Out on the heaving after deck in the middle of the storm, Carlos Santiago stood beside the winch, scarcely able to believe his eyes. The whole thing was threatening to tear off its mountings. The steel cables running down to the net were writhing and twisting. The whole lot was fighting to pull itself back into the black depths even as the screaming motors were trying to tear Pilar forward.
‘What is it?’ bellowed Hernan, spokesman for the panicking crew. ‘Have we snagged a submarine? Are we tangled round the propellers of some massive cruise liner? What is it, Capitan?’
‘It must be a whale,’ said Carlos, shaken.
‘A whale? What sort of whale could do that?
‘Humpbacks,’ shouted Carlos, his voice breaking as his throat began to tear. ‘We must have netted a pod of humpbacks!’
But as he realized this, two things happened in such swift succession that none of them was able to decide which happened first and which second.
The cable parted, causing the whole back section of the boat to leap out of the water, propeller screaming as it found nothing to bite on but thin air.
And the screaming engine coughed and died.
SIXTEEN
At dawn the wind suddenly died. Katapult8 slowed to a dead stop and all four crewmembers stood side by side in the cockpit and looked around at the gathering brightness. Never one to sit on her hands and complain, Liberty decided, ‘Right. This is a good opportunity to fix some food. Emma and Maya, could you do the honours there? Coffee and bacon rolls. And Florence, can you shin up the sail and see what’s up with the running light and the AIS?’
As the off-watch team of Emma and Maya went below to heat up some food and coffee, the tall Australian redhead stepped up out of the cockpit and strode down the central hull, past the huge black wing of the sail, trailing her fingers along its surface like a proud owner petting a thoroughbred. The sail was a perfect aerofoil shape. The rear edge was a little thicker than a knife blade, but the leading edge was as wide as a mast. As she reached this edge, she paused, unclipped her safety harness from the deck lines and clipped it to a toggle set into the sheer composite cliff, then paused, looking up. The toggle she was connected to was set in a shallow groove running right up to the tip of the sail. Just beside it was a ladder of indented foot and hand-holds, designed to make it easy to climb the sail itself. With no further hesitation — as she had done countless times before — she set her toecap into the lowest rung and heaved herself up off the deck. The toggle slid up easily as she climbed nimbly upward. But should she slip and fall, it was designed to hold her safe like an inertia-reel seatbelt. There was no chance of Flo falling, even though the pitching of the hull in the restless early-morning chop was magnified up here.
Five minutes of vigorous climbing took Flo to the top of the sail and she stopped there, twisting the toggle so her harness held her safe as her hands came free. There was a little compartment up here which contained the VMS locator beacon and the electrical wiring that allowed the main battery below to power that and the signal light on the topmost tip. A moment’s inspection showed that the fault was simple — and easy to fix. A connection had come unfastened and the main power wire hung loose. Florence pushed the connection together, snapped the cover home and glanced up at the signal light which was now shining brightly and steadily just above her. ‘Good job, girl,’ she said to herself, and paused to look around.
The sky behind Katapult8 remained low, black and threatening but, for the moment, the heavens immediately above her were blue and clear, as though she was sailing through the eye of a storm. The ocean beneath her triple keel was choppy and unsettled — on the rougher side of moderate and rising force five on the Beaufort scale. And for every degree of movement at surface level, the top of the mast swung ten or more degrees. But Florence was used to the movement and luxuriated for a little longer in the privacy. The day dead ahead looked bright and welcoming, she thought, even if the threatening clouds covering half of it behind were repeated in the far distance, forming a thick charcoal line right across the southern horizon.
Even as Florence, frowning, took all this in, a wind stirred against her cheek and set her red curls dancing. A new wind, from a new direction. It puffed again, feeling somehow determined, promising. Florence knew what this meant. Liberty would want to be off at once. She checked the cover over the little electrical compartment once again and started back down the sail as fast as her safety line allowed. By the time she reached the cockpit and grabbed the mug of coffee and the huge bacon roll Emma and Maya had heated in the vessel’s tiny microwave, the wind that had kissed her cheek up aloft had swung round to the north-west and settled into a steady twenty knots.
As far as Liberty was concerned, after a night of hard sailing and tacking from reach to reach across a dead northerly, the new wind meant freedom and a renewed chance to win her bet with Richard. During the hours of darkness the sleek multihull had covered many miles at a steady twenty knots. But most of those miles had been along courses to the south-west or the south-east as she tacked across the following breeze — far too few for comfort had been dead south. But the crew pulled together, working through fatigue to that plateau where a mixture of exhaustion and adrenaline worked on their systems like a potent drug. This was the level they wanted to attain for their most testing competitions. Every woman there felt utterly at one with the sea, the wind, the multihull and her crewmates. The fact that they had hardly slept in twenty-four hours, that they had loosened their watertight clothing only to relieve themselves, that nothing chafed any longer — not even the long emergency blade that each one wore down her right calf or the safety harness they all wore beneath the life preservers — all became nothing in comparison to the possibilities unleashed by the clear dawn sky, the steady new wind and the broad blue ocean ahead. Not to mention the enhancing effect as mugs of coffee strong enough to dissolve coffee spoons and thick, hot bacon rolls hit their systems. The fiercely competitive Liberty had begun to suspect that her father in Maxima, powered by those two big Caterpillar motors, must be breathing down her neck. Especially now that the AIS was back online and he would be able to pinpoint their precise location every moment of every day and night during the next twenty hours or so it would take them to reach Puerto Banderas. ‘Right,’ she ordered, ‘let’s do some serious sailing while we can.’
If Florence, Emma or Maya had had any second thoughts about the height of the waves, the reliability of the wind, the weather surrounding them or the wisdom of pushing their vessel to the limit when they were further from land than they had planned — for dawn broke and the wind shifted at the outer jibe point of a south-western reach — it never occurred to them to say anything. They were a widely experienced team, used to working together, at that euphoric pitch which comes only once or twice in a lifetime. And although they planned to split up soon and each go their individual ways, preparing to battle the others during the waterborne heats of the Tokyo Olympics — they knew better than to question Liberty. In matters such as mutiny, she made Bligh of the Bounty look like Anne of Green Gables. Without a second thought, therefore, they drained their coffee, stuffed the last of the food in their mouths and fell to working their beautiful multihull. Under Liberty’s steady hand, the huge black composite sail soon grabbed the wind and the multiple hulls sat up on the surface and were skimming from wave-top to wave-top as Katapult8 pulled twenty-five, then thirty knots on a south-south-easterly course across the wind towards Puerto Banderas.