Vadas nodded, keeping his eyes riveted on the windshield. Carter stared uneasily at the seemingly impenetrable barrier of gray-white mist.
"The question is, how do you navigate in this pea soup? How do you keep from running aground?"
Vadas suddenly cut the engine and held up a finger. Across the water came the faint bong of a buoy bell. "They are placed wherever there is danger," Vadas said. "All of them sound slightly different. If one knows them well, they will lead one directly down the lake."
It was a good thing they were a musical family, Carter thought, or he'd have been reduced to trying to row across this lake in a skiff. He turned and went belowdecks. There he found a narrow bench and sat down, picking up an East German fishing catalogue from the map table, but he didn't read any of it. He just held it open on his lap and stared into space, wondering how Cynthia was doing and if she'd regained consciousness, and thinking perhaps it would be better if she hadn't.
The engine ceased while Vadas listened for a buoy. Carter listened along with him. Vadas started the engine again and veered starboard for several minutes, then pulled around to the left. At this rate their progress was erratic. Carter thought with some satisfaction, so even if the frontier guard was outfitted with sonar detection equipment, the old trawler would still be tough to intercept.
The gentle motion of the boat made him drowsy. He laid his head back against the bulwark and closed his eyes. Another stop, another moment of listening, then start again. The galley and his surroundings began to move into the unconscious part of his mind, mixing with other images, when the engine stopped once more, and this time no bell sounded. Instead, the drone of another, much more powerful engine reverberated through the fog, growing steadily louder.
Carter jerked awake and hurried up to the bridge. Vadas turned from the helm as Carter rushed into the cabin. Two hundred yards and closing. Vadas cut the power, plunging the cabin into darkness except for a shaft of light streaming out of the gangway from below. Carter dashed down the stairs and pawed until he hit the switch. It was pitch black only for a second when a bright light beamed in through the porthole. The noise of the approaching engine whined to a peak, and the old trawler began to rock violently. Carter estimated the distance at twenty-five yards.
The lights disappeared quickly, then the engine noise diminished as it steamed into the distance. Carter came slowly up the stairs. "I can't believe they didn't see us," he said.
"The fog," said Vadas. "Be prepared. There'll be others."
They moved slowly ahead in complete darkness for the next quarter of an hour, then stopped again and listened. In the silence the night pulled itself around them, black and damp. The very atmosphere of the cabin had turned to fog. It had penetrated Carter's clothes, and its dampness filled his nostrils. In the distance a buoy tolled like a death knell.
"Funny," said Vadas. "I would have sworn that should have been on the starboard side, not the port." He hastily swung the wheel to starboard when it suddenly dawned on Carter that this was the direction from which the guard boat had been coming.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Maybe they changed the…"
He never completed the sentence. A deafening screech, like a million gulls all diving at once, tore through the cabin, and the deck pitched crazily, tossing Vadas off-balance and ramming his head into the control panel. He rolled against the bulwark, then onto the window, which broke. He hung for a moment by the window frame, black water surging up beneath him, then he slipped through and disappeared.
Carter had caught hold of the pilot's chair, and he clung to it, trying to keep from sliding down the floor and following Vadas. He hung by his hands for what seemed many minutes, although in reality it couldn't have been more than one or two, then managed to wedge a foot against the bulkhead alongside the gangway and swung over. Below him waves of black water lapped the cabin windows, gushing in the hole through which Vadas had vanished.
He crawled down the wall of the gangway, which now had become its floor, and found belowdecks to be in worse shape than the cabin. A fist of wet rock had pierced the hull, and water was steadily running in.
They'd run aground, although whether near shore or on some outcropping of rock in the middle of the lake was impossible to tell.
The boat creaked suddenly like a door being swung open on rusty hinges, and his perch in the gangway shifted another ten degrees from vertical. She was on the verge of rolling out. If he were caught in here, he'd drown.
He scurried back to the cabin and let himself down cautiously on the ladderlike structure of the window frame, being careful to step only where the crosspieces were welded to the top and bottom. Then, using the heel of his shoe, he kicked out the glass all the way to the edges.
He glanced briefly around the cabin, wondering if there were anything useful he might take. But there was no time, and at this crazy angle in the dark, rifling through the lockers would be next to impossible.
He raised his hands over his head and jumped. The cold water covered him, the logical extension of the fog. He began swimming even before he reached the surface, pulling himself forward, heedless of where he was going, until the wave the trawler made as it slid off the rocks washed over him.
Then he treaded water for what seemed an eternity, one more piece of flotsam amid a growing population of debris, until finally a chunk of hull large enough to support him floated by, and he pulled himself onto it.
Daylight found Carter huddled on his makeshift lifeboat, his knees tucked glumly under his chin. During the night the fog had lifted, and although he could now see where the boat had impaled itself — a rocky mass of land that he felt had no business being in the middle of the lake — he had drifted too far to swim to it. He sat, bobbing and shivering, sullenly staring at the waves peak and flatten on the vast, empty expanse of water.
The thought of Cynthia ran continually through his mind. She was coming to mean more to him than just a fellow agent in trouble, or even a woman he had once loved who was in danger and needed him, although either one of these would have been enough to make him brave the fires of hell to reach her. She was beginning to personify the entire debt Kobelev owed him, and the more he thought about it, the larger it seemed.
Vadas was dead. He had never surfaced after falling out of the boat. At one point during the night Carter had found what looked to be a wad of clothing floating with some boards on the water. He speared it with a piece of broken handrail and rolled it over. It was Vadas, his blank eyes staring out of white sockets, a pink gash dividing his forehead where he'd smashed it against the boat's control panel. This brought to ten the number of deaths since the operation against Kobelev had begun.
It was more than just the innocent lives that had been forfeited, or even the political ramifications of a man like Kobelev attaining power among America's enemies. It was more than the foiled assignment in Russia. His wanting Kobelev dead extended to his entire career as an agent. The man epitomized everything Carter had fought against; he negated everything Carter had risked his life time after time to preserve. If he failed again and Kobelev lived, he would tender his resignation, no matter what Hawk said. Success meant that much to him, and yet, as he sat watching the waves lap over the edges of his tiny raft, he never felt so far from accomplishing his goal.
He pulled a wood chip from the ragged comer of his little boat and absently tossed it into the water. It landed a few feet away and bobbed stubbornly. He watched it for a while, then noticed another object on the horizon, about the same apparent size as the wood chip but moving and growing steadily larger. Within a few minutes the faint roar of an outboard motor rose to accompany it.