No word passed among the fatigued and battered trio huddled in the boat. Consoled by the calm in the wake of the departed tempest, exhausted beyond endurance, they entered a region of utterly uncaring indifference to their circumstances and fell into deep sleep.
The swells retained a mild chop until the next morning, a legacy of the storm, before the seas became as liquid smooth as a millpond. The mist had long since faded, and visibility cleared to the far reaches of empty horizons. Now the sea settled down to achieve by attrition what it had failed to achieve by frenzied intensity. They slowly awoke to a sun they had sorely missed for the last forty-eight hours but that now burned down on them with unrelenting severity.
An attempt to sit up sent waves of pain through Pitt’s body. The battering from the sea was added to the injuries he had suffered from John Merchant’s men. Blinking against the dazzling glare of the sun’s reflection on the water, he very slowly eased himself to a sitting position. There was nothing to do now but lie in the boat and wait. But wait for what? Wait in the forlorn hope that a ship might appear over the horizon on a direct course toward them? They were drifting in a dead part of the sea, far from the shipping lanes, where ships rarely sailed.
Arthur Dorsett had picked their drop-off point cleverly. If through some divine miracle they survived the typhoon, then thirst and starvation would take them. Pitt would not let them die, not after what they had been through. He took an oath of vengeance, to live for no other reason but to kill Arthur Dorsett. Few men deserved to die more. Pitt swore to overlook his normal codes and standards of ethics and morality should he and Dorsett ever meet again. Nor did he forget Boudicca and Deirdre. They too would pay for their depraved treatment of Maeve.
“It’s all so quiet,” said Maeve. She clung to Pitt, and he could feel her trembling. “I feel like the storm is still raging inside my head.”
Pitt rubbed caked salt from his eyes, comforted in a small degree at feeling that the swelling had gone down. He looked down into the intensely blue eyes, drugged with fatigue and misted by deep sleep. He watched as they stared at him, and they began to shine. “Venus arising from the waves,” he said softly.
She sat up and fluffed out her salt-encrusted blond hair. “I don’t feel like Venus,” she said, smiling. “And I certainly don’t look like her.” She pulled up her sweater and gently touched the red welts around her waist, put there by the constant friction of the safety line.
Giordino slipped open an eye. “If you two don’t quiet up and let a man sleep, I’m going to call the manager of this hotel and complain.”
“We’re going for a dip in the pool and then have some breakfast on the lanai,” said Maeve with intrepid brightness. “Why don’t you join us?”
“I’d rather call room service,” Giordino drawled, seemingly exhausted by the mere act of speaking.
“Since we’re all in such a lively mood,” said Pitt, “I suggest we get on about the business of survival.”
“What are our chances of rescue?” asked Maeve innocently.
“Nil,” answered Pitt. “You can bet your father dropped us in the bleakest part of the sea. Admiral Sandecker and the gang at NUMA have no idea what happened to us. And if they did, they wouldn’t know where to look. If we’re to reach our normal life expectancy, we’ll have to do it without outside help.”
Their first task was to pull in the steadfast sea anchor and remove their shoes and the tools and other items from Pitt’s jacket. Afterward, they took an inventory of every single item, seemingly useless or not, that might come in handy for the long haul ahead. At last, Pitt removed the small packet that he had shoved down his pants just before driving the bus over the side of the dock.
“What did you find with the boat?” he asked Giordino.
“Not enough hardware to hang a barn door. The storage compartment held a grand total of three wrenches of various sizes, a screwdriver, a fuel pump, four spark plugs, assorted nuts and bolts, a couple of rags, a wooden paddle, a nylon boat cover and a handy-dandy little number that’s going to add to the enjoyment of the voyage.”
“Which is?”
Giordino held up a small hand pump. “This, for pumping up the flotation tubes.”
“How long is the paddle?”
“A little over a meter.”
“Barely tall enough to raise a sail,” said Pitt.
“True, but by tying it to the console, we can utilize it as a tent pole to stretch the boat cover over us for shade.”
“And lest we forget, the boat cover will come in handy for catching water should we see rain again,” Maeve reminded them.
Pitt looked at her. “Do you have anything on your person that might prove useful?”
She shook her head. “Clothes only. My Frankenstein sister threw me on the raft without so much as my lipstick.”
“Guess who she’s talking about,” Giordino muttered.
Pitt opened the small waterproof packet and laid out a Swiss army knife, a very old and worn Boy Scout compass, a small tube of matches, a first aid kit no larger than a cigarette package, and a vest-pocket .25 caliber Mauser automatic pistol with one extra clip.
Maeve stared at the tiny gun. “You could have shot John Merchant and my father.”
“Pickett stood a better chance at Gettysburg than I did with that small army of security guards.”
“I thought you looked awfully well endowed,” she said with a sly smile. “Do you always carry a survival kit?”
“Since my Boy Scout days.”
“Who do you intend to shoot in the middle of nowhere?”
“Not who, but what. A bird, if one comes close enough.”
“You’d shoot a defenseless bird?”
Pitt looked at her. “Only because I have this strange aversion to starving to death.”
While Giordino pumped air into the flotation tubes before working on a canopy, Pitt examined every square centimeter of the boat, checking for any leaks or abrasions in the neoprene floats and structural damage to the fiberglass hull. He dove overboard and ran his hands over the bottom but found no indication of damage. The craft appeared to be about four years old and had apparently been used as a shore boat when Dorsett’s yacht moored off a beach without a dock. Pitt was relieved to find it slightly worn but in otherwise excellent shape. The only flaw was the missing outboard engine that no longer hung on the transom of the boat.
Climbing back on board, he kept them busy all day with odd little jobs to take their minds off their predicament and growing thirst. Pitt was determined to keep their spirits up. He had no illusions as to how long they could last. He and Giordino had once trekked through the Sahara Desert without water for nearly seven days. That was a dry heat; here the heavy humidity sucked the life out of them.
Giordino rigged the nylon cover as shield from the burning rays of the sun, draping it over the paddle he had mounted on the control console and tying it down over the high sides of the flotation tubes with short lengths cut from the nylon line. He sloped one edge so that any rainwater it caught would flow and drop into an ice chest Maeve had found under one seat. She cleaned the grime from the long unused ice chest and did her best to straighten up the interior of the boat to make it liveable. Pitt used his time to separate the strands from a section of nylon line and knot them into a fishing line.
The only food source within two thousand kilometers or more was fish. If they didn’t catch any, they would starve. He fashioned a hook from the prong of his belt buckle and tied it to the line. The opposite end was attached to the center of one of the wrenches so he could grip it in both hands. The quandary was how to catch them. There were no earthworms, trout flies, bass plugs or cheese around here. Pitt leaned over the flotation tubes, cupped his hands around his eyes to shut out the sunlight and stared into the water.