“Nicole!” I waved like a mad thing. “Nicole!” I shouted, and my voice was lost in the appalling sound of wind and sea and rain and flogging sailcloth.
“My God!” Jackie screamed, and I suddenly realized that the flogging sound was not sailcloth, but bullets that were smacking across our jib.
I did not move. I was staring at the figure who stood at the catamaran’s wheel, and who suddenly pushed back her oilskin’s hood to reveal her bright corn-gold hair and blue eyes. “Nicole!” I shouted as the catamaran, its twin wakes spewing quick foam, slashed up the waveslope we had just sailed down. The wheel spun neglected in my hands so that Stormchild bridled, jarred sickeningly, then fell off the wind as the catamaran finally vanished across the crest behind us. My last glimpse was of Nicole’s figure, tall and straight, and the name Genesis Four painted in crude black letters on the catamaran’s starboard transom.
Jackie pummeled my arm. “There were two of them firing at us! Two of them!”
I had not noticed the gunmen, only Nicole. Why shoot at us, I wondered, why? I was their best hope in a world that would hate them. I was their last chance of love, and they wanted to kill me?
“Tim!” Jackie shouted at me, trying to snap me out of my reverie.
“Go below,” I told her. “Get on the VHF. Channel 37. Tell her we’ve come to help her! Tell her I love her!”
I did love her, too, and suddenly my memory registered that Nicole had not just looked at me as her catamaran sliced past Stormchild, but that she had smiled at me. “Oh, God.” I said the prayer aloud, but could not finish it. I was shaking. I was thinking of Nicole’s smile. It had been one of recognition, almost pleasure. Sweet Jesus, but what evil was in us? I had thought to meet her, and to sail with her to where we could talk, but my child had no time for remorse or reunion. She wanted me dead and I did not know why. Was it because I had destroyed Genesis? Or was she so steeped in blood that my death meant nothing more to her? I did not know, I only knew that I was in the worst sea on earth, and pursued by madness.
Stormchild was lying on her side, shaking and pounding in the seas. Her head had fallen off the wind and her one sail was dragging her further round, so I snatched the wheel back and hardened her up into the wind and sea. We were in the foam-ribbed trough of a wave, then, as the hull began to move again, we labored slowly up the next vast slope and I glanced behind just in time to see the vengeful menace of Genesis Four’s twin prows, sharp as lances, spear up over the crest behind, then drop to slide down the wave in Stormchild’s wake. I heard a popping noise and looked up to see another line of ragged holes rip and tear across Stormchild’s jib. Why? I wondered, then I thought to hell with the why, Jackie and I would be dead within minutes if I did not do something. The catamaran was twice as fast as Stormchild, and carried twice as many guns. It was no good leaning on sentiment now, I had to fight back, and so I whipped a lashing onto the wheel, slithered across the cockpit, then yanked up the locker lid to find the gun. A bullet clanged off our gunwale and whined up to the clouds. I turned, worked the rifle’s bolt, aimed at the catamaran’s closest hull, and fired.
Nicole had been overtaking Stormchild’s starboard flank. Her boat’s superior speed gave her the weather gauge, and she could choose her angle and come as close as she liked, yet suddenly, as I returned the fire and worked the rifle’s bolt to fire again, my daughter showed a scrap of good sense and veered her course sharply away from Stormchild and my rifle.
“They’re not answering the radio!” Jackie shouted, then gave an involuntary scream as a bullet ripped through the coach roof. There were two gunmen in the Genesis Four’s cockpit. I recognized one of them as Dominic, Nicole’s blond lover, and he seemed to smile as he opened fire again. I heard the sharp crack as his bullets struck our steel hull, then I saw a jagged rent splay open in the metal boom above my head. Another strike of bullets whipped foam from the dark heart of the wave beyond the cockpit. I fired back, but the Lee-Enfield was a slow, clumsy weapon compared with the assault rifles in Nicole’s boat.
Stormchild, her wheel lashed now, slashed through the broken crest of another wave. The Genesis Four had gone past us and was now racing far ahead of our slower hull. Her two gunmen ceased fire and I knew we would have a few moments peace because Nicole, sailing ahead of us into the shrieking gale, would not dare jibe her boat, but would, instead, have to tack the Genesis Four back into our path. I guessed we would not see her for fifteen minutes.
I went below. The cabin was unusually dark because of the stormshields on the windows, and in that unnatural gloom I could see three sparks of daylight where bullets had punched through the hull. I had a sudden terror that Jackie had been hit, and whirled round to see her hunched over the radio consoles. I shouted her name, she did not move, then I saw she was wearing earphones so as to hear better through the gale’s turmoil. “They won’t answer.” She at last saw me and took off the earphones.
“Are you OK?”
She nodded. “I’m OK.”
“We won’t see them for at least ten minutes,” I promised Jackie, “because even Nicole isn’t crazy enough to jibe a boat in this bitch of a wind.” I took the microphone and pressed its transmission button. “Nicole! Nicole!”
There was silence, except for the sea’s maniacal fury thundering beyond our steel hull. Stormchild shuddered in a wave, slid through a screaming horror of foam, then jarred sickeningly into a trough.
“Nicole!” I called. “Nicole! For God’s sake, this is your father! I’m trying to help you!”
Nothing. Emptiness. Silence. I glanced back up the companionway, to where the rain slanted down out of a gray-black sky. At times, as Stormchild rolled off a wave, I would see a vast cold sea toppling behind us, and against it the bomb-riddled ensign would look shatteringly bright.
“Nicole!” I pleaded into the radio, but she was not listening, or maybe she was listening, but just refusing to talk to me, and I knew I had just ten minutes to touch some old nerve of affection in my daughter, or else she would come back, she would kill us, and then she would sail away to take her chances among the far, anonymous Pacific islands. “Nicole!” I said to her. “I love you, I love you, I love…”
I stopped because a terrible harsh battle percussion was filling Stormchild and I twisted, aghast, to see more holes being punched in the far side of the saloon and I knew that Nicole had done the unimaginable; she had jibed her boat in this awful gale. She was a better sailor than I, and she had a crack crew, and she had turned her boat in front of this ship-killing wind, and she had done it to prove she was a better sailor than I, and that was why Jackie and I had to die in this awful place. Suddenly it was all so clear; we had to die so that my daughter could prove she was a better sailor than her father.
A bullet ricocheted into the galley. Another clanged through the stove’s stainless-steel chimney. Water pulsed through the bullet holes as Stormchild dipped to the wind. Jackie screamed.