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At dawn they were still twenty miles off the coast. An hour later land came into sight. Ten minutes after that a jet fighter-bomber, a French Mirage, streaked out of the sky from the west and passed with a roar directly over them.

Neil had made contingency plans for both air and sea attacks, and, being unarmed, their plans involved either surrendering or playing possum. They were already flying the Brazilian flag—homemade from a piece of sheet—but it would be difficult to surrender to a jet plane they had no radio contact with. As the jet shrieked past and began to climb and turn he shouted at everyone to get down into Frank’s cabin. He himself dashed below to prepare the flares. He didn’t know whether the jet would return or whether it would attack them if it did, but as Olly and Sheila passed him carrying Philip they exchanged pained glances, the look of soldiers marching to a battle they didn’t expect to win.

As he returned from the main cabin with the flares Neil had a chance to look back: the jet was making a long graceful sweep up the sky to the right, then around and back toward Vagabond. Neil was alone at the helm, making no effort to take evasive action, two smoke flares and two fire flares on the control panel shelf, a box of dry matches nearby. The plane grew rapidly larger, and Neil experienced the brief image of a man facing a firing squad. Then there was a brief flash from beneath the jet and almost simultaneously the rush and roar of the missile tearing past the trimaran. The jet shrieked past a second time.

His hands trembling, Neil lit one of the smoke flares and tossed it down into the main cabin. He lit the second and threw it down into the empty port cabin. Dark smoke billowed up out of both cabins within seconds as Neil returned to prepare to ignite one of the light flares. The missile had struck at least a half-mile ahead of Vagabond, but he doubted the pilot had been able to follow its trajectory. As the jet rose and swept to the right a second time the pilot would look back and see his target enveloped in dark smoke. Their hope lay in the pilot’s being satisfied with a probable kill.

But the jet returned. As Neil lit his third flare it fired a second missile. So close did the second shot come to Vagabond that Neil thought it might have gone through the mainsail; it burst less than a hundred yards in front of them. The bright flash of the lit flare must have looked to the pilot—if he could see it, which was doubtful— like a direct hit. The jet roared over the smoke-enshrouded trimaran, and Neil, coughing and almost overcome by the smoke, rushed forward and dropped the jib and mainsail. Then he rushed back through the smoke and down into the starboard cabin with the others. Thick black smoke was pouring out of two of Vagabond’s cabins into the air.

Neil’s hands were black, and one hand had been burned when he lit the third flare. Jeanne and the others looked at him, as if they were asking him to announce their fate. He didn’t have to tell them they hadn’t been hit, and only later did he realize that they didn’t even know they’d been fired on.

The jet didn’t return a fourth time. It returned to base apparently confident that it had prevailed in its battle with the trimaran.

After five minutes of waiting, with the smoke gradually getting worse even in the closed-off cabin, Neil and Olly went back up on deck. Both smoke flares were going out, but something was still burning in the galley. Neil had to go down and extinguish a smoldering rug. The whole interior of the main cabin was black with the smoke.

The others now climbed out of Jeanne’s cabin to survey the damage, but there was no damage. The multimillion-dollar aircraft had fired two highly sophisticated missiles at the plywood and Fiberglas sailboat, but, as Neil explained, they had been metal- or heat-seeking missiles. Vagabond, engineless, gave off no heat and had so little metal in her aluminum spars that the missile couldn’t find her. The pilot had been trained to fire in the general area of the target and let the missile do the fine tuning. Vagabond and her crew had been saved by modern technology.

Two hours later they raised sail again. After they had discussed their next course of action, they decided that they should get as far out of the area as possible: to run directly east for another sixty miles, which would put them fifty or sixty miles off the coast. They would have to do their best for Frank and Philip and Jim and Lisa without the help of the rest of the world. They were alone.

As they sailed on toward the equator the heat and humidity became stupefying; only the recurrent squalls, by refreshing their supply of water, kept them alive and sane.

All Neil felt he dared do for Frank was give him a second blood transfusion, but with the plague victims it was an hourly battle to try to cool off their bodies. The seawater was twenty degrees cooler than the air, and they used it continually. But over the next three days the fever raged on. Twice Lisa went into convulsions, twice she recovered. Jim jabbered on in some otherworldly hallucination about snow and cold and the bottom of the world, sometimes giggling hysterically.

On the third day, after Lisa had had her second bout of convulsions, Neil came down into the cabin and found Jeanne up on the berth with Lisa, her face buried on Lisa’s bare chest and neck, sobbing. For a moment Neil thought that Lisa must have died; a wave of sadness immobilized him. Then he noticed her rapid, shallow breathing and realized that Jeanne, who had been driving herself beyond reason, was suddenly giving up. Pressing her face and mouth against Lisa’s flesh was almost a kind of suicide.

He went up to the edge of the berth, gently pulled her back toward him and, as she wailed and struggled, less gently dragged her out of the cabin. With Olly and Sheila watching uncertainly, he took soap and seawater and scrubbed her face, neck, and arms. She struggled and cried like a child being punished. Neil even forced the soap rag inside her mouth before finally letting her go.

“Take her back to her own cabin,” he said quietly to Sheila. “Keep her there. I’ll take over responsibility for Jim and Lisa until Jeanne’s rested.”

Back belowdecks when he felt Lisa’s forehead, he was horrified: he’d never felt a human body so hot. He dispensed with the side cockpit pool and the towels and instead began throwing buckets of seawater directly over Lisa and Jim and the towels and clothing that wrapped their naked bodies. For half an hour he lugged the buckets down and poured the cool seawater over them. Later he’d have to bail out the cabin’s bilge.

Forty minutes later he went to see Jeanne in her cabin. She was alone and, after asking how she was and receiving a dull reply, he said to her, “I miss you, Jeanne.”

“Miss me?” she said, looking puzzled. “Oh,” she added, understanding.

“I know of no law saying I can’t love you,” he said. “Do you?”

“No,” she replied, not looking at him.

“Nor a law prohibiting your loving me,” he went on. “Is there?”

Her face still averted, she said, “Only a law of nature.”

“What law is that?”

“When a mother is threatened with the loss of her child, she loses a part of herself.”

“I see,” said Neil. “That I can’t help.”

“Nor can I,” said Jeanne.

“And I still miss you.”

“I know,” she whispered.

“There are no barriers between us now,” Neil said gently, “except those we erect in our own hearts.”

“I know,” she whispered again, crying softly. “But I can’t knock them down.”

“But what are they?” Neil asked gently.