“How about it, Ned?” he said to his friend. “Shall we cast off?”
The older man looked at Jeanne, swallowed, then looked away.
“Yes,” he said. “Tell Gary to untie the mooring lines, come aboard, and haul in the anchor.”
“Let me go,” said Jeanne, struggling.
“Take it easy, honey,” Carl said. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
She hit him in the face with her right hand and pulled away, but he simply grabbed her with both arms in a bear hug and held her close. He grinned down at her.
With all her strength Jeanne screamed for help.
It was ten twenty when Neil and Jim brought Vagabond in close to the municipal dock at Point Lookout. Earlier they’d noticed many boats on the water, especially coming down the Potomac. Two vessels had been close to foundering because of the masses of people aboard, but these sights hadn’t prepared them for the hysteria and chaos they now encountered at the docks.
“Bring her around into the wind, Jim,” Neil ordered from the port cockpit. He’d already lowered the mizzen and genoa and was sailing now with just the main. “We’re going to anchor off. Swing her! Swing her!”
As Jim finally brought the boat around into the wind thirty yards from the dock Neil rushed forward and threw out the thirty-five-pound CQR anchor.
“Drop the mainsail!” he shouted back, and Jim rushed out of the wheelhouse.
When they had the sail secured and the anchor well hooked, Vagabond’s stern lay only about twenty-five feet from one end of the T formed by the main dock.
“What do we do now?” Jim asked, looking with amazement at the scene before them. Already a dozen people had rushed down to their end of the dock and were shouting at them.
“Go get your .22,” Neil replied coldly. While Jim went below to get his rifle Neil considered the situation. He’d already decided during the sail over that if the Foresters didn’t appear immediately— Vagabond would be easy to spot, even in this chaos—then he would make one quick sweep around the docks and after thirty minutes get the hell back to Crisfield. Seeing the anarchy ashore made him question whether he should risk even a brief sortie off the boat. Certainly he would wait half an hour, but was there any sense in going ashore?
Jim emerged beside him with the .22.
“Is it loaded?” Neil asked.
“No.”
“Load it.”
While Jim loaded the .22—in full view of the crowd on the dock, Neil noted with satisfaction—Neil wondered whether he could risk sending Jim ashore. It was important to him to get more food aboard, and that he couldn’t expect Jim to handle. Whether there would be any chance to buy, barter, or steal any food he didn’t know, but it was worth a trip into town to find out.
“I’m going ashore,” he said to Jim.
“But do you know what the Foresters all look like?” Jim asked.
“Frank showed me photographs,” Neil replied quickly. “I want you to… I want you to shorten the anchor line twenty feet so we’ll be farther away from the dock. Don’t let anyone aboard.”
“Aren’t we going to help some of these people?” Jim asked.
“Yes,” Neil answered, still staring at the crowd, whose numbers were still growing. “But not until we know how many of our own people we’ll be sailing with.”
“Okay,” said Jim. “But what do I do if someone tries to board us? I can’t shoot them.”
“No, I guess not,” he said after a pause. “Try to keep them off with bluff. If you can’t, I’ll be back and we’ll take it from there.”
Neil climbed down into the dinghy and had Jim pay out the line so he would be blown slowly down onto the dock by the wind. When he was less than ten feet away, he stood up in the dinghy and shouted for silence from the crowd.
“I’m coming ashore,” he announced loudly. “In half an hour we’re sailing across the bay to Crisfield. At that time we’ll take passengers who want to get to Crisfield. Until then you all wait on the dock. Do you understand?”
A few nodded eagerly as if they were anxious to please; others started shouting. Neil ignored them all, signaled to Jim to pay out ten more feet of line, and soon pulled himself up onto the dock. Steadfastly ignoring the people pressing in around him, he watched Jim pull the empty dinghy back toward Vagabond. Then he began pushing his way through the crowd to get to land. He looked closely at the clusters of refugees along the docks, searching for the Foresters, hoping that they had seen Vagabond sail in and would be here on the dock. But they weren’t. If they were alive and in Point Lookout, they would have to be at another marina or else somewhere away from the waterfront for some reason. He couldn’t imagine what such a reason might be.
When he reached the marina office, he went in and questioned a harried and frightened teenager, the only one there, who knew nothing about anyone looking for a trimaran. Outside, Neil looked toward the two marinas to the north but decided he’d go into town first to check there and see if he could buy some supplies.
He had started toward the street, automatically looking at everyone in sight, when he saw a figure running along the street shouting for help, a girl, a young girl. Trying to catch what she was screaming, Neil abruptly realized that she looked something like the picture he’d seen of Lisa. She ran past him and turned into the entrance of the municipal marina, still running and now moving away from him.
“Lisa!” he shouted.
The girl stopped and looked around. It must be her.
“Lisa Forester!” he shouted and ran over to her.
“Who… who are you?” she asked.
“Neil Loken, Frank Stoor’s captain,” he answered quickly. “I’ve come—”
“Come quick!” Lisa cried. “I think they’re kidnapping my mother!”
“What!?”
“Some men took my mother on their boat, and I heard her scream and they’re leaving!”
“Show me,” said Neil.
Lisa began running back along the street with Neil running beside her.
“There!” she shouted, without slowing her pace, and she pointed at a long, low yawl that was slipping away from a nearby dock. “She’s on that boat.”
“You’re sure?” Neil asked, looking into the young stranger’s eyes.
“Yes! Yes! Please save her!”
Neil ran down the embankment and out onto the dock, and in one motion dove into the water. A part of him felt uncertain and ridiculous, but it was no time for second thoughts. Where was Lisa’s father?
As he surfaced after his first six strokes he realized that the yawl was easing up over its anchor and he was gaining on it quickly. There was one man in the cockpit and another handling the anchor line. They didn’t seem to notice him.
In another twenty strokes he was even with the vessel’s raked stern and, grabbing a cleat, he hauled himself up over the transom and onto the afterdeck. When he stood up, the man in the cockpit, a man in his forties, caught sight of him.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
Neil walked forward, stepped down into the cockpit, smiled at the man, and walked down into the cabin. A big bearded man was standing in the galley way with his back to Neil, and beyond him was a woman, barely visible past the man’s bulk. Carl swung around when he heard Neil, and the two men confronted each other.
“Excuse me,” Neil said and walked past Carl. The woman, crouching at the far end of the cabin, had a butcher knife in her hand. It was Jeanne Forester. He was startled by the sudden impact of her tensed animal beauty, accentuated by her gleaming wide dark eyes and the long black hair falling wildly across one side of her face.
“Hey, Ned!” Carl shouted up to the cockpit. “Who is this guy?”