'A good man, Sergey. Will this injure his career?'
'With what he has in his head? I think not.'
'Fine with me,' Ritter said, walking away.
They were too closely matched. The other boat had a slight advantage, since it was in the lead, and able to choose, while the cutter needed her half-knot speed advantage to draw closer so painfully slowly. It was a question of skill, really, and that, too, was down to whiskers of difference from one to the other. Oreza watched the other man slide his boat across the wake of the freighter, surfing it, really, sliding her onto the front of the ship-generated wave and riding it to port, gaining perhaps half a knot's momentary advantage. Oreza had to admire it. He couldn't do anything else. The man really was sailing his boat downhill as though a joke against the laws of wind and wave. But there was nothing funny about this, was there? Not with his men standing around the wheelhouse carrying loaded guns. Not with what he had to do to a friend.
'For Christ's sake,' Oreza snarled, easing the wheel to starboard a little. 'Be careful with those goddamned guns!' The other crewmen in the wheelhouse snapped the covers down on their holsters and ceased fingering their weapons.
'He's a dangerous man,' the man behind Oreza said.
'No, he isn't, not to us!'
'What about all the people he -'
'Maybe the bastards had it comin'!' A little more throttle and Oreza slid back to port. He was at the point of scanning the waves for smooth spots, moving the forty-one-foot patrol boat a few feet left and right to make use of the surface chop and so gain a few precious yards in his pursuit, just as the other was doing. No America's Cup race off to Newport had ever been as exciting as this, and inwardly Oreza raged at the other man that the purpose of the race should be so perverse.
'Maybe you should let -'
Oreza didn't turn his head. 'Mr Tomlinson, you think anybody else can conn the boat better'n me?'
'No, Petty Officer Oreza,' the Ensign said formally. Oreza snorted at the windowglass. 'Maybe call a helicopter from the Navy?' Tomlinson asked lamely.
'What for, sir? Where you think he's goin', Cuba, maybe? I have double his bunkerage and half a knot more speed, and he's only three hundred yards ahead. Do the math, sir. We're alongside in twenty minutes any way you cut it, no matter how good he is.' Treat the man with respect, Oreza didn't say.
'But he's dangerous,' Ensign Tomlinson repeated.
'I'll take my chances. There...' Oreza started his slide to port now, riding through the freighter's wake, using the energy generated by the ship to gain speed. Interesting, this is how a dolphin does it... that got me a whole knot's worth and my hull's better at this than his is... Contrary to everything he should have felt, Manuel Oreza smiled. He'd just learned something new about boat-handling, courtesy of a friend he was trying to arrest for murder. For murdering people who needed killing, he reminded himself, wondering what the lawyers would do about that.
No, he had to treat him with respect, let him run his race as best he could, take his shot at freedom, doomed though he might be. To do less would demean the man, and, Oreza admitted, demean himself. When all else failed there was still honor. It was perhaps the last law of the sea, and Oreza, like his quarry, was a man of the sea.
It was devilishly close. Portagee was just too damned good at driving his boat, and for that reason all the harder to risk what he'd planned. Kelly did everything he knew how. Planing Springer diagonally across the ship's wake was the cleverest thing he'd ever done afloat, but that damned Coastie matched it, deep hull and all. Both bis engines were redlined now, and both were running hot, and this damned freighter was going just a little too fast for things. Why couldn't Ryan have waited another ten friggin' minutes? Kelly wondered. The control for the pyro charge was next to him. Five seconds after he hit that, the fuel tanks would blow, but that wasn't worth a damn with a Coast Guard cutter two hundred goddamned yards back. Now what?
'We just gained twenty yards,' Oreza noted with both satisfaction and sorrow.
He wasn't even looking back, the petty officer saw. He knew. He had to know. God, you'regood, the Quartermaster First Class tried to say with his mind, regretting all the needling he'd inflicted upon the man, but he had to know that it had only been banter, one seaman to another. And in running the race this way he, too, was doing honor to Oreza. He'd have weapons there, and he could have turned and fired to distract and annoy his pursuers. But he didn't, and Portagee Oreza knew why. It would have violated the rules of a race such as this. He'd run the race as best he could, and when the time came he'd accept defeat, and there would be both pride and sadness for both men to share, but each would still have the respect of the other.
'Going to be dark soon,' Tomlinson said, ruining the petty officer's reverie. The boy just didn't understand, but he was only a brand-new ensign. Perhaps he'd learn someday. They mostly did, and Oreza hoped that Tomlinson would learn from today's lesson.
'Not soon enough, sir.'
Oreza scanned the rest of the horizon briefly. The French-flagged freighter occupied perhaps a third of what he could see of the water's surface. It was a towering hull, riding high on the surface and gleaming from a recent painting. Her crew knew nothing of what was going on. A new ship, the petty officer's brain noted, and her bulbous bow made for a nice set of bow waves that the other boat was using to surf along.
The quickest and simplest solution was to pull the cutter up behind him on the starboard side of the freighter, then duck across the bow, and then blow the boat up... but... there was another way, a better way...
'Now!' Oreza turned the wheel perhaps ten degrees, sliding to port and gaining fully fifty yards seemingly in an instant. Then he reversed his rudder, leaped over another five-foot roller, and prepared to repeat the maneuver. One of the younger seamen hooted in sudden exhilaration.
'You see, Mr Tomlinson? We have a better hull form for this sort of thing than he does. He can beat us by a whisker in flat seas, hut not in chop. This is what we're made for.' Two minutes had halved the distance between the boats.
'You sure you want this race to end, Oreza?' Ensign Tomlinson asked.
Not sodumb after all, is he? Well, he was an officer, and they were supposed to be smart once in a while.
'All races end, sir. There's always a winner and always a loser,' Oreza pointed out, hoping that his friend would understand that, too. Portagee reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette and lit it with his left hand while his right - just the fingertips, really - worked the wheel, making tiny adjustments as demanded by the part of his brain that read and reacted to every ripple on the surface. He'd told Tomlinson twenty minutes. He'd been pessimistic. Sooner than that, he was sure.
Oreza scanned the surface again. A lot of boats out, mostly heading in, not one of them recognizing the race for what it was. The cutter didn't have her police lights blinking. Oreza didn't like the things: they were an insult to his profession. When a cutter of the United States Coast Guard pulled alongside, you shouldn't need police lights, he thought. Besides, this race was a private thing, seen and understood only by professionals, the way things ought to be, because spectators always degraded things, distracted the players from the game.
He was amidships on the freighter now, and Portagee had swallowed the bait... as he had to, Kelly thought. Damn but that guy was good. Another mile and he'd be alongside, reducing Kelly's options to precisely zero, but he did have his plan now, seeing the ship's bulbous bow, partly exposed. A crewman was looking down from the bridge, as on that first day with Pam, and his stomach became hollow for a moment, remembering. So long ago, so many things in between. Had he done right or wrong? Who would judge? Kelly shook his head. He'd let God do that. Kelly looked back for the first time in this race, measuring distance, and it was damnably close.