Pitt hunched over the rudder in the stern, listening to the now familiar scrape and splash of the bailer. His intense green eyes, sore and swollen, scanned the horizon as the orb of the morning sun flushed from a golden-orange glow to flaming yellow. He searched, hoping against hope that a hint of land might rise above the clean straight horizon of the sea surrounding them. He searched in vain. No ship, aircraft or island revealed itself. Except for a few small clouds trailing to the southeast a good twenty kilometers away, Pitt’s world was as empty as the plains of Mars, the boat little more than a pinprick on a vast seascape.
After catching enough fish to start a seafood restaurant, hunger was not an anxiety. Their water supply, if conserved, was good for at least another six or seven days. It was the fatigue and lack of sleep caused by the constant bailing to keep the boat afloat that was taking a toll. Every hour was misery. Without a bowl or a bottle of any kind, they were forced to splash the incoming water overboard with their cupped hands until Pitt devised a container from the waterproof packet that held the accessories he had smuggled past the Dorsetts. When tied to a pair of wrenches to form a concave receptacle, it could expel a liter of seawater with one scoop.
At first they labored in four-hour shifts, because Maeve demanded she carry her share of the exertion. She worked gamely, fighting the stiffness that soon attacked the joints of her arms and wrists, followed by agonizing muscle aches. The grit and guts were there, but she did not have the natural strength of either man. The shifts soon were divided and allocated by stamina. Maeve bailed for three hours before being spelled by Pitt, who struggled for five. Giordino then took over and refused any relief until he had put in a full eight hours.
As the seam split farther and farther apart, the water no longer seeped, but rather spurted like a long fountain. The sea pried its way in faster than it could be cast out. With their backs against the wall and no trace of relief in sight, they slowly began to lose their steadfastness.
“Damn Arthur Dorsett,” Pitt shouted in his mind. “Damn Boudicca, damn Deirdre!” The murderous waste, the uselessness of it all made no sense. He and Maeve were no major threat to Dorsett’s fanatical dreams of empire. Alone, they never could have stopped him, or even slowed him down. It was a pure act of sadism to set them adrift.
Maeve stirred in her sleep, murmuring to herself, then lifted her head and stared, semiconscious, at Pitt. “Is it my turn to bail?”
“Not for another five hours,” he lied with a smile. “Go back to sleep.”
Giordino paused from bailing for a moment and stared at Pitt, sickness in his heart from knowing without question that Maeve would soon be torn limb from limb and devoured by the murder machines of the deep. Grimly, he went back to his work, laboring ceaselessly, throwing a thousand and more containerfuls of water over the side.
God only knew how Giordino could keep going. His back and arms must have been screaming in protest. The steel willpower to endure went far beyond the limits of comprehension. Pitt was stronger than most men, but alongside Giordino, he felt like a child watching an Olympic weight lifter. When Pitt had yielded the container in total exhaustion, Giordino took it up as if he could go on forever. Giordino, he knew, would never accept defeat. The tough, stocky Italian would probably die trying to get a stranglehold on a hammerhead.
Their peril sharpened Pitt’s mind. In a final desperate attempt, he lowered the sail, laid it flat in the water, then slipped it under the hull and tied the lines to the buoyancy tubes. The nylon sheet, pressed against the crack by the pressure of the water, slowed the advance of the leakage by a good fifty percent, but at best it was only a stopgap measure that bought them a few extra hours of life. Unless the sea became perfectly calm, the physical breakdown of the crew and the splitting apart of the boat, Pitt figured, would occur shortly after darkness fell. He glanced at his watch and saw that sunset was only four and a half hours away.
Pitt gently grabbed Giordino’s wrist and removed the container from his hand. “My turn,” he said firmly. Giordino did not resist. He nodded in appreciation and fell back against a buoyancy tube, too exhausted to sleep.
The sail held back the flow of water enough so that Pitt actually stayed even for a short time. He bailed into the afternoon, mechanically, losing all sense of time, barely noting the passage of the brutal sun, never wilting under its punishing rays. He bailed like a robot, not feeling the pain in his back and arms, his senses completely numbed, going on and on as if he were caught in a narcotic stupor.
Maeve had roused herself out of a state of lethargy. She sat up and peered dully at the horizon behind Pitt ’s back. “Don’t you think palm trees are pretty,” she murmured softly.
“Yes, very pretty,” Pitt agreed, giving her a tight smile, believing her to be hallucinating. “You shouldn’t stand under them. People have been killed by falling coconuts.”
“I was in Fiji once,” she said, shaking her hair loose. “I saw one drop through the windshield of a parked car.”
To Pitt, Maeve looked like a little girl, lost and wandering aimlessly in a forest, who had given up all hope of ever finding her way home. He wished there was something he could do or say that would comfort her. But there was nothing on God’s sea that anyone could do. His sense of compassion and utter inadequacy left him embittered.
“Don’t you think you should steer more to starboard?” she said listlessly.
“Starboard?”
She stared as if in a trance. “Yes. You don’t want to miss the island by sailing past it.”
Pitt’s eyes narrowed. Slowly, he turned and peered over his shoulder. After nearly sixteen days of taking position sightings from the sun and suffering from the glare on the water, his eyes were so strained that he could only focus in the distance for a few seconds before closing them. He cast his eyes briefly across the bow but saw only blue-green swells.
He turned back. “We can no longer control the boat,” he explained softly. “I’ve taken down the sail and placed it under the hull to slow the leakage.”
“Oh, please,” she pleaded. “It’s so close. Can’t we land and walk around on dry ground if only for a few minutes?”
She said it so calmly, so rationally in her Australian twang, that Pitt felt his spine tingle. Could she actually be seeing something? Reason dictated that Maeve’s mind was playing tricks on her. But a still-glowing spark of hope mixed with desperation made him rise to his knees while clutching a buoyancy tube for stability. At that moment the boat rose on the crest of the next swell and he had a brief view of the horizon.
But there were no hills with palm trees rising above the sea.
Pitt circled his arm around Maeve’s shoulders. He remembered her as robust and spirited. Now she looked small and frail, and yet her face glowed with an intensity that wasn’t there before. Then he saw that she was not staring across the sea but into the sky.
For the first time he noticed the bird above the boat, wings outspread, hovering in the breeze. He cupped his hands over his eyes and gazed at the winged intruder. The wingspan was about a meter, the feathers a mottled green with specks of brown. The upper beak curled and came to a sharp point. To Pitt the bird appeared to be an ugly cousin of the more colorful parrot family.
“You see it too,” said Maeve excitedly. “A kea, the same one that led my ancestors to Gladiator Island. Sailors shipwrecked in southern waters swear the kea shows the way to safe harbors.”
Giordino peered upward, regarding the parrot more as a meal than a divine messenger sent by ghosts to guide them toward dry land. “Ask Polly to recommend a good restaurant,” he muttered wearily. “Preferably one that doesn’t have fish dishes on the menu.”