Cayman Brae was like a godsend. He’d been alone for too long with his thoughts and Mother, who taunted him, telling him he was a fool and that he would die alone at sea. But his spirit guide deposited him instead at the Cayman Islands. The Caymans were composed of three islands: Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brae. All were at low elevations, but Cayman Brae rose 140 feet into the sky with its limestone bluffs, and it became a beacon for him that morning after leaving the inhospitable Dominican shore. He saw Cayman Brae rise from the water like some sort of Loch Ness Monster, yet it was nonthreatening, beautiful. He stayed on at Cayman Brae for two weeks while true craftsmen worked on his mast and windows and whatever else needed repair, paying in funds still available to him on his mother’s life insurance policy. As for the more serious problems with navigational equipment-nav, as the seasoned sailors called it-computer hardware and software damage, he’d have to await his arrival in America. In Cayman Brae he learned just how close he was to America, to Florida waters.
While remaining in the safe port during that time period, Warren had wisely restrained from any hunting and killing until all repairs were finished and paid for. He’d stocked new food, fixed broken equipment, beefed up weak points in the boat and rigging, repaired old sails and got some new ones. After that, he began exploring each of the three islands in the chain, and while doing so, he began to collect a handful of willing victims.
Now he raced for this safe port again, low on food but with his boat intact and sound. He sat at the navigation station, studying weather maps. Sitting in this area of the cabin was a bit like sitting at the center of a teacup; at the center of the cup was the nav station. His chair faced a phalanx of electronic equipment, blipping radar screens, computers, radios and instruments towering to the cabin’s ceiling. At the top was a portable CD player strapped in with bungee cords. From here, he could read wind speed true, wind direction and wind speed apparent in the bright red letters of the light-emitting diodes before him.
The chair and the table were gimbaled, so as the boat leaned to one side or the other, Warren could sit perfectly level to work, eat or drink. He studied the weather maps every day, each generated from his own on-board computer weather station. A lean man at six-two, he averaged 170 pounds but burned them like a panther. On a one-man sailboat where speed and progress depended on reading and agilely responding to wind and waves, his incessant activity-trimming and changing sails, tweaking this, modifying that-translated into miles between him and Tampa Bay, the Florida authorities and the FBI.
So now Warren was blasting along on a calm and unhurried West Caribbean wind at about twenty-five knots, allowing the autopilot to steer while he checked the maps again. From what his speed and the maps were telling him, he knew now that he must rig the new sail, his old one having been shredded by the storm at his back after an abrupt wind shift. Warren went above deck and wrestled with an enormous snake-actually, a giant sock encasing a new sail which he’d purchased in Sanibel Island during his stay there. He knew it would take him two, possibly three hours to get the new sail up, more if the old sail were to get knotted in the rigging. But it was his only chance to hook up with the Caribbean sailboat race called the Jamaica Run that he intended to infiltrate and ride in on. It made perfect sense, if he could time it exactly right, for entering Cayman was like finding a postage stamp out there, and the race would act both as a guide-thanks to more experienced sailors than he-and as a cover. Entering port at Cayman amid such confusion and mayhem would afford the perfect cover. If he could only pull it off. The new sail, too, with its sundial face, would fit right in with the racers.
The sock system made it a great deal easier for one person to handle such a large sail. Still, it took an hour just to hook each eye. But then he was ready to raise one end of the enclosed sail to the top of the mast on a halyard. It took another hour and a half, using a system of lines and pulleys on the sock itself, to raise the sail to its full height. He secured lines to the color-coded lines which fed back into the boat’s cockpit and allowed him to raise, lower or reef his sails with assurance. He now tugged on a line, and the sock slowly and by increments rose, heavy as hell, finally to the top of the mast, where it billowed sheetlike in the strong trade wind.
Satisfied, Warren Tauman pounded his chest at his single-handed accomplishment, sweat pouring from his brow, the sun burning into his scalp, his tan lines showing now.
He went below again and checked his course. The autopilot had kept him nearly perfect. He made up for the machine and reset the autopilot before going to his port charts. He had charts for Brazil, South America, Puerto Rico, Mexico and other places, as well as the Cayman and Jamaican Islands. He had to have a chart for any port he might visit. He’d have to check in with the port authorities in any country he visited, and thus far his alias had held and he’d aroused no suspicions in the Cayman Islands, but he planned on creating a new set of papers and a new alias before reaching the islands, just to be sure. It hadn’t hurt that he’d greased a few palms there during his last visit. He knew who to see and where to see them.
The Tau Cross carried a system that captured satellite photographs around the clock, and Warren analyzed the photos religiously while alone at sea; it only made good sense and was a safety precaution to do so. Still relatively new at being a sailor, he’d learned much during his crossing of the great Atlantic, in a kind of ordeal by fire. He knew that in the southern latitudes, storms rolled out of nowhere without warning, so he must be ever vigilant. On his weather charts, these low-pressure storms appeared to be so many malignant growths, and from these big lows many small tentacles grew, twisted and gnarled to become as treacherous as the mother storm. It was from one of these he was now running.
He had an eighty-five-foot-high mast, enough to cause alarm in any storm. Thank God he had two large inboard motors to fall back on. These motors also charged the batteries that ran the autopilot, computers, radar and other electronics. Losing power was high on Warren’s nightmare list, for this meant losing communication, information and the crucial help of the autopilot, which freed him to cook, clean, repair, navigate, sleep and do other extracurricular activities, such as enjoy himself with the ladies whenever one was brazen and stupid enough to choose to step aboard his death ship.
He was mildly worried now. Pushing a boat twenty-four hours a day was a recipe for system failure, as an old sailor in Key West had once warned him. He recalled his trouble coming over, the moment when the boat fell off a wave like a truck from a bridge. He’d felt the sickening jolt in his bones and teeth, as when Mother had once struck him so hard he’d fallen unconscious. The ship, as it had come crashing down off that wave, had shivered and flexed her entire length like a dying horse, and he knew something big was wrong. He prayed to his gods even as he stared out at the one remaining mast that night to see it bowing like a bone about to break. He could see that a metal fitting clasp, holding a crucial support stay halfway up the mast, had snapped, and that it just hung there, a useless ornament blowing in the storm. By then his other two, smaller masts were long gone. And by this time, Warren had done all he could to save the boat from capsizing, so all he was left with was the wheel. It took all his strength to hold the wheel against the storm while he’d continued to pray.