author's note | excerpt | review

SEA HUNTER

~5~

The harbor was quiet. The party across the water was over, Il Bacione dark except for her neon name board and her anchor lights. David Hope scanned the water around the yacht with a pair of mil-spec night vision binoculars that Barbara’s merry band had left behind in the confusion.

No boats; no motion disturbed the crisp green image. He raised the glasses and inspected the yacht’s decks. Suddenly, he locked onto motion. Up on the helicopter deck that overhung the after deck where the party had been he saw a silhouette moving rhythmically against the stars.

It was too dark and too far to distinguish faces, much less sexes. But it was clear that two lucky people were employing the safety railing to maintain their respective positions while getting eagerly and inventively laid.

He lowered the binoculars. Motion below drew his eyes to the water.

“Christ on a crutch! I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.”

Here she came, rowing a large fiberglass dinghy with a determined if not precisely accurate stroke. He couldn’t distinguish Sally’s face, but her rowing stance was the seated version of her busy walk. It bespoke a woman who convinced herself that she could go it alone—board the yacht, load her diving gear onto her boat, and make her getaway—without any help from a wimp charter captain. What she didn’t know was that two people–who were very likely the anchor watch—were having sex on B deck, on a railing that afforded a fine view of any row boats that attempted to approach empty and leave full.

Any second there’d be shouts and searchlights. It was amazing they didn’t hear the oars. Then he saw a towel or some cloth hanging from the side of the boat and he realized with sudden admiration that she had muffled her oar locks like a smuggler.

Sally rowed right under their noses. And when Hope focused on B deck, again, he learned that Sally Moffitt dwelled under a very lucky star tonight. The couple had reversed positions and were now locked mouth to mouth, sliding off the railing and sinking toward the supine in the shadow of the helicopter.

Sally disappeared around the other side of the hull. Five minutes passed. Ten.

Hope stood up, inserted a winch handle and began cranking. Just in case, he told himself, she falls overboard and starts drowning. As the jib unfurled, the wind caught it and swung Oona’s stern. When the sail was out and shivering, Hope scoped out the yacht again. Nothing. No sex. No Sally. He moved to the mast and raised his mainsail. Then he took his binoculars further forward and loosened his mooring line until a single turn around the cleat held Oona’s widespread double nose to the wind.

He scoped out Il Bacione again. Down at the water line, Sally’s dinghy slipped around its stern. She dipped her oars and began pulling across the harbor. Up on the yacht, the lovers rose from the deck like sinuous ghosts and returned to position one on the rail.

Sally got twenty yards and was almost home free, when they spotted her. Hope heard shouts. A flash light beam darted about, ineffectually. Then another, a big hand-held thousand-candle-power halogen light jumping wildly, stabbing the dark and suddenly pinning Sally’s dinghy like a spear. The row boat was heaped with diving gear, camera cases, underwater lights and a slew of canvas bags.

A siren shrilled. The big motor yacht was suddenly ablaze in electricity: deck lights, side lights, work lights, painted Il Bacione stark white. From her upswept bow to her elegant stern, naked and near-naked people were running out on deck, yelling. Sally Moffitt ducked her head and rowed harder.

Road Harbour was a mile wide and a mile long, surrounded by land north, west and east. Its shores were indented by marina piers and shipping docks, which were dimly lit so late at night. The hills surrounding were dark with only an occasional house lamp burning. Its waters, too, were shrouded in darkness, speckled here and there with anchor lights, a rapid red blinker at the end of the marina dock, a quick flashing white on the cruise ship mooring dolphin near Il Bacione, and a pair of channel markers flashing red and green half a mile away at the entrance.

There were a thousand places to hide, but none for very long. Come daylight it would be like trying to disappear on a New England town green, where everybody knew everybody and the cops knew the strangers. The only guaranteed escape was to the southeast, through those red and green flashers, where the harbor opened into the Sir Frances Drake Channel between cliffs fringed with reefs.

Hope said, “No, no, no.” His sails were out and the wind was stiff. Oona was straining to go. But even though he had anticipated the farce across the water, the last thing in the world he wanted to do was throw off his mooring line.

A fast catamaran like Oona would cover the half mile between the anchored Il Bacione and the harbor mouth in two or three minutes if the land-bound wind co-operated. But a fast catamaran was still a sailboat, while a powerful motor boat like Il Bacione’s mile-a-minute, high-speed tender could make the half mile to the harbor mouth in thirty seconds.

He couldn’t help her. He could only watch with a kind of sick fascination, as if he were witness to a highway accident beginning in slow motion: a big rig smashing through the guard rail, drifting across the grassy median, tumbling into oncoming traffic.

Then Sally’s husband started yelling into a megaphone. “You bitch! You controlling bitch!”

The loudhailer echoed his big voice off the surrounding hills. Hope, forced to reassess his earlier conclusion that Moffitt still loved Sally, doubted there was a man or woman asleep in Road Town who did not wake to the man’s opinion of the woman he’d been married to for six years.

“Bring back my outfit. What the hell do you need it for? You think you can shoot without me? Just ‘cause you’re a hotshot diver doesn’t make you a shooter. There’s some things even you can’t control, you bitch. Somebody get a boat.”

Laughter trilled across the water. “Catch her, Greg! Tally ho! Boat! Boat! Tally hooooo!”

Hope muttered, “Oh for Chrissake!” Angry at himself before he even started–but powerless to ignore the fact that one miserably hurt woman was being hunted by a pack of rich people who didn’t really need what she had in the boat, anyhow—David Hope slipped his mooring and ran to his helm.

 

~6~

Oona didn’t do him any favors. Instead of falling off the wind to fill her sails, the catamaran drifted clumsily backwards, with her jib and main flapping like damp laundry. He eased their sheets and played the rudders, coaxing them to bite the water. At last, the sails bellied. He sheeted both in hard.

But heavily laden with food, water, beer and wine and fuel, she was not the light-footed ballerina she’d been yesterday when she saved him from the berserk Vermont. Nor was she in her element in the landlocked harbor.

The cliffs and nearby hills played hell with the wind. Here it blew a stiff breeze from the southeast; there a lull; then a hard gust from the north. In the dark there was no reading the water surface to see where it was coming from next. The catamaran picked up speed. Buffeted by a wind shift, she fell back.

When her course from Hope’s mooring to the anchored yacht carried her onto more open water, he felt the wind freshen and veer from the northeast. Praying it would hold and not suddenly back blast him with a huge gust in his face, Hope steered for a dark spot that would place him between Il Bacione and Sally’s rowboat.

“You bitch! Bring that back you controlling bitch!”

thundered against the hills. Hope ducked down to look under the sails. The yacht was close. They still hadn’t launched a boat. Sally was rowing hard, stroking a fairly straight course to nowhere, heading like a frightened animal for the dark.

Oona was accelerating at last. Hope felt a familiar tightening of his stomach. At speed in close quarters she had a grim habit of getting even more unwieldy. He would have his hands full slowing down before he overshot the frantically rowing Sally. To make matters worse, the distance between them was difficult to gauge in the dark. Where the water was streaked by shore lights and the brightly lit Il Bacione it was even harder to tell what was going on. All he knew for sure was that the distance between them was diminishing rapidly.

“Controlling bitch!” boomed suddenly in his ear. He ducked to look under the sails again. God, he was right on top of her. He threw his helm hard to port, headed up. Oona skidded sideways, almost crushing Sally’s dinghy.

“Grab this!”

Hope threw the first free line he found. He missed her boat, but Sally lunged and plucked it out of the water.

“Wrap it around something!”

Oona was starting to move again, as her sails filled. She began sliding past the dinghy. Tangled in the heaped gear, Sally couldn’t find anything to tie on to. The rope started burning through her hands. She dropped it, lunged to the bow, found the painter tied there and threw that mooring line to Hope. He caught it on the fly and secured it to Oona’s port hull’s stern cleat.

Forging ahead, the catamaran dragged the dinghy further from the brightly lit yacht.

“Where the hell did he come from? You bitch, you got a boyfriend already? Where’s that fucking tender you drag-ass wops!”

“Quick!” yelled Hope. “Get the stuff aboard.”

He set Oona for the harbor mouth, a half mile away, locked the helm, and jumped down the dive steps. “Pass it to me.”

First aboard was the precious rebreather. And now he was partaking of a felony. While the “few pieces of gear” he humped aboard next could outfit a re-make of “Sea Hunt:” three heavy camera boxes, several padded bags, an aluminum case of clanking metal, two heavy sea bags, and finally six compressed air and gas tanks and a portable generator.

Hope looked over his shoulder to see where they were headed. Lark Bank’s green flasher still on the right, Scotch Bank’s red to the left. But Oona was veering to starboard, straying out of the channel.

“That it? Get on. Get on.” He grabbed her hand and pulled her aboard and shoved her up the steps. When she was safe in the cockpit he inhaled what felt like his first breath of air in five minutes.

He let the dinghy’s painter out so that it rode between Oona and his own inflatable, which was trailing on a longer line. Praying their lines didn’t foul, he climbed up after Sally, grabbed the helm and nudged the cat toward the middle of the channel. The Lark Bank green was coming up fast. Two more minutes and they would be out of the harbor.

Sally was laughing wildly. “That was fantastic. You looked like this huge white bird flying to my rescue. I got it all. I got it all. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

In thirty seconds, the speeding catamaran pulled between the flashing red cone and green can that buoyed Lark and Scotch Banks. Ahead, a huge black night sky filled with stars loomed over dark, empty deep water. Almost there. Then behind them Hope heard the high-pitched roar of powerful outboard engines.

The pursuit was clearly visible, four or five people on Il Bacione’s high-speed tender waving halogen spot lights.

“They don’t see us yet,” said Sally and indeed the twin engine inflatable was veering toward the Scotch Bank side of the channel.

“They will,” said Hope. The halogen spots were slashing all over channel and his prediction came true with a vengeance. One moment the triangles of Oona’s sails were cutting dark swaths from the brilliant stars; the next they reflected snow white the first beam that struck them.

“There’s the bitch!” Sally’s husband voice roared across the water.

“Jesus H!” said Hope. “He brought the megaphone.” It would be almost funny, if people weren’t racing around dark, reef-studded waters at sixty miles an hour.

“I told you he gasses on. You should hear him at a Wildscreen film festival with a drink in one hand and a mike in the other. What are we going to do?”

“Do? We’re not going to do anything, we’re caught.”

“No!”

“Sally, they can go four times as fast as me on my best day.”

“No. No. There must be a way.”

“Silly bitch. I’ll put you in jail.”

Hope looked toward the shoal water beyond the Lark Bank buoy and thought, I do not want to be a fucking knight in shining armor.

There were five or six fathoms immediately outside the channel, plenty to float Oona. But further into shore, closer to Burt Point, reefs lurked just below the surface. At night, he could see no clues indicating where they lay.

“Can you steer for a second?” Hope asked.

“I never steered a sailboat.”

“Just pretend it’s a motor boat and head right there.” Sally clapped both hands on the helm and stood behind it, stiff as Captain Ahab awaiting a hail from the masthead. “There! Left of that green flasher.”

Hope switched on his forward-looking depth finder and the Global Positioning System and ran forward to raise the dagger board into its trunk in the starboard hull. With Oona’s draft reduced from eight feet to three and a half, he scrambled back to the cockpit and took the helm.

Il Bacione’s inflatable was catching up fast.

“Open that hatch,” Hope told Sally. “Put on a life jacket.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to pray that tender driver is making his first visit to the B.V.I.”

Hope turned the boat downwind and let out the sails. Then he steered straight at the loom of the land. The cliffs rose like a dark brow against the stars. Eying the rapidly changing images on his depth monitor, and the numbers spooling on the G.P.S., he drove the big cat into the shoal water so close to the beach that he could see waves breaking in white foam.

“Run him aground!” Sally’s husband bellowed in his megaphone. “We’ll nail him on the beach. Hey, controlling bitch, your boyfriend’s gonna wreck his boat on account of you. You picked yourself a doozy, fella. Hope you have insurance.”

The tender roared closer. When less than ten yards separated the two craft, it slowed to match Oona’s eight knots and in doing so, sank down from its surface-skimming plane until its powerful engines were digging deep in the water.

Half-blinded by their lights, Hope veered closer to the beach, where the darting spots illuminated the breakers smashing the shore. Sally said, “Do you know where you’re going?”

One eye on the G.P.S., the other glued to the depth finder, Hope muttered, “My cook did a little dope running in her youth.”

“What cook?”

“The cook some charterers pay extra for.”

The inflatable growled nearer.

“Look out!” cried Sally. “Here they come!”

The inflatable was suddenly bearing down on them, angling swiftly alongside. Two burly crewman were scrambling onto the rubber sides, braced to jump, and Hope could only conclude that they were drunk as skunks to take such a chance.

“Don’t!” he yelled. “You’ll break your fucking necks.”

“We’re coming aboard,” Sally’s husband roared into his megaphone. “Back your jib!”

Hope’s depth finder finally showed him the reef he’d been praying for. “Your husband,” he told Sally, “has been reading too much Patrick O’Brian.” He wrenched the helm hard right and steered inshore of the reef, trying to squeeze Oona’s wide hull through a narrow channel between the coral and the rocks.