Trembling and tingling with fear again, Neil crawled behind the wheelhouse settee for protection, listening for the sound of gunfire, his shoulders and back waiting to feel the thud and sting of a bullet. Then, in the silence, he realized that the launch was no longer bumping Vagabond’s port hull. He dared to raise his head to peer out the shattered Plexiglas window, but could see nothing. He ducked around into the starboard cockpit again, staring astern, but again could see no sign of the attackers. Although he knew he must have hit some of them in the boat, he was afraid Jim’s maneuvering had disoriented him and even now the attackers might be about to pick him off.
“Seth! Tony!” he called forward. “Come aft!”
He needed a weapon now that his .45 was out of ammunition. He thought he had hit two of the three dark figures in the speeding boat, knew he had hit the man on Vagabond’s deck—looked over to make certain he was still lying where he had been hit.
Tony thumped down into the cockpit beside him.
“Seth is hit,” Tony said. “But that boat is buzzing off.”
“Where?” said Neil.
“It’s way off the other side,” Tony replied. “I think I hit a couple of them.” Even in the darkness Neil could see Tony’s eyes were wide with excitement or fear. For a half-minute he remained crouched down, listening for the sound of the outboard, but he could no longer hear it.
“Are you all right, Jim?” he then whispered.
“Yes,” Jim answered, his voice cracking, “but they really wrecked poor Vagabond. ” The forward Plexiglas windows were shattered in five or six places. They’d have to check for other damage.
“Head us back east,” Neil said. “Keep us at full throttle.”
For a minute more Vagabond surged through the darkness, beginning, at almost nine knots, to smash into the swells with loud booming reports. Neil, Tony, and Jim stayed where they were, then Neil walked beside Jim and turned off the engine.
In a few seconds the noise of both the diesel and of Vagabond’s hull plowing through the swells had diminished to nothing, and Neil strained his ears to hear the outboard. There was no sound of it. Jim suddenly left the helm and vomited into the sea from the port cockpit. Expressionlessly he returned.
“Okay,” said Neil, feeling for the first time since the skirmish had started a measure of calm. “Get her going again, Jim. Come on, Tony, let’s see about Seth.”
In another thirty minutes the sense of danger had passed. Vagabond was almost four miles from the causeway and was now sailing before a light breeze. The night was dark, the engine switched off now, and she was both invisible and inaudible to any potential attacker, except at very close range. Neil and Jeanne did their best to treat Seth Sperling’s bullet wound, but they knew it was beyond their limited skills. Seth had been struck by the first burst of automatic rifle fire, a slug tearing through his left thigh and imbedding itself in his right thigh. The artery hadn’t been severed, so all they did was clean the wound, staunch the flow of blood, and give Seth some antibiotics.
Later, when Neil came up on deck, he realized that the man he had shot was still lying on the afterdeck. He went and knelt beside the body, that of a slender man, and searched his pants pockets: wallet, handkerchief, some change, several loose bills, a business card. Then he rolled the man over to look at the face. In the dim light from the aft cabin, where Jeanne was still sitting with Seth, he could see little, but something looked strange. He asked Frank to shine a light over and then he saw: the man’s face was disfigured with recent burns. Neil wondered if the whole boatload of attackers was equally disfigured.
He briefly recited from memory the concluding verses from the Navy burial service and then rolled the body into the sea.
At dawn Neil, sleeping in the back of the old wheelhouse area, was half-awakened by something. Lying on his back, he had the vague feeling of still being in a dream. He was disoriented. In the dream he had been lying where he was lying now, but Jim was at the helm, and another figure, also himself it seemed, was seated a few feet away on the port settee. The third figure in the wheelhouse was both himself and an intruder, and he struggled in his half-awakened state to determine who the other person was. In the dream the figure began to take on a more ominous emotional significance; Neil began to have the nightmarish feeling of struggling to awaken himself in order to deal with impending danger.
He sat up with a groan, awake at last. Jim was standing at the helm, as in his dream, and to his left, seated with characteristic calm, was the thick, compact figure of Conrad Macklin. He was sipping a cup of tea.
For a brief moment Neil felt himself back in the dream, then realized with a sinking feeling that he was facing reality. Conrad Macklin was back on board.
He looked steadily at Macklin, who gazed back without expression.
“Would you like some hot tea?” Macklin asked.
“Where’d you come from?” Neil finally asked.
“I never really left,” Macklin answered. “I stowed away in some kind of storage area up front.”
“How did you get back aboard?”
“Swam out, mostly underwater, right after you put me ashore,” Macklin replied. “Pulled myself up the anchor line while you were loading the last bunch onto the dinghy.”
Neil continued to stare at Macklin coldly, then released a long sigh. “A man is wounded,” he said. “I suppose you’d better take a look at him.”
“Good,” said Macklin.
“I doubt it,” said Neil.
An hour later, awake but with his eyes closed, he realized that all night long, even before the dream, something had been missing, something he ought to be feeling but was not. Vagabond was cutting cleanly through the blue waters; dead ahead the sunlight sparkled like diamonds on the whitecaps. He had escaped to sea; the horrors of the land were receding. At such times he should feel elated. But he didn’t. Something inside him must be telling him that this time there was no escape: the tentacles of land had reached out and even now lay heavily on his deck. He was at sea, but that ninety-eight cent lump of earth called man was still with him.
Part Two
ASHES
The moon, now almost three-quarters full, lit up the sea to port like a giant nightlight. It was after midnight, and Neil had enjoyed the last hour more than any since they’d fled the Chesapeake three days before. Vagabond was now rushing through the night at eleven or twelve knots, and Neil was feeling that exhilaration that, only a sailboat tearing through the sea at night could give him.
Behind were three trails of phosphorescent white, bubbling out so fast it seemed Vagabond must be doing twenty knots, no matter what the speedometer read. Ahead Neil could see almost nothing. The trimaran charged into the blackness, as if totally confident that nothing could halt her queenly progress.
They were now about a hundred miles east of the North Carolina coast, and Neil held his course at due south by lining up the cluster of stars that made up Orion’s belt with the upper port shroud. He had let Jim and Lisa, whose official watch it was, continue sleeping, rather than wake them for their midnight to three a.m. watch. Vagabond, plunging forward through the night, was just on the edge of being over-canvased, and Neil kept checking to feel if the wind was getting too strong for the sail area. So far it hadn’t, and part of his joy arose from the feeling that he, Vagabond, the wind, and the sea were in total harmony.