“ This way it’ll look like we’re hiding behind, under the wood, and hopefully they’ll shoot where we’re not.” He moved behind the wheel to set the self-steering gear.
“ Don’t set it,” Broxton said. “You go below. I’ve got other plans.”
“ Mr. Broxton,” Ramsingh ordered. “We’re going below.”
“ No, sir,” Broxton said. “I have the helm now. My job is to keep you safe. I’ll be all right.” There was something about the way he said it that made Ramsingh smile.
“ Right, I’ll go below.” The prime minister slipped down the companion way, but kept watch as Broxton kept Gypsy Dancer on a collision course with Sea King.
“ Any minute,” Broxton yelled.
“ What’s going on?” Ramsingh said. From his position looking up and out the companionway he could see Broxton behind the wheel, but not much else.
“ Ramming speed,” Broxton said, as Sea King bore down on them, looming large in his vision, like a hulking monster ready do devour them.
“ Oh, God,” Ramsingh said.
A wave or slight wind shift altered Broxton’s course, but he corrected, keeping his eyes on the vee of the approaching vessel. Sea King was slicing through the water like a sharp razor through soft skin. For a second he thought about playing the game out, but he knew his rival and he couldn’t imagine Dani giving up. He tensed his right hand on the wheel in anticipation of the turn. Then Sea King broke to his left. She was turning. The amazement zapped him like a cardiac arrest. She wasn’t interested in besting him. If she was, she could have held out longer. She didn’t want to take the chance and guess which way Broxton would turn. She wanted them off her left side and there could only be one reason for that. Ram was right. The Texan was in position to shoot at them as they sailed by.
Broxton turned, not away from her as he’d planned, but toward her. He kept them on a collision course. Sea King turned more to his left and he corrected, keeping Gypsy Dancer aimed at the bigger boat’s bow. There was no doubt in his mind who’d lose in a collision. The basic laws of physics favored the larger vessel and he had no desire to test those laws. He moved the wheel slightly to the right when Sea King was only a few yards away.
He heard the skin crawling sound of the two boats scrapping hulls, but he didn’t see the damage they were causing each other, because he was busy scurrying around the wheel. He dove under Ramsingh’s teak floorboard shields as the Texan opened up. The first two shots went wild. The third thunked into the teak. Broxton crouched low, hugging the sail. The fourth ricocheted off a winch. The fifth slammed into the teak, followed by the sixth. Then the screeching, scraping and shooting stopped and they were temporarily out of danger.
“ It’s all right,” Ramsingh said, coming up through the companionway. “They’re behind us and out of range.”
“ Sorry about your floor.” Broxton stood and set the floor hatches on the port cockpit seat.
“ Sod the floor,” Ramsingh said.
“ And your boat. It’s probably pretty scratched up. It sounded like it was coming apart.”
“ You’re alive. They missed. That’s all that counts,” Ramsingh said.
“ You missed,” Dani wailed and Earl almost cringed from the fury in her eyes. He had no problem hearing her above the sound of the flapping main or the choppy sea. But as suddenly as the anger was upon her it seemed to pass. “All right,” she said. “We’ll just have another go at it.”
“ We’re not going to fool them again,” he said.
“ We didn’t fool them last time. Broxton faked me out with his chicken game and he had some kind of cover rigged up to hide behind. It’s not going to be so easy.”
“ What are we going to do now?” Earl asked.
“ What I should have done the first time. We’re going to ram this boat up their ass and sink them.”
“ What about us?”
“ Sea King is a steel boat. Strong and sturdy. Ramsingh’s boat is made of fiberglass. When steel crashes into plastic, plastic loses.”
“ You should have rammed them then.”
“ I thought I said that,” she said, glaring at him. This was one woman he never wanted to cross, he thought. Not ever.
“ Take the wheel,” she ordered, and Earl obeyed. “We’re going to jibe around and finish it.” Earl watched as she looped a turn of the starboard jib sheet around the winch, then she turned back to him. “Just the opposite of what we did before. When I yell, “Jibe ho,” you crank it to the left. Stop your turn when you have the ass end of that boat sighted across the bow. Got it?”
“ Got it,” he answered.
She waited a few seconds, judging distance and speed, Earl thought, then she yelled out, “Jibe ho,” and Earl started spinning the wheel as she slacked the port jib sheet from its winch. Halfway through the hundred and eighty degree turn she started hauling in on the starboard sheet, taking in the line, hand over hand, a demon possessed. Muscles rippled along her bare arms. Sweat glistened on the back of her neck and ran down her naked back. Her hair flew in the wind, and he felt an animal power flow from her. She was like a great jungle cat, everyone else was just prey.
She cleated off the sheet, then ground some more of it in with the winch. “I’ll take the wheel now,” she said, and Earl let her have it. Then she reached over to the engine panel and pushed the ignition button. Earl heard and felt the rumble of the diesel as it started up. “I don’t think we can catch them without the main, but with the help of the engine they won’t have a chance of getting away.”
“ I don’t think that’s a problem,” he said.
“ Why not?”
“ I don’t think they want to get away.”
“ They’re turning around,” Broxton said. He was back at the wheel. Ramsingh had just come back up from below, after having replaced his damaged floor hatches.
“ I spend all of my spare time on this boat,” he said. He was talking loudly, but Broxton heard the sigh in his voice. “It’s more than a hobby.”
“ I’m sorry about hurting it,” Broxton said.
“ It’s not your fault,” Ramsingh said. “You were doing your job, but I’m taking over command now. I know you’re trying to keep me alive, but I don’t think Gypsy Dancer can take much more of your methods.”
Broxton nodded, meeting Ramsingh’s eyes. There was a grim determined set to his jaw, a sturdy, unafraid timbre to his voice and a sad, soulful look in those eyes. He’d made a decision and Broxton wasn’t sure he wanted to know what it was, but he had to ask. “What do we do now?”
“ We let them catch up to us.”
Ramsingh let out some of the mainsheet and the boat slowed from seven to five knots. “Look, there,” he said, pointing, “those are the Porpoises, right off our starboard side.”
Broxton turned to look. They were close to the rocks and he still had trouble seeing them. If Ramsingh hadn’t pointed them out he’d have missed them completely. He looked behind. “They’ve completed their turn.”
“ Look at the island ahead,” Ramsingh said. “We’re headed directly for the south coast. When I tell you, turn to starboard, to the right. Keep turning till the island is off the port side. That’ll be a ninety degree turn. Hold that position till I tell you differently.”
“ But the rocks?”
“ We should be by them by then.”
“ Should be?” Broxton said.
“ Should be,” Ramsingh answered.
Broxton checked behind them again. He didn’t have to tell Ramsingh they were getting closer. He turned away and eyed the coastline, looked again toward the rocks, but they’d moved past and he couldn’t see them through the rising swell.
“ What are you doing?” he asked, as Ramsingh let out more of the mainsheet.
“ Slowing the boat down even more.”
“ They’re coming awfully fast.”
“ I think she wants to ram us.”
“ Won’t she go down, too?”
“ Good possibility, but she’s thinking she’s got a steel boat. We’re fiberglass, she’s bigger. She probably thinks she’d survive a collision and we wouldn’t. She’d be wrong. Fiberglass is a lot tougher than it looks, and that thin skinned steel boat isn’t as strong as she thinks. Anything can sink, even the Titanic went down, and that boat’s no Titanic.”