EIGHT
Robin went from ‘stunned’ to ‘overwhelmed’ as Nic showed her round his new toy. With her experienced eye taking in every detail as though Maxima were a boat she was just about to command, she walked at his side from the engine room with its showroom-new Caterpillar twin diesel motors capable of cruising at twenty knots, where she’d met the engineer and his little team. They walked through the galley where the chef was putting the finishing touches to the light luncheon he was just about to serve, through the eight palatial state rooms and the cavernous internal common areas where various crew members were tidying up and making beds after the crew of Katapult8 had departed for the morning shakedown aboard their own vessel. They stopped at the command bridge where she met Captain Toro, his first officer and the navigating officer — and finally the flying bridge where she met the communications officer and the electrical officer who were running checks on the navigation and communication equipment up above their heads — and where it was possible to watch Liberty and the crew of Katapult8 as they left off their preparations to take their multihull out tomorrow and came back aboard Maxima to wash-up and eat.
Robin, Nic, Liberty and Katapult8’s all-woman crew lunched at a table on the middle outer deck, with the tail of the Bell above them and the swimming pool below. Robin knew all of them well — she had raced with and against them in the past. If anyone could shake Katapult8 down and really get the best out of her revolutionary ‘flying hook’ design, it would be these women. Though, even having seen the massive Caterpillar 3,516–6,200-horsepower diesels in the engine room below and discussed their massive potential with the men who maintained them, she doubted that Maxima could keep up if Katapult8 got the wind in that huge jet-wing sail of hers. The gin palace might be capable of twenty-five knots at a push. Katapult8 was capable of forty-five, especially when the long, sleek hulls lifted right out of the water and she sat just on the hook-shaped hydrofoils that generated hardly any drag to slow her as she flew.
As they tucked in to the lunch, Katapult8’s crew debated whether they should rush back aboard as soon as they were finished or whether there might be time to take advantage of the warm afternoon for a quick dip in the swimming pool, which filled much of the aft section of the deck they were looking down on. After all, the plan was to run Katapult8 south as fast as she would go and shake her down for the next Olympics, while Maxima shadowed her, then they would all meet up in Puerto Banderas and enjoy some R&R in Nic’s newly built estate down there. However, Liberty didn’t take much persuading to let her crew indulge themselves. The next couple of days threatened to be hard going, even if the weather predictions were overcautious. Earlier incarnations of Katapult had boasted comfortable accommodation for four. But this was the equivalent of a formula-one racer, not a family camper. There were berths but they were little more than strengthened hammocks. And there were supplies — though nothing tasty and nothing hot. Nor, indeed, facilities to heat anything up, in any case. It was a thousand miles down to Puerto Banderas and Liberty was reckoning on at least fifty hours’ tough sailing — sheer, solid grind. If the wind really got up they would find themselves working very hard indeed. Or swimming in far more dangerous waters.
So the crewmen finishing the maintenance on the jet skis and inflatables around the folded-down stern section were soon treated to the distractingly attractive sight of four lithe bikini-clad bodies swimming like mermaids in an aquarium, for the act of folding down the stern revealed that the aft wall of the pool itself was made of toughened glass. And that was the reason they gave, much later, to explain why they failed to check the final item on their maintenance itinerary: the Spurs line-and-net-cutting system.
While Liberty and her crew relaxed, Nic took Robin round the rest of the boat’s interior then, finally, after another hour or so, down to see his ‘pictures’ of Dahlia Blanca as Liberty and her crew went back to Katapult8. The minute Robin realized what he had in mind, she thought, you’ve got to be kidding me! But she said nothing, all too well aware that Nic was cheerfully winding her up. He settled her solicitously in the front row of the on-board cinema and popped a SIM card into the slot beneath the seventy-five-inch flat-screen TV that took up half the wall. Nic’s ‘pictures’ sprang to life.
A swooping camera — clearly a helicopter-shot — sailed low across a wide blue sea towards a wall of jungle. In full, in-your- face, 3D, the blue-backed in-running waves whipped downwards out of shot at the bottom of the wide screen, replaced for an instant by a foam-edged white sand beach, but the precipitous, jungle-clad slopes washed threateningly towards the camera like a solid green tsunami. Between the leaves, trunks and creepers of the canopy, bare earth and sheer rock walls gleamed, running with steams and waterfalls. It was hard to get a sense of scale, but the angle of the shot made it all seem huge, precipitous and terribly threatening. Robin found herself leaning back in her seat as though the jungle were bursting out of the screen like an avalanche to crush her. But at the last moment the camera angle changed giddily and instead of rushing further up the precipice it turned to follow the crest of the ridge itself. Now the tops of the huge trees whipped under the shot like the waves at the start, reminding Robin of the rainforests of Africa; of the Virunga National Park clinging to the slopes of volcanoes on the Congo — Rwanda border. Equally untouched. Equally dangerous.
On the left-hand side of the wide screen, another ridge rose higher and, distantly, another rose higher still, reducing the sky to a shred of blue as thin as the strip of white that had been the beach. It was like an enormous staircase, Robin realized. An unimaginable wall of mountainside, stepping down and down beneath the jungle canopy to that tiny ribbon of beach and then the huge Pacific.
‘This is like Keats’s Peak in Darien,’ said Nic cheerfully, ‘where the poet imagines the Spanish explorer and conquistador Cortez looking at the Pacific for the first time — in the poem about Chapman’s Homer. “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he star’d at the Pacific — and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise — silent, upon a peak in Darien”,’ he quoted sonorously. Then he spoilt the effect by adding, ‘Shit, it probably is that peak in Darien! On a less highbrow note, though, it’s also where ex-Governor Schwarzenegger came to film the Predator movie. The jungle’s that thick, wild and remote …’
But no sooner had Nic made the point than the trees stopped. The camera was suddenly swooping low over the outskirts of civilization. A sizeable town clung to the lower steps of the mountainside, overlooking the rolling Pacific. Tall trees were replaced in the blink of an eye by taller hotels. The mountain slope on the left of the screen fell back into a wide, dry river valley, on whose flat floor stood an airport. On the right, the inclines were suddenly divided into city blocks, and a kaleidoscope of red-tiled roofs, flat roof gardens, hotel tops with satellite dishes and lift housings came and went. And among them, all along the straight-ruled streets below and the upper ones winding like serpents into the wild greenery above, were blue pools, gleaming the iridescent scales on a butterfly’s wing. Made brighter, Robin suddenly realized, contrasted against the early evening gloom gathering outside Maxima herself.