Miraculously, the sea anchor was not torn away. It did its duty and exerted its drag, preventing the sea gone berserk from capsizing the boat and throwing everyone into the murderous waters from which there was no return. The gray waves curled down upon them, filling the boat's interior with churning foam, soaking them all to the skin, but tending to pull the center of gravity deeper in the water, giving an extra fraction of stability. The twisting motion and the choppy rise and fall of the boat whirled their cargo of seawater around their bodies, making them feel they were being whipped inside a juice blender.
In a way, the size of the tiny craft was a blessing. The neoprene tubes around the sides made it as buoyant as a cork. No matter how violent the tempest, the durable hull would not burst into pieces, and if the sea anchor held, it would not capsize. Like the palms that leaned in the wind from gale-force winds, it would endure. The next twenty-four minutes passed like twenty-four hours, and as they hung on grimly to stay alive, Pitt found it hard to believe the storm had not overwhelmed them. There was no word, no description for the misery.
The never-ending walls of water poured into the boat, leaving the three of them choking and gasping until the boat was thrust up and onto the crest of the next swell. There was no need for bailing. The weight of the water filling the interior helped keep them from capsizing. One second they were struggling to keep from floating over the sides of the tubes, the following second preparing for the next frenzied motion, as they fell into a trough, to keep from being slung into the air.
With Maeve between them, each with one arm-protectively draped over her body, Pitt and Giordino braced their feet against the sides for support. If one of them was thrown froth the boat, there could be no chance of rescue. No soul could survive alone in the writhing sea. The downpour cut visibility to a few meters, and they would quickly be lost to view.
During a flash of lightning, Pitt looked over at Maeve. She looked convinced that she had been dropped into hell and must have been suffering the torment of the damned from seasickness. Pitt wished he could have consoled her with words, but she could never have heard him over the howl of the wind.
He cursed the name of Dorsett. God, how terrible it was to have a father and sisters who hated her enough to steal away her children and then try to murder her because she was good and kind and refused to be a part of their criminal acts. It was horribly wrong and unfair. She could not die, he told himself, not as long as he still lived. He gripped her shoulder and gave it an affectionate squeeze. Then he stared at Giordino.
Giordino's expression was stoic. His apparent nonchalance under such hell reassured Pitt. Whatever will be, will be, was written in his eyes. There was no limit to the man's endurance. Pitt knew that Giordino would push himself beyond the depths of understanding, even die, long before he would let loose his grip on the boat and Maeve. He would never surrender to the sea.
Giordino's friend of thirty years looked as though he could go on forever. Giordino ceased to be amazed by Pitt's fortitude and love for adversity. Pitt thrived on disaster and calamity. Oblivious to the frenzied pounding by the swells, he did not look like a man waiting for the end, a man who felt there was nothing he could do against the furies of the sea. His eyes gazed into the sheets of rain and froth that lashed his face, strangely remote. Almost as if he were sitting high and dry in his hangar apartment, his mind seemed concentrated elsewhere, disembodied and in a vacuum. Pitt was, Giordino had thought on more than one occasion while they were in or under the sea, a man utterly at home in his own element.
Almost as if their minds worked together simultaneously, Giordino looked to see how Pitt was faring.
There were two kinds of men, he thought. There were those who saw the devil waiting for their soul and were deathly afraid of him. And there were those who mired themselves in hopelessness and looked upon him as a relief from their worldly misery. Pitt was of neither kind. He could stare at the devil and spit in his eye.
Darkness came and passed, a night of torment that never seemed to end. They were numbed by the cold and constantly soaked. The chill cut through their flesh like a thousand knives. Dawn was a deliverance from hearing the waves roar and break without seeing them. With a sunrise shrouded by the convulsive clouds, they still grimly hung onto life by the barest of threads. They longed for daylight, but it finally came in a strange gray light that illuminated the terrible sea like an old black-and-white motion picture.
Despite the savagery of the turbulence, the atmosphere was hot and oppressive, a salty blanket that was too thick to breathe. The passage of time had no relation to the dials of their wristwatches. Pitt's old Doxa and Giordino's newer Aqualand Pro were watertight to two hundred meters deep and kept on ticking, but saltwater had seeped into Maeve's little digital watch and it soon stopped.
Not long after the sea went on its rampage, Maeve buried her head against the bottom of a flotation tube and prayed that she might live to see her boys again prayed that she would not die without giving them fond memories of her, not some vague recollection that she was lost and buried in an uncaring sea.
She agonized over their fate in the hands of her father. At first she had been more frightened than at any other moment in her life, the fear like a cold avalanche of snow that smothered her. Then gradually it began to subside as she realized the arms of the men about her back and shoulders never let up their pressure. Their self-control seemed extraordinary, and their strength seemed to flow inside her. With men such as these protecting her, a spark grew and nurtured the imperceptible but growing belief that she just might still be alive to see another dawn.
Pitt was not nearly so optimistic. He was well aware that his and Giordino's energy was waning. Their worst enemies were the unseen threats of hypothermia and fatigue. Something had to give, their tenacity or the storm's violence. The constant effort to keep from drowning had taken all they had to give. The fight had been against all odds, and total exhaustion was just around the comer. And yet, he refused to see the futility of it all. He clung to life, drawing on his dwindling reserve of strength, holding tight as the next wave engulfed them, knowing their time to die was fast approaching.
But Pitt, Maeve and Giordino did not die.
By early evening there was an easing of the wind, and the jumbled seas began to diminish shortly after.
Unknown to them, the typhoon had veered off its earlier course from the northwest and suddenly headed southeast toward the Antarctic. The wind velocity noticeably slackened, down from over 150 kilometers to a little below 60, and the seas curtailed their madness, the distance between the wave crests and the troughs decreasing to no more than 3 meters. The rain thinned into a light drizzle that became a mist, hovering over the flattened swells. Overhead, a lone gull materialized from nowhere, before darkness swept the seas again, and circled the little boat, screaming as if in stunned surprise at seeing it still afloat.
In another hour, the sky was clear of clouds, and the wind was hardly strong enough to sail a sloop in.
It was as if the storm were a bad dream that struck in the night and vanished with the soft light of day.
They had won only one battle in a war with the elements. The savage seas and the cruel winds had failed to take them into the depths. What the great whirling storm could not destroy with its murderous fury, it rewarded with clemency.
It seemed almost mystical, Maeve thought. If they were destined to die, they never would have lived through the storm. We were kept alive for a purpose, she decided staunchly.
No word passed among the fatigued and battered trio huddled in the boat. Consoled by the calm in the wake of the departed tempest, exhausted beyond endurance, they entered a region of utterly uncaring indifference to their circumstances and fell into deep sleep.
The swells retained a mild chop until the next morning, a legacy of the storm, before the seas became as liquid smooth as a millpond. The mist had long since faded, and visibility cleared to the far reaches of empty horizons. Now the sea settled
down to achieve by attrition what it had failed to achieve by frenzied intensity. They slowly awoke to a sun they had sorely missed for the last forty-eight hours but that now burned down on them with unrelenting severity.
An attempt to sit up sent waves of pain through Pitt's body. The battering from the sea was added to the injuries he had suffered from John Merchant's men. Blinking against the dazzling glare of the sun's reflection on the water, he very slowly eased himself to a sitting position. There was nothing to do now but lie in the boat and wait. But wait for what? Wait in the forlorn hope that a ship might appear over the horizon on a direct course toward them? They were drifting in a dead part of the sea, far from the shipping lanes, where ships rarely sailed.
Arthur Dorsett had picked their drop-off point cleverly. If through some divine miracle they survived the typhoon, then thirst and starvation would take them. Pitt would not let them die, not after what they had been through. He took an oath of vengeance, to live for no other reason but to kill Arthur Dorsett.
Few men deserved to die more. Pitt swore to overlook his normal codes and standards of ethics and morality should he and Dorsett ever meet again. Nor did he forget Boudicca and Deirdre. They too would pay for their depraved treatment of Maeve.
"It's all so quiet," said Maeve. She clung to Pitt, and he could feel her trembling. "I feel like the storm is still raging inside my head."
Pitt rubbed caked salt from his eyes, comforted in a small degree at feeling that the swelling had gone down. He looked down into the intensely blue eyes, drugged with fatigue and misted by deep sleep. He watched as they stared at him, and they began to shine. "Venus arising from the waves," he said softly.
She sat up and fluffed out her salt-encrusted blond hair. "I don't feel like Venus," she said, smiling.
"And I certainly don't look like her." She pulled up her sweater and gently touched the red welts around her waist, put there by the constant friction of the safety line.
Giordino slipped open an eye. "If you two don't quiet up and let a man sleep, I'm going to call the manager of this hotel and complain."
"We're going for a dip in the pool and then have some breakfast on the lanai," said Maeve with intrepid brightness. "Why don't you join us?"
"I'd rather call room service," Giordino drawled, seemingly exhausted by the mere act of speaking.
"Since we're all in such a lively mood," said Pitt, "I suggest we get on about the business of survival."
"What are our chances of rescue?" asked Maeve innocently.
"Nil," answered Pitt. "You can bet your father dropped us in the bleakest part of the sea. Admiral Sandecker and the gang at NUMA have no idea what happened to us. And if they did, they wouldn't know where to look. If we're to reach our normal life expectancy, we'll have to do it without outside help."
Their first task was to pull in the steadfast sea anchor and remove their shoes and the tools and other items from Pitt's jacket. Afterward, they took an inventory of every single item, seemingly useless or not, that might come in handy for the long haul ahead. At last, Pitt removed the small packet that he had shoved down his pants just before driving the bus over the side of the dock.
"What did you find with the boat?" he asked Giordino.
"Not enough hardware to hang a barn door. The storage compartment held a grand total of three wrenches of various sizes, a screwdriver, a fuel pump, four spark plugs, assorted nuts and bolts, a couple of rags, a wooden paddle, a nylon boat cover and a handy-dandy little number that's going to add to the enjoyment of the voyage."
"Which is?"
Giordino held up a small hand pump. "This, for pumping up the flotation tubes."
"How long is the paddle'?"
"A little over a meter."
"Barely tall enough to raise a sail," said Pitt.
"True, but by tying it to the console, we can utilize it as a tent pole to stretch the boat cover over us for shade."
"And lest we forget, the boat cover will come in handy for catching water should we see rain again,"
Maeve reminded them.
Pitt looked at her. "Do you have anything on your person that might prove useful?"
She shook her head. "Clothes only. My Frankenstein sister threw me on the raft without so much as my lipstick." '
"Guess who she's talking about," Giordino muttered.
Pitt opened the small waterproof packet and laid out a Swiss army knife, a very old and worn Boy Scout compass, a small tube of matches, a first aid kit no larger than a cigarette package, and a vest-pocket .25 caliber Mauser automatic pistol with one extra clip.
Maeve stared at the tiny gun. "You could have shot John Merchant and my father."
"Pickett stood a better chance at Gettysburg than I did with that small army of security guards."
"I thought you looked awfully well endowed," she said with a sly smile. "Do you always carry a survival kit?"
"Since my Boy Scout days."
"Who do you intend to shoot in the middle of nowhere?"
"Not who, but what. A bird, if one comes close enough."
"You'd shoot a defenseless bird?"
Pitt looked at her. "Only because I have this strange aversion to starving to death."
While Giordino pumped air into the flotation tubes before working on a canopy, Pitt examined every square centimeter of the boat, checking for any leaks or abrasions in the neoprene floats and structural damage to the fiberglass hull. He dove overboard and ran his hands over the bottom but found no indication of damage. The craft appeared to be about four years old and had apparently been used as a shore boat when Dorsett's yacht moored off a beach without a dock. Pitt was relieved to find it slightly worn but in otherwise excellent shape. The only flaw was the missing outboard engine that no longer hung on the transom of the boat.
Climbing back on board, he kept them busy all day with odd little jobs to take their minds off their predicament and growing thirst. Pitt was determined to keep their spirits up. He had no illusions as to how long they could last. He and Giordino had once trekked through the Sahara Desert without water for nearly seven days. That was a dry heat; here the heavy humidity sucked the life out of them.
Giordino rigged the nylon cover as shield from the burning rays of the sun, draping it over the paddle he had mounted on the control console and tying it down over the high sides of the flotation tubes with short lengths cut from the nylon line. He sloped one edge so that any rainwater it caught would flow and drop into an ice chest Maeve had found under one seat. She cleaned the grime from the long unused ice chest and did her best to straighten up the interior of the boat to make it liveable. Pitt used his time to separate the strands from a section of nylon line and knot them into a fishing line.
The only food source within two thousand kilometers or more was fish. If they didn't catch any, they would starve. He fashioned a hook from the prong of his belt buckle and tied it to the line. The opposite end was attached to the center of one of the wrenches so he could grip it in both hands. The quandary was how to catch them. There were no earthworms, trout flies, bass plugs or cheese around here. Pitt leaned over the flotation tubes, cupped his hands around his eyes to shut out the sunlight and stared into the water.
Already, inquisitive guests were congregating under the shadow of the raft. Those who plow through the sea on ships and boats powered by big engines with roaring exhausts and thrashing propellers often complain that there is no life to be seen in the open ocean. But for those who float close to the surface of the water, drifting soundlessly, it soon becomes a window, opening on the other side on citizens of the deep, who are far more numerous and varied than the animals who roam the solid earth.
Schools of herringlike fish, no larger than Pitt's little finger, darted and wiggled under the boat. He recognized pompano, dolphins, not to be confused with the porpoise and their larger cousins, the dorado, with their high foreheads and long fin running down the top of their multicolored iridescent bodies. A couple of large mackerel glided in
circles, occasionally striking at one of the smaller fish. There was also a small shark, a hammerhead, one of the strangest inhabitants of the sea, each of his eyes perched on the end of a wing that looked like it was jammed into his head.
"What are you going to use as bait?" asked Maeve.
"Me," said Pitt. "I'm using myself as a gourmet delight for the little fisheys."
"Whatever do you mean?"
"Watch and learn."
Maeve stared in undisguised awe as Pitt took his knife, rolled up a pant leg, and calmly carved off a small piece of flesh from the back of his thigh. Then he imbedded it on the improvised hook. It was done so matter-of-factly that Giordino did not notice the act until he saw a few drops of blood on the floor of the boat.
"Where's the pleasure in that?" he asked.
"You got that screwdriver handy?" Pitt inquired.
Giordino held it up. "You want me to operate on you too?"
"There's a small shark under the boat," Pitt explained. "I'm going to entice it to the surface. When I grab it, you ram the screwdriver into the top of his head between the eyes. Do it right and you might stick his pea-sized brain."
Maeve wanted no part of this business. "Surely you're not bringing a shark on board?"
"Only if we get lucky," Pitt said, tearing off a piece of his T-shirt and wrapping it around the small gouge in his leg to staunch the bleeding.
She crawled to the stern of the boat and crouched behind the console, happy to get out of the way.
"Mind you don't offer him anything to bite on."