The Stowaway Solution

  “Don’t do it!” Lopez pleaded, thrashing again. “You’ll drown!”

  Aiden and Meg piled heavy coils of rope onto the tarpaulin, pinning Lopez to the deck.

  “You seem like a good guy,” Meg told him. “Thanks for caring about us. Nobody else does.” Then she turned to Aiden and said, “Showtime.”

  Aiden snatched the handle of the portable life raft — and very nearly yanked his arm out of its socket. He peered down at the label: NET WEIGHT: 32 KG/70.4 POUNDS.

  “Meg — give me a hand!”

  Together, they managed to drag the heavy valise out the hatch and up the companionway.

  “What have they got in here?” Meg panted. “Anvils?”

  The Samantha D was pitching so violently that they had to get on all fours and push the life raft across the deck to the gunwale. Luckily, the night was near black, with terrible visibility through the driving rain.

  Easier to trip over us than spot us in these conditions, Aiden thought.

  “Here goes nothing.” He grasped the inflation tab and pulled.

  There was a crack, followed by the loud hiss of compressed gas. The valise seemed to erupt, swelling and unfolding like time-release photography of a flower coming to bloom. In seconds, the suitcase shape was gone, replaced by a circular raft eight feet in diameter, enclosed by a canopy. Inside, the craft was fully stocked with life jackets, paddles, signal flares, food, water, and a first aid kit.

  They gawked. It was tough to feel anything beyond raw fear at a moment like this. But both couldn’t help but be impressed by such a marvel of engineering.

  And then they were captured in a flashlight beam.

  “Freeze!” roared the furious voice of Rod Bergeron.

  The command had the exact opposite effect. Aiden and Meg burrowed themselves under the rubberized base and pushed with all their might. The big life raft rose up and toppled over the rail, plummeting to the turbulent waves below. Propelled by an explosive mix of panic and purpose, Aiden and Meg scrambled after it, hurling themselves clear of the Samantha D’s massive hull.

  The ten-foot drop to the ocean felt endless, a frightening plunge down a bottomless pit. Impact was harder — and colder — than Aiden expected. Suddenly, he was submerged, his gasps for breath drawing frigid salt water into his lungs.

  The icy blast got him swimming. He broke the surface, choking and spitting. “Meg!” he cried. “Meg!”

  The second syllable had just passed his lips when a whitecap broke over him, a hammer blow that drove him under again. He kicked with all his might and popped back up, looking frantically for his sister.

  What he saw instead were waves — big ones — a fluid mountain range encircling him. The Pacific was alive, hurling fifteen-foot swells in every direction. Aiden was a tiny cork, bobbing helplessly, at the mercy of the titanic forces around him.

  Where’s Meg? Where’s the raft? Where’s —

  Out of the darkness roared the hull of the Samantha D, hundreds of tons of metal hurtling toward him. Heart pounding, Aiden swung himself about in the water until his feet made contact with the wall of steel. Summoning all the strength in his legs, he pushed off, propelling his body away from the ship.

  Through churning sea and spume, he felt his head bump into something soft and smooth. He glanced up, treading furiously to maintain his position against the wave action.

  The raft! The ocean was tossing it like pizza dough, but — amazingly — the craft had landed right side up.

  Now to find Meg …

  All at once, something grabbed him from behind. The rush of instant horror was unlike anything Aiden had experienced before — a fright so basic, so primal, that it overwhelmed fear of capture and even fear of death. What could be worse than drowning? To be torn to pieces by a man-eating shark.

  He tried to scream, but no sound would come out. Dread had robbed him of all wind. He wheeled in mute panic to face the monster that would end his life….

  Meg.

  “What are you doing?” he rasped.

  “Rescuing you!” she shouted, struggling to keep her head above the liquid chaos.

  Aiden turned his attention to the raft. “Where’s the door on this thing?”

  Circling the craft in search of a way in proved nearly impossible. Each wave tilted them into a desperate upstream sprint. Then came the trough — a wild descent into the guts of the Pacific. Both were good swimmers, but exhaustion came quickly. Aiden grabbed a fistful of Meg’s shirt to keep her from drifting away. He clung to her, but the effort made swimming impossible.

  An awful sense of wonder came over him. Right here, right now, fatigue was more deadly than any shark. Soon there would be no energy left in them. They’d be at the mercy of the swells.

  Unbelievable! We’re going to drown three feet from the life raft….

  Aiden wrapped both arms around Meg and squeezed. The United States government had not been able to pry them apart; the ocean would not succeed, either. Whatever their fate, it would happen to them together.

  The next wave struck hard. But as the Falconers tried to ride it, a second swell blindsided them at a ninety-degree angle. Aiden felt the collision as a rocket booster — an irresistible force that launched the siblings straight up.

  They broke free of the water, and for an instant they seemed to hang there, suspended above the furious ocean. Aiden waited for the sea to grab them and drive them under — a dive from which they’d never recover. There was no energy left in them to fight this enemy. They were going down for good.

  Whump!

  They struck solid rubber. Aiden looked around in bewilderment.

  The wave tossed us right onto the raft!

  The hatch was just a few feet away, flapping wildly in the gale-force winds. He pushed his sister through it and scrambled inside, zipping the canopy behind him.

  He collapsed to the waterproof floor, landing face-first in a pile of life jackets. “Quick!” He shrugged into his own vest and helped Meg into hers.

  “Won’t make — any difference,” she managed to say, her speech interrupted by the chattering of her teeth. “If the — raft sinks, we’ll die of hypo — thermia.”

  “Never thought I’d be colder than in the tank.” Aiden shivered. He tried to embrace Meg to preserve body heat, but the frigid wetness of their clothes made that pointless. “We’ll dry off sooner or later. Just keep the flap shut!”

  “Are you kidding? I wouldn’t go back out there if the Death Star was landing on our roof!”

  Without warning, the inside of the raft lit up like a baseball stadium at night. Shocked, Aiden and Meg scrambled to their knees and squinted through the plastic window of the canopy.

  The conning tower of the Samantha D loomed over them, about twenty yards off. Two powerful floodlights cut through the storm, trained on the life raft.

  “Oh, come on!” Meg howled in frustration. “They’re sitting on a billion gallons of stink oil that needs to be in Seattle! Why can’t they leave us alone?”

  “We’ve got to get away from that ship!” Aiden agreed urgently.

  “How?” she demanded, slightly hysterical.

  “With these!” Aiden pulled a pair of oars from behind the food stocks. “Come on!”

  He unzipped the flap, and the two poked their heads out into nature at its most violent. Soaring waves sent white water cascading high in the air, where it mingled with the lashing downpour to form an icy liquid atmosphere. They began paddling madly.

  “Don’t beat at the water!” Aiden called. “Pull with your whole body!”

  But he knew it was no use. A hundred oarsmen couldn’t propel the raft in these conditions. They might as well have been rowing with wet noodles.

  A swell broke over them, and the interior of the life raft was suddenly awash.

  They heaved with every ounce of dwindling strength they had left. All their efforts had crystallized into this one impossible moment. There would be no Falconer family if their escape failed. This raft had to m
ove.

  * * *

  “What’s going on here?”

  Captain McNicholl stormed the wheelhouse of the Samantha D, his strides easy and confident despite the bucking of the deck.

  Bergeron peered through binoculars into the floodlights’ glare. “We’ve got ’em, skipper,” he said without looking up. “They won’t get away — not in these seas.”

  “Who won’t get away?” he demanded.

  “The kids! They attacked Lopez and took off in one of the inflatables. Let’s move closer, Mr. Drury — ”

  “Belay that!” snapped the captain. “Hard to starboard! Veer off!”

  “No!” The first mate turned on his commander. “We can put a boat in the water! Bring them in!”

  “In these conditions,” McNicholl insisted, “we’d just as likely ram them.”

  “Those are the Falconers!” spat Bergeron. “The traitors!”

  “Their parents are the traitors,” the captain pointed out. “Those two are children.”

  “They tied Lopez up with duct tape!”

  “Because they’re desperate. I won’t risk their lives — if they haven’t drowned already.”

  The first mate’s face radiated deep outrage. “How can any loyal American let them go free?”

  “Any loyal American,” the captain interrupted, “should be asking himself why our government pushes children to the point where this is their only option.” He snatched the binoculars from Bergeron’s hands and gazed into the floodlights’ brilliance. The raft seemed like a tiny bouncing bottle cap, pummeled by storm, swells, and spindrift.

  “Radio the Coast Guard — we’ll keep the raft in sight till they get here. And tell them to bring divers.” McNicholl paused, his face a thundercloud. “There may be a couple of bodies to recover.”

  * * *

  Meg paddled furiously, commanding herself to ignore the searing agony in her arms and shoulders.

  No pain … no storm … no ocean …

  In her mind, she was in the backyard with Mom and Dad. The oar was a shovel, and they were digging up sod for a vegetable garden.

  A faceful of spray jolted her out of the fantasy and very nearly knocked her over. Sputtering, she willed herself back to the yard.

  When the Samantha D’s blinding floodlights dimmed a little, Aiden and Meg had thought the life raft was in motion at last. But their celebration was premature. The ship, not the raft, was changing position — retreating to watch them from a safe distance.

  Without warning, the powerful beams winked out.

  “It’s about time — ” she began.

  And then horror robbed her of her voice. The lights hadn’t been turned off; they’d been blocked from view —

  By a wall of water thirty feet high!

  “Back inside!” shouted Aiden.

  They dove for the flap. Meg got there first. She scrambled through the opening and wheeled around to pull her brother to safety.

  The monster wave broke. Five tons of sea came crashing down on the life raft with the destructive power of a small earthquake.

  The force was like nothing Meg could ever have imagined — as if a hand the size of a Mack truck had covered the raft and pushed it deep under.

  The ocean roared inside the small craft, sweeping the oar from her hands and bowling her over. Now a lethal projectile, the paddle struck the side of the canopy, swung up, and cracked her on the back of the head.

  The impact tore through her. She saw one last thing before everything went dark and the raft filled up with water….

  It was her brother, overpowered by the fury cascading down on him, losing his grip on the life raft, and disappearing into the boiling blackness.

  Aiden tumbled down the face of the wave, sliding into the lightless trough. Then — underwater, diving deeper, the pressure hurting his ears, heading for the bottom, the end —

  A sudden rush of buoyancy lifted his head and shoulders up and out.

  The life jacket!

  He sucked air, choking on salted lungs. “Meg!” he howled, spinning around in a floundering search pattern. The raft was nowhere to be found.

  His heart folded inside out. Sunk? Or was it just hidden behind the towering skyline of whitecaps?

  The next swell drew him up its slopes. Desperately, he tried to use his temporary vantage point to search for the craft. Nothing. Even the floodlights of the Samantha D were little more than a distant flicker on the horizon now.

  “Meg!” The ocean fell out from under him, and he was on the way down again, careening to a dunking at the bottom.

  He popped up once more, coughing and spitting. How long could he go on like this?

  The answer was both comforting and terrible: If I can stay conscious, the life jacket will never let me drown.

  But there were other, scarier possibilities. For all he knew, the current was carrying him out to open ocean.

  “Are you out there, Meg? Can you hear me?”

  There was no reply, only the brawl of gale and sea. Aiden rode the roller coaster, battered and scrambled, discombobulated, and finally, numb.

  * * *

  Agent Emmanuel Harris stepped off the plane into the Seattle-Tacoma airport, reeling from turbulence and bad airline coffee. The pilot blamed it on a huge offshore storm system — the bumpy ride, not the coffee. Harris could only imagine what conditions were like aboard ship in this weather.

  He was reviving himself at the Starbucks stand when his cell phone rang. It was his assistant in Washington. Bad news, as usual.

  “What do you mean, overboard?” Harris bellowed. “They fell off?”

  “They jumped off,” came the reply. “They tied up a sailor and escaped in an inflatable life raft.”

  Not for the first time, the FBI man was aware of a strange, almost fatherly pride. Those Falconers had to be the most daring, resourceful, and fearless kids in human history. The dark circles under his eyes testified to that.

  A quick glance out the window at the blowing wind and rain brought him back to earth. “Is that safe?”

  “Not according to the Coast Guard. They’ve got people on the scene, but no sign of the raft. There’s not much chance of finding them until the weather improves.”

  “And then?” he demanded.

  “There are two ways it can go. Search and rescue, or recovery. Search and rescue means the kids are probably still alive. Recovery means — ”

  “I know what it means,” the agent interrupted. “Call me the instant you have news. Got that? You don’t finish typing a sentence; you don’t sharpen a pencil; you don’t pause for a deep breath. When you hear, I hear.”

  It was the first time in a fifteen-year career that Emmanuel Harris had said no to a cup of coffee. He stepped out of line, bent double by the bag of shot puts that had materialized in the pit of his stomach.

  Come on, kids. Hang in there.

  * * *

  After the brutal Pacific night, the early morning sun reflected off a surface that was flat calm, almost mirrorlike, broken only by the scattered ripples of jumping fish.

  The swamped raft hung low in the sea, barely a pimple on the glassy plain. The support pole had collapsed, so the canopy covered Meg’s sleeping form. She lay on her back in three inches of briny water. Had she toppled onto her stomach when the oar struck her, she almost certainly would have drowned.

  She might have slumbered much longer if a tiny killifish hadn’t jumped in through the flap, landing on top of her life jacket. Finding itself suddenly high and dry, the hapless creature began bouncing on her chest and face.

  “Five more minutes,” she mumbled, and then rolled over into a snootful of cold salt water.

  Choking, she tried to leap up, and very nearly capsized the small craft. “Aiden!” she cried, struggling against the rubber of the canopy. All at once, her head poked out of the opening, and she remembered.

  The raft. The escape. The storm.

  And her brother, washed out to sea.

  She hugged her
self against a surge of horror and noticed the life jacket she was still wearing. Aiden had one, too.

  But could a few pounds of flotation save him from the wrath of the world’s mightiest ocean?

  It can and it did! He’s alive.

  She believed it with all her heart — because the alternative was just too terrifying: Her brother drowned; Mom and Dad locked away forever; and Meg all alone in this heartless, unfeeling world.

  He’s alive, she repeated to herself. I just have to find him.

  She took stock of what she had. The raft, plus assorted survival equipment. The food was intact, although the first aid kit was waterlogged — soaked bandages and seasickness pills reduced to mush.

  I’d give anything for a dry sweater, she reflected with a shiver. She touched a sore spot on the back of her head, where the oar had conked her. And some ice for this egg.

  She pulled an awkward-shaped object out of the pocket of her wet jeans.

  Frank Lindenauer’s opera glasses.

  Eagerly, she panned the vast surrounding water with the slightly fogged lenses, hoping against hope to see her brother bobbing and waving.

  No Aiden.

  The sting of disappointment was eased by a discovery that was almost as welcome: land. A lush green stripe of coastline, not too far away.

  Her dilemma: paddle for shore or stay on the water to search for Aiden?

  Meg thought it over. What were the odds that her brother would just happen to float into sight? She’d have a better chance of spotting him from land, where she could climb a hill or a tree for a clearer view.

  Besides, it didn’t help Aiden if they were both lost at sea.

  When she picked up the oar, the entire right side of her body curled into a paralyzing cramp. Oh, yeah, I did this about twenty zillion times last night.

  She began to row for shore, gritting her teeth in pain. However much this hurt, it had to be better than what poor Aiden was going through — floating and freezing in a life jacket. She paddled at top speed for a month and a half — at least it felt that way. It was probably more like an hour. The coastline seemed no closer.

  This was going to be more of a marathon than she’d thought.

  Aiden’s voice echoed in her head: Don’t beat at the water. Pull with your whole body.