But then she realized that this might not, in fact, be the worst of it.
Humming thoughtlessly and nearly silently as she crossed to the forward section of the command bridge, she was surprised to find she was unconsciously partway through an old Bob Dylan song about dead oceans and hard rain falling down. That’s all I need, she thought. Both Bob Dylan and my bloody husband screwing up my head.
‘What’s that?’ demanded Nic suddenly, his voice pitched loud to overcome the roaring rain, his tone rising with tension. ‘Looks like some kind of emergency beacon ten or so miles dead ahead of us.’
Robin and Captain Toro crossed to stand beside him at once. The three of them crowded together in silence, looking into the ship’s state-of-the-art electronic display. There were screens showing readings from the big navigation and communications systems in the white domes on the communications masts high up above them. Sonar, radar and satellite feeds, each with their own display. Then there was a big central screen where all the information came together. And, just as Nic said, this screen showed, somewhere way out ahead, a tiny signal. An electronic contact registered by something in low orbit over their heads and rebroadcast to their displays down here. Matched with the sonar feed and the collision alarm radar, then put on to the electronic chart that reflected their immediate environs above and below the surface. And that little point of electronically generated brightness could only mean one thing. Maybe twelve miles up ahead of Maxima, someone was probably having quite a serious emergency.
Robin wondered whether either of the men beside her saw the irony of the fact that the emergency signal was in all likelihood being picked up and broadcast to them by the same NOAA satellites that were watching the ARkStorm which was making their current predicament so risky. But even she remained ignorant of the fact that the downpour was limiting the range of their radar, so that although the pre-programmed bands reached outwards promising to see contacts as far away as one, five, ten, fifteen and twenty miles, the radar could actually scarcely see less than five with any accuracy. Had Pilar, which was in fact twenty miles south-east of them and easing north-west on a reciprocal course, had her location system switched on, the NOAA satellites would have displayed her position accurately in spite of the torrential rain. But she did not, and so, although the bright emergency beacon blinked on the read-outs clearly enough some twelve miles ahead, the fishing boat remained invisible to Maxima.
‘It’s too small to be a lifeboat beacon,’ said Robin after a moment. ‘They tend to be emergency position indicating radio beacons: EPIRBs. Like I said, the ones on Katapult8’s life raft certainly are. This may be something smaller, maybe a personal locator beacon or PLB. Like you might find on a lifebelt.’
‘On a lifebelt!’ said Nic, horrified at the thought of someone actually in the water under these conditions.
‘Not one of ours,’ said Robin. ‘Didn’t you tell me the girls’ Gill Marine lifejackets didn’t have individual beacons? Just lights, whistles and grab handles. Basic standard issue with no fancy bits to get in the way and slow them down. Lean and mean. If they’re in trouble, they’ll activate the life raft and their big, bright, in-your-face EPIRBS satellite locator beacons.’
‘It’s what they’ve planned and practised.’ Nic nodded, a measure of relief creeping into his voice.
‘Still, Señor Greenbaum,’ said Captain Toro quietly, ‘we should go to this beacon. It may be your daughter or it may not. But it is somebody. And it looks as though they may need help.’
‘If they’re out on the water in this,’ said Robin, ‘they will certainly need help. And we are likely to be the only vessel in the immediate area not running for safe haven. The only vessel about legitimate business, at any rate. If we don’t go and check it out then it’s a fair bet no one else is going to.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Nic grimly. ‘It’s on our way. And anyone out on the water in this will need all the help they can get. Especially if, as you say, there’s no one else likely to be out there except pirates, smugglers or drug runners.’
TWENTY
‘Have you ever known rain like this, Capitan?’ asked Miguel-Angel, simply awed as he stood and looked over Carlos Santiago’s shoulder out at the watery nothingness cascading blindingly down the windows of Pilar’s bridge.
Carlos grunted his customary paternal ‘don’t bother me now, boy’ reply. Given an edge, if the truth be told, by the fact that it had been Miguel-Angel at the helm when everything went so catastrophically wrong. But, in spite of the fact that he was little more than a metre away, Miguel-Angel didn’t hear it over the relentless roaring of the downpour.
Pilar was feeling her way gingerly forward through the blinding deluge as her capitan nursed her badly damaged engine into turning the twisted shaft that made her dented and misaligned propeller spin. The loss of the net, the inexperienced helmsman’s unthinking demand for full power at the worst possible moment and the way the propeller had leaped right out of the water while this was all going on had done more damage than even Carlos Santiago could have imagined. But, he told himself, he blamed himself, and then his bad luck, long before he blamed Miguel-Angel. Besides, now that the damage had been assessed and some basic repairs put in place, Pilar had come back to life.
Carlos had long since stopped worrying about the torrential rain, for, once the wind had fallen away, the hull and upper works were well enough maintained to keep most of the weather out. The unsettling, sharp-sided chop was even easing back into the familiar sets of long Pacific rollers he and Pilar knew so well. Besides, he had a simple, unalterable mission: to follow the faint signal of the beacon he had providentially attached to the end of the net. To find it and to pull it aboard no matter what the heavens were throwing down at them. To fill his freezer holds with the biggest catch Pilar had ever brought home in all her life, if the nets were as full as he hoped and prayed they were. If San Telmo, patron saint of sailors, would intervene for them. If San Andreas, patron of fishermen, looked kindly down. If Hernan and the others had fixed the winch by the time Carlos found the net. If the propeller maintained them on a true course and kept turning. If the twisted shaft did not warp any further or jump out of its bed along the keel or — heaven forbid — break altogether. If the motor that kept both of them turning and also worked the winch continued to do so until Hernan and the others pulled the catch aboard and Pilar brought them safely — and richly — back to her dock by Los Muertos.
The fact that his equipment saw so little — for it was hardly even comparable to that aboard Maxima twenty miles north-west of him and racing blindly south-east towards that same faint beacon — meant that he had to rely on his instincts. And, although his experience was wide enough to give him almost god-like status in the boy’s eyes, the fact was that age was beginning to dull them. And desperation, in any case, was driving him more powerfully than his usual care and caution. It was as though the act of letting that net go out over the transom had changed him from a model citizen to a desperate pirata.