But not for long. ‘This won’t do,’ said Liberty, rolling over and kneeling up again. ‘Did any of you see anything of Katapult8? If she’s still tangled in the net I’m game to get my lifejacket off and go down after the life raft.’
‘She’s gone,’ said Maya. ‘I saw her going as I cut my lifeline. I was pretty damn lucky not to go down with her.’
‘Don’t get ideas above your station,’ said Liberty. ‘That’s the captain’s job. But Katapult8’s gone, you’re sure?’
‘Deep six,’ said Maya. ‘Davy Jones. Full fathom five. Gone.’
‘Right. Then what I suggest is this, just for the time being. Flo, you snap your harness on to the inertia-reel toggle and you two tie the ends of your lifelines to Flo’s harness. I’ll do the same in a moment and that way we’ll all be secured. In the meantime, while things are relatively settled, I’ll stand up and take one good look around.’
While the other three were doing as she suggested, Liberty slowly and carefully pulled herself erect. In actual fact, the sail was pretty steady. Her footing on the black composite was quite secure. And yet Liberty felt as though she was on a tightrope. The situation went straight into her unconscious — the difference between walking along a metre-wide pavement on Knight Way outside her alma mater in Stanford and crossing a metre-wide ledge high in the Himalayas. Even erect, on the stable platform of the sail, her calf and thigh muscles jumped and her torso felt dangerously top-heavy, making her wave her arms for balance. The wind didn’t help, blowing steadily from the north-west. But after a few moments she straightened and her eyes cleared.
She saw the serpentine pattern of bright orange floats more clearly and followed the bobbing tail of the things across the restless ocean until they ended in that bright, flashing light made more vivid by the gathering darkness out there. It was a phenomenon she found acutely disturbing, given that it was early morning and ought to have been getting brighter — not darker. But then, right in the very distance, far beyond that flashing light, she saw something else. A shape back there in the shadows that looked to her like some kind of vessel. A small one, running without lights, that seemed to come and go like a ghost ship. It was so vague and fleeting that she wondered whether it was anything more than a coincidence of shadows and wishful thinking.
And Liberty was still trying to focus on this, to get some kind of idea exactly what and where the mysterious vision was, when something hit her on the back of the head. She staggered, her imagination conjuring everything from attacking seagulls to flying fish. She began to turn and was hit again — on the ear this time. An ear that was instantly full of water. She looked down. The composite at her feet seemed to explode as though a little bomb had detonated there. One the size of a baseball. She turned further still and looked up. The blue of the morning sky had vanished. In its place there was a low scud of rapidly moving overcast. And beneath it trailed grey veils of rain, sweeping across the agitated ocean towards her. Another raindrop hit her, square on the forehead with enough force to make her stagger. It was the size of a baseball — and felt as hard as one into the bargain. Within a heartbeat, the four women marooned on the sail, unprotected in the middle of the ocean, found themselves at the heart of a deluge that would have done credit to Angel Falls.
NINETEEN
‘Look, Nic,’ said Robin, keeping her voice at its calmest and most reasonable, ‘the chances are that Katapult8’s AIS has just gone offline again. That’s all. If anything more serious had happened, we’d know about it, wouldn’t we? I mean, if Katapult8 was in trouble the girls would radio for help.’
‘That’s all very well, but I’ve radioed them and they’re not replying.’
‘Nic, you know that’s Liberty playing her mind games with you. She was sneaking around and hiding yesterday evening. Now she’s probably got a wind that we haven’t caught yet and is making such good time she doesn’t want to give anything away. That was the last message, wasn’t it? They were coming up past forty knots and due in Puerto Banderas by sometime tonight? That’s probably what’s happening, then. If there was anything serious enough to put the yacht at immediate risk, especially if this rain has started wherever she is, they’d go into their life raft, and that has EPIRB emergency beacons which would alert us automatically — alert everyone from Canada to Costa Rica. Really. Think about it. They are four of the most competent sailors in the world, in one of the best-designed vessels afloat. Face it, Nic. In this case no news really is good news.’
Nic didn’t look convinced, though he nodded in courteous agreement.
But Robin could see why he was worried. She had never come across rain like this. Huge drops were smashing down out of the low sky with astonishing force. The wipers on Maxima’s clear-view windscreen had given up the fight and seemed just to be sliding an inch of solid water back and forth across opaque glass. Even Robin’s most reasonable tones had to be projected in her quarterdeck voice as though calling down half the length of a super tanker instead of across Maxima’s command bridge. Water thundered on to the deckhead above them as though they were trapped beneath a waterfall. The decks outside were inches deep in seething water, even though they were open, with nothing but deck rails surrounding them. Robin had visions of paint and varnish being stripped from metal and wood, as though the downpour was as powerful as a sandblaster.
Nic had ordered the automatic cover to be slid into place over the pool, which was just as well, Robin thought, or it would have been overflowing. Not that it made much difference to the amount of water cascading off the lower deck — just in its temperature and quality. What little could be seen of the sea that they were sailing in seemed to be boiling fiercely. Indeed, the surface was so completely shattered by the downpour that it formed a low mist which looked disturbingly like steam.
And yet there was almost no wind. That was part of what made this such a strange experience. That the sky could be vomiting down gallon after gallon of water hour after hour on to Maxima, but without a storm or even a squall. Robin had a mental image of a wedge of air trapped against the Baja California, backed hard up against the Cordillera’s ten-thousand-foot peaks while the ARkStorm was forced to rise high above it. Forced up fast enough to be losing some of its massive weight of water, even out here. It would have to be a wedge of hot air rather than cold, which tested even her meteorological understanding to its limit. Yet there was something. Right at the back of her mind. What did they call it? A temperature inversion? Was that it? But whether this inversion was real or something she was making up, it was all she could envisage that made any kind of sense of the weather they were experiencing now. If Katapult8 was caught in this, whether she was becalmed or running at forty knots before a friendly wind, then Nic would be getting a radio call, no matter how much pride and humble pie his over-competitive daughter would have to swallow.
And then she thought of Richard’s all-too accurate words: ‘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.’ The only thing he had missed out was that Maxima would find herself in the way of it as well, particularly as she was going at full speed south after the girls like a blind man running across a motorway.