I ran topside and clipped on my lifeline. I worked the rifle’s bolt, but the Lee-Enfield was puny against our enemy’s automatic fire, and Stormchild’s slow hull was no match for the speed of my daughter’s twin keels, and my seamanship, God help me, was not a patch on hers. At that moment, as I watched the slicing hulls come straight at us, I knew that Nicole was going to kill us. She would do it to prove she was the better sailor, and so she was, I thought, as I stared at the approaching boat that flicked so lightly through the spume and sea scum. The two gunmen were using the cabin top as a firing step, the third crew member was by the sheet winches, while Nicole, bareheaded and happy, stood tall at the helm beneath the strange sea-green ensign of Genesis. Nicole did indeed look happy. She had taken our measure, and now she would win because she was more daring than her father.
The Genesis Four was sliding toward us down the face of a wave. Stormchild was on the opposing face. We would meet in the trough. Once again Nicole held the weather advantage, but this time, throwing caution to the wind, she would use it to come so close that her gunmen could not possibly miss. They would pour their fire into Stormchild’s cockpit, riddling it with ricocheting bullets to overwhelm our cockpit drains with blood. Jackie, terrified of the clangor of bullets down below, had come to crouch beside me. She frowned at my gun, perhaps wondering why I did not fire it, but I knew the rifle would not help me now.
Genesis Four seemed to leap through the water, eager to bring us our death. I laid the gun down in the cockpit and smiled at Jackie. “Hold tight!” I told her, for I had chosen to outdare my daughter.
I stood up straight, not caring about the gunmens’ bullets, and I stared at my daughter. If I did not beat her now, then Jackie would die, and I would die, and Stormchild would sink to join the legions of Cape Horn’s dead.
“Hold on!” I shouted to Jackie, and, with fingers numbed by the cold, I unlashed Stormchild’s wheel.
Christ, but the catamaran was close. Jackie held my arm and I could feel her shaking and shivering. And no wonder, for the catamaran was scarcely forty yards away now. Nicole, braced at its wheel, was aiming to slide her starboard hull just inches from our starboard gunwale, and, at that range, despite the jarring of the sea’s pounding, Genesis’s last gunmen could not miss. Nicole doubtless expected me to turn away and run downwind, and when I did, she would follow. I could see her winch-handler poised to loosen the jib sheets and I knew that the moment I turned to run, the catamaran would pounce on us like a striking snake.
And then we would die, and Nicole would take her chance for freedom in some far, warm sea.
But there was another way.
And I chose it.
I dropped the wheel’s lashing, and, when Genesis Four was just twenty yards away, I spun the spokes to drive Stormchild’s tons of steel straight at the speeding catamaran.
I saw Nicole’s eyes widen in alarm. She shouted in anger and snatched at the wheel to turn away, but she was too late. The two gunmen clutched for support at a handrail on the cabin roof and one of their two guns skidded into the scuppers and bounced overboard, then I was shouting at Jackie to hold on for her dear, sweet life.
Someone screamed. I think it was my daughter, because she knew I had beaten her.
Stormchild slammed into the turning catamaran. We smashed her starboard hull, breaking it into splinters of fiberglass. A wire stay whipped skyward. The catamaran’s mainsail was suddenly demented, filling a noisy sky with its maniacal thrashing, then, inevitably, the Genesis Four’s mast began to topple. I saw Dominic whirl round, face bloody, as the catamaran’s severed backstay whipped its frayed metal strands across his eyes. The mast was cracking and falling, and still Stormchild was driving into the catamaran’s belly like a great killing axe. I heard the tortured screech of steel on steel as our sharp bows slammed into the main beam that spanned the catamaran’s twin hulls. I staggered with the impact, while Jackie, her fingers hooked like claws, clung to my arm. Stormchild’s forestay snapped, slashing our jib into the ship-killing wind. A sea thundered across our joined decks, sweeping gear off Genesis Four’s scuppers and filling Stormchild’s cockpit with a crashing, icy whirlpool. Our bows churned sickeningly in the wreckage of the catamaran. I was sobbing for my daughter, for what I had done.
The great sea turned us broadside, thrusting our stern eastward. Our bows were trapped by the catamaran’s broken hulls. I threw off Stormchild’s jib sheet as the two boats screeched on each other, but our boat was afloat and the Genesis Four was breaking apart. Already the catamaran’s cockpit was awash and her starboard hull under water. A blue and yellow curtain floated free of the shattered saloon. Stormchild’s mast was swaying horribly, but her backstays and shrouds were holding it upright and the damage would have to wait.
“Lifebuoys!” I shouted at Jackie. I could see two yellow-jacketed bodies clinging to the catamaran’s wreckage and I could see a third person in the foam-scummed water beyond. I could not see Nicole. The catamaran’s mast had collapsed to trail the reefed mainsail and a tangle of lines in the foaming sea.
“Nicole!” I shouted, then hurled a life buoy into the wreckage. I slashed with my knife at the bindings of Stormchild’s life raft, and Jackie helped me push the big canister overboard. Another thunderous sea crashed cold across the two boats and when it had passed I saw that the two men who had been clinging to the wreckage were gone. I pulled the life raft’s lanyard and watched as the bright orange raft began to inflate.
Another toppling sea hammered like an avalanche at our beam. Stormchild’s tortured bows were still buried in the Genesis Four, but the lurch and twist of the awful sea loosened and prized us free, then the gale snatched at our jib which still writhed at the end of its halyard, and which now turned us fast downwind. I sliced through the line which tethered the life raft to Stormchild, thus leaving the bright orange raft for my daughter. “Engine!” I shouted at Jackie, then I hurled the last buoy overboard and slapped my lifeline onto a jackstay to work my way forward.
Jackie turned on the ignition and, above the throb of our automatic bilge pumps that were dealing with the water let in by the bullet holes, I heard the harsh banging as the starter motor turned over. A wave broke on our counter, swamping the cockpit and crashing white down the companionway. The engine would not start and the wind and sea were carrying us so fast that already the wreck of the Genesis Four was hidden by a spume-fretted wave crest.
Jackie advanced the throttle, turned the key again, and this time the motor caught and throbbed. She let in the clutch, then staggered to the wheel to turn Stormchild back toward the wreckage, but a great sea, heaped and wind-whipped, slammed us back and almost threw us on our beam ends. Jackie sensibly let the boat run, while I, terrified that our mast would be lost, sawed with my rigging knife at the jib halyard. The cut halyard snaked up through the masthead block to release the jib that sailed away like a demonically winged monster. The forestay was streaming ahead of us, carried almost horizontal by the force of the rising gale, which now leeched the ocean white and bent Stormchild’s tall mast like a longbow.