Still nothing. I sat at the console smelling the pervasive smell of the diesel oil that still reeked in Stormchild’s saloon carpet. “Stormchild calling Genesis Four. This is Stormchild calling Genesis Four. Come in please. Over.”
Were the Chileans listening? Was the Armada monitoring all the medium and high frequency channels in an effort to find us and intercept us? If they thought I was trying to help my daughter evade their country’s justice then the Chilean Navy might very well have a lean, gray patrol vessel somewhere in this wilderness of sea and wind. Yet, I reasoned, the Armada would surely talk to me on the radio if they had intercepted this transmission, and so far neither they, nor Genesis Four, had replied. Perhaps no one was listening. I pressed the key again. “Stormchild calling Genesis Four. This is Stormchild calling Genesis Four. Over.”
“We hear you,” said the voice from the speaker, and it said nothing more. Just those three words. “We hear you,” but it was my daughter’s voice, curt and toneless, and I stared at the radio as though it had just transmitted the word of God.
“Nicole?” I transmitted in wonderment. “Nicole?” but there was no reply, and I realized that though my daughter might listen to me, she had nothing to say in return.
So be it. I closed my eyes, pressed the key, and spoke.
I began by saying that I loved her. It sounded stilted, so I said it again, and afterward I told her I knew what she had done, not just to her mother, but to the crew of the Naiad, and I said that the evidence of her deeds had been given to her Uncle David, who was making sure it reached the proper authorities. I then explained that the Genesis community had ceased to exist; its leaders were dead, its members were homeless, and its settlement was destroyed. “You can sail back there now and you’ll find the Chilean Police and Navy waiting for you, or you can rendezvous with me and we’ll either go back together, or sail to the Falklands. I’m not offering you freedom, just a choice between British or Chilean justice. I would also like to meet you and tell you that I still love you, even if I hate what you’ve done.” My words still sounded lame, but the truth so often does limp off the tongue in times of crisis. Just when we most need to speak with the tongues of angels, we stumble with uncertain words.
“I’m sailing southward now,” I told Nicole, “and I’ll clear the cape in six or seven days. If you meet me, I’ll escort you to wherever you want to go and I’ll do my best to find you an honest and good lawyer”—I paused—“and I love you, Nicole.”
I waited, but there was no reply. “Nicole?” I begged the sky, but still no word came back. I left the radio switched on and its speaker turned full up as I went back to the cockpit, but no voice broke the hissing silence. If Nicole was going to accept my offer, then she was accepting it in silence.
“She said nothing?” Jackie asked.
“Only that she could hear me.”
Jackie bit her lip, then gave me a decisive look. “I’ve been thinking about it, Tim, and I know it’s going to be all right. Nicole must know she’s got nothing to gain by hurting you? She knows it’s over, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“And she’s not a fool, Tim!” Jackie said passionately. “She probably won’t even look for us. I mean, the only choice you’ve offered her is between a British and a Chilean jail, so she’s much more likely to sail west, isn’t she? To try and lose herself in the Pacific?”
“She might,” I admitted, “she very well might,” but somehow I did not think that Nicole would resist this final confrontation, and I suddenly wished I had not let Jackie share it with me. I wished I was not driven to the confrontation myself, for, by facing my daughter, I risked my new happiness in exchange for an old relationship that could never be restored.
In the early hours of darkness the wind backed into the east, a sure sign that it would freshen. Jackie and I took in two reefs, and I was glad we did, for within the hour the wind was shrieking in the rigging as we slogged southward on a long port tack. Every slam of the bows reverberated through the steel hull and rattled the crockery in the galley and shivered the floating compass card in the cockpit’s binnacle. White spray slashed back to spatter on the spray hood.
I sent Jackie below to rest and noted that, instead of finding a snug refuge in the forward cabin, she took her bag into the aftercabin where my own things were stored. Yet she must have found it hard to sleep, for, shortly after midnight, she came back on deck. The ship was dark as sin for I was sailing without any navigation lights and the stars were cloud-shrouded, so that the only illumination in our whole world was the tiny unobtrusive red glow of the instrument lights. Jackie groped her way to my side, then snapped her lifeline to the D-ring at the base of the wheel’s pedestal. As her night vision came she saw the sliding avalanches of white water that rushed beside our gunwales and the sight made her tremble. “Doesn’t it frighten you?” she asked, and I realized that this was her first experience of cold, gale-force sailing.
I smiled in the darkness. “Oh Lord”—I quoted her the fishermens’ ancient prayer—“my boat is so small and Thy sea is so big. Protect me.”
“That’s nice,” she said softly.
“Besides”—I gave the wheel a twitch—“you should be cautiously afraid of the sea. A wise old fisherman once said that a man who isn’t afraid of the sea will soon be drowned, for he’ll go out on a day when he shouldn’t sail, but those of us who are afraid of the sea only get drowned every now and again.”
She laughed, then was silent for a good long while. Perhaps the mention of drowning had put the thought of Nicole into Jackie’s mind, for she suddenly asked just where I thought we would meet Nicole, if we met her at all.
“I know just where she’ll met us,” I said, because I had thought this whole rendezvous through, and I knew the exact place to which Nicole was even now racing in her fast catamaran. “She’ll be waiting at the Horn.”
“The Horn!” Jackie echoed the two words, and I heard the wonder in her voice as though she could not truly believe that we were really going to that hell of a seaway where the big ships died and where the ghosts of sailormen never rested.
We were sailing to Cape Horn.
There are plenty of terrible seas on earth. I would not lightly sail the Agulhas Current off the African coast again, for there the sea shudders in a perpetual rage and its sudden watery chasms can break the steel spines of the hugest vessels. I would not willingly sail the North Cape again, for there the ice storms howl out of a white desert and the rigging freezes and even boats seem to get tired of fighting the savagery of that weather. Yet neither of those places, nor even the storms of the Tasman or the shallow hell of a North Sea winter storm can rival the bitter fame of Cape Horn.
Now, racing southward with two reefs tied in our mainsail, Jackie and I were already in the cape’s feed-chute. Far beyond our eastern horizon the tip of South America bent ever more sharply toward the Atlantic, thus forming the northern lip of a funnel that compressed and savaged the great Pacific waves that had been fetched across fifteen thousand miles of roaring ocean, and which were there forced to squeeze themselves into the shallow gap between Cape Horn and Antarctica. That gap was the Drake Passage, the coldest, roughest and most savage waterway on earth. A sober man, a prudent man, would have taken the Straits of Magellan, but I would round the Horn, as I had first rounded it eighteen years before.
Back then, fighting for a record, I had creamed past the Horn, running west to east, and cutting the corner close enough to see the flag flying at the small naval post that the Chileans maintained on the Isla de Hornos. My boat had flogged through windlashed spray, plunged through the Horn’s steep seas, then disappeared northward toward Plymouth, home and the ephemeral glories of a world record.