‘Maybe it just went offline again. Same problem as before.’
‘Maybe. That’s what I said, but Nic’s worried.’
‘Fair enough. You know what to do — it’s partly why you’re there, after all. Take no risks. Head for their last location as fast as you can.’
‘We are doing.’
‘Good. And watch out yourselves …’
‘Why?’
‘It looks as though this ARkStorm everyone’s been so worried about isn’t going to hit Long Beach and LA after all. It’s going to hit Mexico. Everywhere from Tijuana to Puerto Banderas and on down south. Wherever Katapult8 and the girls are, they’re likely to be right in the worst of it.’
EIGHTEEN
Katapult8 had topped forty-four knots soon after contact with Maxima ended. When she’d hit the whale she’d been sailing faster than she’d ever sailed before. The only parts of her that broke the surface were the J hooks and the long rudders. Under normal circumstances, the whale would have heard her coming and dived. Even had she not, the leading J hook would hardly have touched her and both yacht and cetacean would have survived the collision undamaged. But the whale was one of a hunting pod of nine powerful fifty-footers that had become wrapped in Pilar’s nets away south in the middle of last night. They were lucky to have survived so far — many of the other ocean-dwellers caught in the nets around them had failed to do so. But, working together, the bull, the cow and the near-grown calf of the main family group and the half-dozen others that swam and hunted with them had kept at the surface, still able to breathe as the polymer mesh billowed around them like a gigantic, undulating spider’s web the best part of a kilometre long.
Katapult8’s J hook bounced off the humpback’s head, doing only a little damage to the whale. But it snagged on Pilar’s illegal drift net wrapped around its massive face. The leading edge of the hook was razor-sharp and it sliced through the net easily, cutting a hole large enough to let the family pod of whales swim free and offer the other six huge creatures a chance of escape as well. But even the slightest resistance interfered with the physical laws that Katapult8 relied on to keep moving in this manner at these speeds. The starboard hooks sank deeper. The net slid up the uprights away from the sharpest section. It began to bunch up and to offer more resistance. The hull sank further. The port-side hooks became involved. At first they too cut the net. But then they also began to sink and the net entrapped them.
One second Katapult8 was hurling across the wind at forty-five knots; little more than a second later her J hooks were enmeshed. A second later still, her rudders were trapped. The hull itself, under the pressure of that massive sail, strove to keep moving at forty-five knots. The hooks in the net were forced to come almost to a dead stop as they pulled the deadweight sea anchor of the drift net, made heavier still by the corpses of Pilar’s enormous final catch of hundreds of dead and dying tuna — and the energetic attempts of six fifty-foot humpbacks to follow their friends to freedom.
Before Liberty or any of her crew had the faintest idea of what was happening, Katapult8 pitchpoled. The J hooks snapped, pulling her bows downward. The three sharp forecastles punched into the back of a wave all at once. They stopped moving forward, as though they had hit a wall. But the sail did not. It pulled the stern and the women in the cockpit there out of the water as the rudders, still caught in the net, shattered, letting the poop leap up off the surface and high into the air like a rocket lifting off. Katapult8 stood on her nose for a nanosecond, with the sail and the stumps of the J hooks parallel to the water. The three hulls between them pointed their bows towards the bottom of the ocean and their sterns towards the top of the sky. Liberty, Flo, Emma and Maya were hurled out of the hull, flying through the air until their safety lines snapped taut.
Katapult8 flipped over. The top of the sail slammed into the water at a speed which made the surface seem as hard as rock. The sail snapped free of the central hull which somersaulted over it and crashed upside down into the water beside it with an impact hard enough to smash all three hulls open. The composite of which the hulls were made was as light as it was strong, but it was not as buoyant as the sail or the J hooks. Burst open, they were still weighed down with kit: microwaves, tackle which included their emergency equipment, distress signals, radio and supplies. The instant the air exploded out of them the three hulls immediately began to sink, dragging the crew, still secured by their safety lines, down into the depths. Even though their top-flight Gill ocean-going lifejackets began to inflate automatically, the stunned and disorientated women would all have died then. But the net that had put them in this terrible danger saved them — for the moment, at least. The sinking hulls became trapped in it just as the J hooks and the tall rudders had. A kilometre of net, with most of its floats intact, was more than enough to slow its descent. And, ironically, the net stopped the ruined hull from sinking, while there was still just enough length on the lifelines to allow Liberty, Flo and the others to reach the restless, choppy surface.
Liberty’s head burst through the surface and she pulled in a great shuddering breath in spite of the fact that her ribs complained agonizingly and part of the air going into her was compromised by saltwater foam. The sharp-edged chop which had seemed so trivial from Katapult8’s cockpit now seemed dangerously overwhelming. And, in spite of her deep-water clothing, it felt icily cold. Her field of vision was reduced from the furthest horizon to the nearest wave-top. She was still looking wildly around and preparing to call out when the next wave surged under her. Her head jerked back under water because the line still secured to Katapult8 was a foot too short to keep her above the wave crests. Cold pierced her eyes. Brine hit her adenoids like acid.
Liberty’s brain kicked fully alive and the adrenaline of shock and fear joined the cocktail of elation and exhaustion, coffee and protein in her blood. She began to look around for her friends. But the water was thick and salty. Her vision was limited. She could see vague shapes; some movement, and nothing more. The billowing net formed a lumpy, disturbing background to what little she could make out. She did not know it, but at least the whales had gone. It occurred to her that she should use this moment underwater to curl over, grab the handle of her safety knife and cut her line before she was dragged further down. It wouldn’t take much: two more feet and she would be a mermaid.
Fighting to ignore the pains in her chest and back, momentarily irritated by the fact that her buoyant PFD was fighting her every inch of the way, Liberty used the tension on the lifeline to pull herself down until she could reach the knife sheathed against her right calf. She slid it free and cut the line in one blessedly swift and fluid motion. At once she exploded to the top, seeming to burst out of the water until half her length was above the surface like a breaching whale. But then she settled back in, gasping, choking, blinking. It took her a moment to realize two extremely worrying things: she had dropped the knife as she exploded upwards. And as soon as she reached the surface, she started drifting, taken by the wind and the current.
Her next thought, once again, was for the others. ‘Hey!’ she called. ‘Can anybody hear me? Flo? Emma? Maya? Flo?’ A wave slapped her in the face and filled her mouth. She choked into silence, then remembered her basic first-aid training. You can’t help others until you are safe yourself. Kicking her legs wildly, waving her arms and wrenching her body, she managed to swing herself round in the water. And there, immediately behind her, sitting high on the wave-tops, was the solid composite sail. Lighter and less encumbered than the hulls, it was buoyant and steady. She kicked towards it desperately, fearing that the wind which had powered it so far would blow it beyond her reach. But no. After a moment or two’s exhausting effort, she found she had forced her unwilling body and recalcitrant personal flotation device through the restless water until she could touch it. The next problem was the sail’s height. Even lying on its side, it formed a disturbingly substantial wall. The thick leading edge rather than the slim aft blade was closest to her. Even flat on the surface, this section of the sail was more than a metre sheer. After a couple of convulsive attempts to get up on to it, she discovered that although she could reach up over its rounded black circumference, she couldn’t get a grip secure enough to allow her to pull herself aboard.