Olly too seemed to have regained his high spirits. Frank sometimes spent a day aboard Scorpio as captain and, back aboard Vagabond, Olly entertained his friends with exaggerated praise for the “oldness” of Scorpio, claiming nothing was truly beautiful until it was “at least sixty.”
“She’s as bald and toothless as me,” he said, “but she can still bite.”
Olly was aboard Vagabond when they spotted their first vessel. Jim was alone at the helm in an overcast dawn, little different from each of the last several days. Neil was curled up on a wheelhouse cushion behind him. In the galley Jeanne had just begun to parcel out the small bits of dried fish and dried fruit that would be their morning meal. Visibility was only about a mile, and Jim was sleepy at the end of an uneventful watch. Vagabond was ghosting along at only three or four knots in a light wind, so he glanced mainly at the compass. There was nothing to see out on the water except the same gray slate they’d been staring at for so long.
And then, after exchanging a few idle words with Jeanne and yawning, Jim glanced ahead and saw, so large and clear and close that it was as if God had that very instant set it down in the sea in front of them, a long gray submarine. Vagabond was sailing forward, barely rocking, and there, ahead and a little to port, lay a submarine. With a red star. A Soviet submarine.
For several moments Jim stood staring in disbelief at this gray dawn’s apparition. Then, almost incredulous, he turned to Neil.
“Neil!” he hissed in a loud whisper, as if his voice might reveal the fifty-foot trimaran’s location to the enemy.
Neil sat up slowly rubbing his eyes. “Mmmhuh?”
“A submarine. Dead ahead.”
Groggy, Neil stood up and peered forward.
“Living God,” he murmured.
Jeanne, aware of suppressed sounds from above, came to the hatchway entrance and looked up.
“What’ll I do?” Jim asked in a low voice.
“Hold your course.” Neil knocked on the wheelhouse floor to awaken Olly, who was asleep below.
“All hands!” he called in a sharp but low voice.
“What’s happening?” Jeanne asked from the hatchway, then climbed the three steps and looked out: ahead and off to port, now only two hundred yards away, was the submarine, fully surfaced, with a dozen men on the main deck and several in the conning tower. The boat was immense: almost two football fields long; it was like sailing past an island. Even as she watched, a gun—some sort of artillery—emerged from the forward deck. Several men clustered around it. She saw several officers in the conning tower looking at them through binoculars.
In his underwear Olly poked his head into the wheelhouse, hair disheveled, sleepy-eyed, the bones of his ribs showing prominently. He blinked at the gray monster. They were going to pass within a hundred feet of it. He could see two sailors pissing off the bow, and he could also see the eight-foot naval gun being swiveled into position to fire on Vagabond.
“Raise your arms!” Olly shouted to them. “Raise your arms! It’ll help their morale.”
Neil lifted his arms in surrender, as did Jeanne. Jim adjusted his position so that he could steer with his thighs and chest, and then he too raised his arms.
“Sheila, get on up here!” Olly shouted. “And bring Skip. Mac!” He himself, arms raised, clad only in his underdrawers, walked into the cockpit, closer to the enemy. When Sheila came on deck, she took in the scene in stunned silence and slowly raised her arms in surrender.
As quiet and softly as a feather drifting in a pond, Vagabond was now gliding past the Russian submarine, less than ninety feet away. On its deck stood almost twenty Soviet sailors, staring in disbelief. In Vagabond’s cockpit stood three men, two women, and a child, all with their arms raised in surrender, facing the barrel of a cannon aimed directly at them. From the conning tower three Soviet officers were conferring agitatedly. As Vagabond sailed gently by the gun crew turned a wheel and kept the cannon trained amidships. One of them was looking to the conning tower for instructions. The submarine crew had quite possibly discharged up to twelve missiles in the past two months and presumably killed hundreds of thousands, more likely millions, of people they had never seen. Now they had a puny cannon aimed at seven people they could see.
An officer on the conning tower shouted something at Vagabond; he sounded angry, and shouted again. Vagabond was now sailing serenely away from the submarine and was already a hundred and fifty feet off.
“Shouldn’t we heave to?” Macklin asked in a whisper.
“Keep sailing!” Neil replied quietly, his arms still raised.
Again the Russian shouted, this time to his own men, and there was a flurry of activity in the conning tower. A sailor raced down the ladder to the deck. Vagabond sailed on. The cannon swiveled to follow her. A single shot would blow Vagabond to bits.
“We’d better heave to,” Sheila said urgently to Neil.
But Neil and Olly were both grinning. “Keep sailing!” Olly shouted happily.
They sailed on. Slowly, softly, as if she were tiptoeing past a sleeping giant, Vagabond bore away from the great metal leviathan that threatened to destroy them. For a panicky moment Neil was convinced that the captain of the sub was going to wait until the range presented a challenge to his gun crew and then blast them out of the water. Then that moment passed. The Russian gun crew, or most of it, dispersed; now they seemed to be occupied with a different problem. The strange, otherworldly meeting of the great gray engine of destruction and the white sailing vessel was ended.
Still Neil and the others stood with their arms raised.
“Can’t I put my arms down now?” Skippy complained.
“Yes,” said Neil with strange seriousness. “You can lower your arms. We’ve beaten them.”
As they all lowered their arms Jeanne stared at the distant smudge of gray on the horizon and then looked at Neil.
“Beaten them?” she asked.
“No, not beaten them,” he said, correcting himself and still looking thoughtful. “But we won the only way we could have.”
Olly slapped Macklin on the back and gave Sheila a hug and kiss.
“We showed ’em, didn’t we?” he said, grinning wildly. “They didn’t dare fire a shot. Totally bluffed ’em.”
Vagabond ghosted on ahead.
All that day they celebrated their “victory” over the Russian submarine, rafting themselves to Scorpio for over an hour to make sure Olly had a chance to tell everyone the story. They broke out some of the last Mollycoddle rum and partied. They were less than seven hundred miles from the equator and began planning another celebration for that nautical event. They even caught a fifteen-pound fish, their first in four days.
It was nine days since they’d left St. Thomas, and with the fear of the plague disappearing, Jim and Lisa were even accepted as crew members back aboard Scorpio, Jim being a welcome fresh hand at the tedious task of pumping and Lisa happy to be back with some of the young people again.
Neil himself created his own celebration: that evening he again made love to Jeanne. With Frank seeming to have withdrawn from everybody, he went to her cabin openly, while Macklin and Sheila were on watch. The lovemaking with Jeanne was more tender than the first time, a long, quiet coming together that, strangely, left them both in tears. Afterward Jeanne talked in a long rush of her hopes for Lisa and Skip and of their finding a haven. For the first time Neil found himself sharing her hopes, even as he noticed with a start the boney knees and protruding ribs of Skip lying in the other berth. To bury his fears, to bury their fears, they made love again.