them in every sport. The next time you reach the top of Everest, there’ll be a mountaineering expert waiting to tell you sternly that you should be banned from the cliffs and slopes because you used the wrong color rope and didn’t hammer in your pitons with the proper stylish stroke.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “But we did get where we wanted to go, didn’t we? And it’s people like you who keep the undertakers busy, talking big about slitting people’s throats—to a man in my line of work! I hope you realize that, having said it, you’re dead if you come anywhere near my bunk after I turn in.”
There was a little silence, broken by the rhythmic surging sound of the bow wave as the big Genoa pulled us along as best it could with the wind we had. “Oh, dear!” said Mrs. Williston at last, very softly. “Oh, dear, that was a stupid thing for me to say, wasn’t it? I assure you, it was just a manner of speaking. I really have no designs on your life.”
“You’ll excuse me if I don’t take your word for that,” I said. “If you’re not here to kill me, sooner or later, or at least put me out of commission somehow, what are you here for? The warning still goes. Don’t make any moves that can be misinterpreted, Mrs. Williston, or feed me any funny-tasting foods, please. I can be a very sudden guy when I have to, or just think I have to.”
She said, “Yes, you warned the little girl, too, didn’t you? Or threatened her. Are you a very careful man who doesn’t want any unfortunate misunderstandings? Or are you just a big blowhard who likes to intimidate helpless women, Mr. Helm?” Then she laughed softly. “All right. Get your rest. I won’t come below at all. That’s a promise.”
I hesitated. “It might be kind of hard to keep, on a long watch.”
She laughed again, more heartily. “My dear man, there’s a bucket in the cockpit locker; and it won’t be the first time I’ve squatted on deck. Go to sleep.”
The cabin of a boat under way, even a sailing vessel under sail in light airs, is a noisy place full of creakings and gurglings and splashings. As I lay in my bunk drowsily, I heard the ratchety sound of a winch aft as Mrs. Williston cranked in the Genoa sheet slightly. A pan in the galley clanked metallically against something at the end of each roll. Somewhere above me on deck an unidentified piece of gear was going tick-tock against the mast… and I found myself thinking of a smallish girl with pale straight hair and blue-gray eyes and shy little breasts of surpassing loveliness, and I was teaching her, in my gentle and expert fashion, that, she really wasn’t significantly aberrant; in fact, with the right approach she could respond quite normally and adequately, even passionately, to the skillful ministrations of a wonderful, understanding, virile partner like me…
A clattering crash inside the cabin shocked me awake. I sat up, grabbing the shotgun I’d removed from its locker to save Mrs. Williston from temptation. Something was rolling and rattling around on the cabin floor: a plastic bucket.
“Helm, wake up!” It was a sharp whisper from the cockpit. “Damn you, get up here, we’ve got company!” I scrambled aft without bothering with my shoes, all I’d taken off to sleep. I climbed the companionway ladder cautiously, until I could see Mrs. Williston through the open hatch.
“God, I could have cut your throat a dozen times, the way you were sleeping! And I didn’t want to leave the tiller and tip them off I’d spotted them. Or get shot trying to shake you awake.”
“Where?”
“Port quarter. They’re running dark, and they’re hanging well back now; but they slipped and got too close a few minutes ago and the stern light caught them on the roll. One of the big fast macho jobs. Donzi, Cigarette, Magnum, you name it. I can’t keep those damn thunderboats straight. Around thirty feet. Fifty to sixty knots, probably. Maybe more. We sure as hell can’t outrun them with fifteen lousy horsepower, which is about what you’ve got down there, isn’t it?”
“Right on,” I said. “Any idea who’s out there?”
She looked at me sharply in the glow of the instruments. “No friends of mine, if that’s what you’re thinking. If they were, I’d have let them take you asleep, wouldn’t I? Instead of heaving a bucket at you.” She threw a glance over her left shoulder. “They can’t just be tracking us to see where we go, that’s no mystery. On this course it’s got to be either the Berry Islands, or Nassau farther on. So they’ll probably move in on us as soon as those ships get well over the horizon. Just in case we get on the horn or let off a distress flare or something.”
She indicated two clusters of lights, like floating hotels, far off to port. Looking that way, I caught a glimpse of a shadowy boat shape, low and rakish, much closer and farther aft. Black or some very dark color, it was almost invisible in the night; I guess it was the gleam of the water curling off the predatory bow that had drawn my eyes to it.
“Maybe you’d better get on the radio,” Mrs. Williston said. “It’s hardly a job for Bahamas Air Search and Rescue, known as BASRA, I don’t think they have any law-enforcement facilities, but maybe there’s some kind of a government vessel cruising around here within VHF range, looking for pot smugglers or something.”
I said, “Even if there is, it’ll be too late getting here; those boys aren’t going to hang around back there very long, knowing that sooner or later the moon will break through and spoil their surprise by showing them to us. Anyway, I don’t think I want to bother the Bahamian authorities.” I frowned. “Have you ever been shot at, Mrs. Williston?”
“No, and I don’t want to be.”
I said, “Who gets a choice? At least being shot at is better than being shot. How’s your nerve?”
“Mister, I’m a big brown chicken. Guns scare me shitless.”
“Sure. Well, we can wash out your pants afterward, if that’s the only problem; and how is it we keep having these excremental discussions, anyway?”
She laughed shortly. “All right, tell me what to do.”
I found myself liking the woman better. To be sure, she’d been infuriatingly dictatorial as long as we were dealing with her specialty, sailing; but apparently she was willing to take orders from me on the subject of my specialty, violence. Furthermore, only the good ones tell you what stinking yellow cowards they are. It’s when they start telling you how brave they are that you’ve got to watch them.
I said, “Just steer the boat and behave naturally. Act shocked and scared and yell for me when they close in; scream at me to snap out of my drunken stupor and come save you from these terrible pirates. And drop into the bottom of the cockpit and stay there when the gunfire starts. That’s important. Don’t go rushing around. I’ve got to know where I have you so I know where I can shoot and where I can’t.”
She licked her lips. “Where will you be?”
“You’ll see. Can you stay on course without the compass lights? Or any lights?”
“Hell, I’m steering by the wind, anyway. Yes, I can hold her steady. Helm…”
“Yes?”
“I hope you shoot as mean as you talk.”
“Lady, that makes two of us.”
I ducked back down into the cabin, fell over the bucket and set it aside, put on my shoes, and found a coil of rope up forward and hacked off several lengths with my pocketknife, probably ruining an essential piece of boat equipment, but to hell with it. Working in the darkness alleviated by the leakage of the instrument lights aft, and the glow of the masthead navigation light spilling through the Plexiglas hatch overhead, I used one piece to rig a sling for the shotgun and strung the others on my belt. I moved into the galley and filled my pants pockets with shells: buckshot to starboard, solid slug loads to port. Pistol ammunition aft, in the hip pocket; although it didn’t look like a good spot for a .38 bellygun with a two-inch barrel. I checked the little gun in its waistband holster and slung the big gun across my back and moved aft.
“Ready?” I whispered.
Her voice came down the hatch. “They’re still hanging back. Ready any time you are. As ready as I’ll ever be.”
“Here goes nothing.”
I hit the boat’s main switch, cutting all the electricity on board. That left us in darkness except for the vague luminosity of the moonlight filtering through the thin clouds. I hauled myself out the main hatch and ran forward and went up the mast like a scared monkey—more scared because I hate high places. I thanked God for the mast steps since I’m not much for shinnying up slick aluminum poles with seven pounds of shotgun on my back, not to mention the pistol and all the ammo.
Some fancy boats have two or more sets of spreaders to provide the proper angles for the shrouds supporting the mast, but
Spindrift
’s was a bread-and-butter rig with only one pair. I pulled myself up there and used one of the rope lengths from my belt to tie myself to the mast, forcing the rope through the slot between the taut mainsail and its track and running it over one of the mast steps as well, hoping it would hold if my whole weight should hit it.