He crumpled the message into his fist and leaned forward; at last he was rewarded. Under the boy’s legs, right at the bottom, providentially wrapped in plastic, was a radio. Richard leaned over, muscles in his legs, back, and belly jerking to keep him upright in the restless boat, and caught hold of it.
Just as he made this move, the next corpse at the boat’s side followed the other toward the waterspout, pulling the radio operator’s corpse upright as it did so. A cold dead hand clutched at Richard’s face, stiff fingers driving at his eyes as if attempting to protect the precious radio. Richard reacted without conscious thought, driven by primitive instinct. He clutched at the icy forearm and pushed it away, grabbed the slimy shirtfront, and heaved the corpse overboard. It was only then that he realized how he had been betrayed; tricked by the dead men. The radio message had been wadded in the fist he had used to fight off the dead radio operator. As he released the shirtfront, so the flimsy paper slipped through his fingers, too, and the greedy wind snatched it immediately, whirling it away into the stormy sea.
Richard was up at once. He had had enough. The message was gone but the radio was still here. He grabbed it. Five steps down to the lifeboat’s head. Massive twist of his body to swing the bulky radio onto Katapult, followed immediately by his own chest and legs. Even as he scrambled aboard the rope snapped; the instant his feet kicked free, the lifeboat turned and began to pull away.
He fell into the cockpit clutching the radio just as the other three arrived. “Jesus Christ!” yelled Hood, staring at the fast-approaching waterspout. “Where did that come from?” Then Weary grabbed him, pointing to the lifeboat scudding broadside-on to the wind away from them. The fierceness of the storm swept over it at once and turned it turtle. Then no one was watching it any longer: they all had too much else to do.
The black storm cloud that had spawned the waterspout covered half of the sky; the sun was somewhere behind it. Out of the sinister overcast came a huge white funnel. It fell vertically at first but after a hundred feet or so it twisted off line and writhed increasingly wildly out of shape until it planted its foot firmly on the sea in the midst of a thick column of gyrating mist, dangerously close, dead ahead. The eternal mist was being sucked in, spewed up, and replaced at once in an incredible process by the wind. Such was the power of the thing that the sea dead ahead sloped up quite steeply. The spout sat on its own great hill of water, which appeared and disappeared as the first stinging downpour swept across their line of sight.
Richard had been in storms before but he had never experienced anything like this. The wind was solid around him as he finished stowing the lifeboat’s radio. He faced the storm briefly — and it nearly drowned him. He turned his back, choking, and was lucky enough to catch a breath before the air in front of him was sucked away. There was no gusting to it, no variation except for its gradual intensification. And it had all the power of a fire hose. And as the air was sucked in toward the spout, so everything seemed to stream along with it. The sea was steep-sided, dark, and vicious. Spray from the wave tops spewed back in solid chunks of water and the rain was abruptly torrential. Richard staggered forward and clung on. The wind pressed wet clothing to chilled skin so forcefully that the pattern of the material marked it. He suddenly realized there were bruises on his chest caused by his buttons.
Weary, his mind now clear, took charge. Obviously, Katapult’s engine was not going to be powerful enough to help much. No. If they were going to get out of this then Weary would have to sail them out of it. Hood had no problem with this. Richard was a man of action and would have preferred to be in charge; but he was also a fairweather yachtsman and knew a master when he saw one.
Robin, however, had serious reservations. Less than five minutes had elapsed since the man now wrestling with the helm, the man in whose enormous hands their lives now rested, had been mindless, screaming, apparently insane. Hood knew this, and when she came toward him, he fell in beside her and as they worked, he talked. It was hardly an idle chat. Some of it was formless, almost meaningless, a series of disjointed phrases and half-sentences projected just a little louder than the screaming wind. Sam Hood was no fool. He knew Robin needed an explanation before she would trust Weary and obey him again — and he was acutely aware that any hesitation by anyone might easily prove lethal.
So, as Weary punched in the manual override and the systems belowdecks prepared to answer his dictates on heading, sail angle, outrigger angle, and all the rest, the others began to batten down everything, and to check every single line, strut, and joint that might fail fatally in the near future. Silently the telescopic booms moved out and the tall sails filled to bursting with the wind.
Richard started at the far stern. Hood and Robin started at the bow. All of them worked back toward the relative safety of the cockpit as fast as they could, for Weary wasted no time. Within thirty seconds of his arrival on deck. Katapult heeled to starboard, took the hurricane blast under her solid, experimental skirts — and was off on a wild roller-coaster ride toward the very heart of the thing.
“You know anything ‘bout Nam?” yelled Hood as they worked shoulder to shoulder.
“Bit.”
“Tet Offensive? Khe Sanh?”
“Some.”
“I met that asshole there. That was, what? February ’sixty-eight? Long ago…” The wind snatched at him, he staggered, and some of his words were lost. “He was in a Huey of all things when I first saw him. I was in the jungle in back of Khe Sanh, pinned down, rest of the unit gone. We was part of D Company, First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry, Twelfth Brigade of the American Division. Mean mothers; born to kill.”
The bow disappeared under a steep white horse. The foam hesitated, not knowing whether to splash back over them or to break forward with the brunt of the wind.
“Never found out precisely what unit Doc was with. Some gung ho elite volunteer Australian outfit. He don’t know more than that now, that’s for sure.”
“Wh—”
“Let’s get back along here a piece. Hell, girl, this’s getting dangerous!” Real, almost boyish excitement in his voice.
A moment or two later, “So…”
“So I was pinned down and lookin’ to die when suddenly this Huey full of Australians comes along. Picked them up a ways back and taking them down to our lines. But the pilot saw me and came down. Brave mother, I thought. Found out later they made him do it: Doc and the rest. They came down and I went for it like a jackrabbit. That line tight there? Jesus, listen to the sound of it! Back a ways more, Miz Mariner: we’ll get some protection from the outrigger.”
Hood was having a good time. To tell the truth, so was Robin. The simple sense of fun kept the very real — momentously increasing — danger at bay.
“I almost made it to the Huey when I fell. Thought I’d tripped: been shot in the leg, ten maybe fifteen yards short. Then there’s this kid. He just jumps out of the side and comes for me. Big, strong guy. He used to work out with weights in them days. Don’t do much these days. Do ya, Doc?” he yelled at Weary, slapping him on the shoulder as Robin and he tumbled into the sloping bucket of the cockpit.