As far as Captain Sin was concerned, the storm tiger that had pursued him across the Pacific had not only arrived above his command, but it had also brought with it a whole range of bad-luck spirits. Intensified, the captain let slip, by the fact that this was his fourth command. And that, with Antoine, Guerrero and his contingent aboard, the ship’s complement was effectively forty-four. To most westerners these coincidences would have meant little, but Richard had spent enough time in Hong Kong and Shanghai to know that to the Chinese, the number four — which sounded unsettlingly close to the word ‘death’ in Mandarin — was the unluckiest number of all. And forty-four — ‘death-death’ — ranked up with seating thirteen for dinner, walking under ladders and kicking black cats out of your path in Western superstitions. Richard glanced down at the radio link through which he had just finished speaking to his superstitious and apoplectic captain, and shook his head. Then he turned to more immediate matters — though he had no more control over these than he had over what was happening in the Long Beach docks.
The super-competitive Liberty was teasing her father and his friends in the face of Richard’s wager, using the thick wind to drive Katapult8 relentlessly at more than the twenty knots Maxima was cruising at, and using the fault on her AIS, the congealing, clotting haze, the ruby dazzle and the gathering shadows of sunset to play a game of hide-and-seek with the watch-keepers. The huge composite mainsail was too good a target ever to escape the radar, though, and, when full dark came, she would have to switch on her riding lights — which included one bright star right at the tip of the massive sail itself. Unless that, like the automatic identification system transmitter right beside it, was also faulty. It was for this sail that Robin, lacking a sense of distance and scale, had mistaken the tall black fluke of a local humpback whale as it rolled over and over among the white horses. He looked at the back of his preoccupied wife, feeling he could almost read her thoughts, then he was in motion across the bridge.
Twenty knots was fast for Maxima, Robin reckoned, but not for Katapult8. The multihull’s crew was being tested, but by no means pushed to their limits. At twenty knots, they wouldn’t even be up on the J hooks that lifted her long hulls right out of the water and allowed her to fly up towards her top speeds in excess of forty knots. Were Robin in Liberty’s place, she would be running easy with two crewmembers on watch and the other two in the tiny little cabin below, heating up one of their pre-packed meals in the microwave, no doubt. And she would plan to ease back still further after sunset and dinner unless the wind got up and tempted them into something more challenging — or shifted, causing a change in the basic requirements of yacht handling.
Lowering the binoculars, she checked Maxima’s anemometer, which was adjusted for the ship’s own speed, and read the wind speed as though Maxima was dead in the water. The thick, hazy wind out there was moving at fifteen knots. Force four on the Beaufort scale. A moderate breeze which she could have estimated from the one-metre waves and the pink, foaming whitecaps. The state-of-the-art weather predictor suggested that the wind would strengthen in the early hours of the night, sometime during the first watch, she thought; strengthen and swing round to come down from the north. It was information that might have rung alarm bells had she not been so fully focused on Liberty’s probable problems with helming Katapult8 most efficiently. A brisk northerly would help Maxima as it would settle in right behind her. But a northerly would likely hinder Katapult8, for Liberty would have to stop playing hide-and-seek and start to tack from side to side — reach to reach — across the following wind if she was going to get the best out of her command as she ran due south. Katapult8 could run south at twenty knots across a fifteen-knot north-easterly wind forever, she reckoned, even with two on watch and two more making something hot to eat and drink. But once the wind went dead north, things would become more difficult.
Robin crossed to join Richard, who had come over from the radio and was now towering at the helmsman’s shoulder for a closer look at the navigational display. Maxima had come the better part of one hundred and eighty five miles south since setting sail. Katapult8 was an hour ahead, but she had made a slow start and was only fifteen miles distant, according to the radar. The instrumentation made it clear that if Robin looked away eastwards to port instead south-westwards on the starboard forequarter, which is where Katapult8 seemed to be, she would catch the first glimpse of the lighthouse on Cape San Quintin on the west coast of the Baja California, that long peninsula running parallel to the west coast of Mexico, separated from the mainland by the Gulf of California. And even as she realized this, the beam of the light itself gleamed white against the darkening mass of the land. Dragging Richard with her, she crossed to the port side of the bridge for a closer look.
In the distance, beyond the light which was already beaming out of blue-black velvety shadows, the tops of the Baja’s central mountain chain flamed as though they were erupting volcanoes as they picked up the last rays of the setting sun. And, above them, catching the light like a cross between a star and a ruby burning against the darkening vault of the sky, there was something else that caught her eye. At first she thought it was an aeroplane, but then she realized that it was lower and slower than a plane. And, even in the shapeless dazzle of the sunlight, it was the wrong shape — too fat and squat.
‘What is that?’ she breathed.
‘Thunderbird Two by the look of it,’ rumbled Richard.
And she saw at once that he was right. There, above the jagged peaks of the mountains, the airship Dragon Dream which they had seen yesterday above Los Angeles was heading southwards towards its destination in Mexico City. Robin smiled as though the distant gleam of the state-of-the-art dirigible was the face of an old friend, then she looked down at the peaks above which it was passing. Those would be the Cordillera running through Ensenada and Mexicali, she thought. The Sierra Juarez and the Sierra San Pedro Martir. The high points of the long backbone of the peninsula that rose to ten thousand feet here at one or two peaks. But only one or two. It faded into much lower elevations for most of the length of the peninsula before gathering again at the tip into the Sierra La Laguna.
The mountains of the Baja formed a watershed which transformed itself — after a valley filled by the mouth of the Gulf of California — into the much more massive coastal mountain system she had seen in Nic’s film of Puerto Banderas: the solid wall of the Sierra Madre mountains which began behind Mazatlán and ran on down the coast towards Puerto Vallarta and Acapulco, reaching heights of more than ten thousand feet consistently and repeatedly within a very few miles inland from the Pacific coast.
And no sooner had she thought of Nic than the man himself appeared. ‘Come on, you two,’ he called from the doorway at the aft of the bridge. ‘Sundown. Time for some drinks before we settle into supper. Alcohol-free, I’m afraid, Robin. But I think I can promise you something to eat that will be the equal of the last two meals we’ve shared.’
They lingered over their fruit-juice cocktails then ate, taking their time over a dinner that was every bit as delicious as any they had enjoyed so far. Captain Enrique Toro and chopper pilot Biddy McKinney joined them and proved witty and amusing companions, even though Nic ran a dry ship and the most powerful stimulant available was the after-dinner coffee. After coffee, they retired to Maxima’s cinema and Nic showed them the full film of his new Puerto Banderas home, inside as well as outside — a process further enlivened by Biddy’s wry commentary on the hair-raising things she had to do with the Bell in order to get most of the pictures.