“No,” Barclay said. “Find her a pail.”
If she hadn’t passed him we had no chance at all, but it was now or never. I swung. My fist crashed into the blurred whiteness of Barclay’s face, and at the same time I yelled, “Run!”
Barclay fell back, clawing in his pocket for the gun. She came up through the hatch, moving fast, with Barfield shouting behind her. I could see her for a brief second, standing erect on the deck at the forward end of the cockpit with the bulky life-preserver clutched to her breast. Then she was lunging and falling outward, splashing somewhere in the darkness. I grabbed Barclay’s jacket and pushed him into Barfield as he came lunging up. I slid over the rail, and water closed over me. Even as I was going down I tried to keep myself oriented.
The Ballerina was off course now, all of its angles gone. I started to swim back, hoping to spot her blonde head or the white of the life belt, but the whitecaps were confusing.
When the sloop was some 75 yards away, I lifted my head and called out, not too loudly, “Shannon. Shannon!” There was no answer. I wondered if I had gone beyond her. I began to be afraid, and called out again.
This time I heard her. “Here,” she said. “Over this—” The voice cut off, and I knew she had gone under. She was off to the left, downwind. I turned.
Another sea broke over me. Then I was floundering in the trough. The blonde head broke surface right beside me. “Thank God,” I said silently, and grabbed her dress. She clasped her arms tightly about my neck and tried to pull herself up. We went under. I felt suddenly cold in water that was warm as tea. She had both arms about me.
Our heads came out. I shook water from my face. “Shannon! Where’s the lifebelt?”
She sputtered and fought for breath. “It – I—” she said, and gasped again. “I lost it.”
It was the bright sunlight streaming into the cabin that brought me out of it slowly. And then the wonderful nightmare of the night in the water came back to me. The lifebelt was gone, and she knew we couldn’t make it. Yet she’d ignored Barclay’s hailing from the Ballerina as he tried to locate us in the darkness. She’d been wonderful. Scared, but she’d followed my directions fully. Stripped for buoyancy, we tried the hopeless push toward Sanport, orienting on the stars.
It was dawn and we hadn’t covered a third of the way, when I choked up enough breath to tell her.
“I couldn’t tell you before,” I said. “Even – if he had run out on you. But doesn’t matter now. Have to tell you. I love you. You’ve never been out of my mind since you walked out on the edge of that pier—”
She didn’t say anything. She brought her arms up very slowly and put them about my neck. We went under, our lips together, arms tight about each other. It was like falling endlessly through a warm, rosy cloud. I seemed to realize, very dimly, that it was water we were sinking through and that if we didn’t stop it and swim up we’d drown right there, but apparently there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t want to turn her loose long enough to swim up. We went on falling, through warmth and ecstasy and colors.
We’d broken surface again, and then I’d seen the masts of the sloop. They were still looking for us. Suddenly I realized she’d let go, voluntarily. I’d gotten to her, even as I realized that the sloop was bearing down on us. Barclay’d made good use of those 7 × 50 binoculars. I remember Barfield’s whistling as he dragged her aboard. Then I’d blacked out.
It was four in the afternoon when Barfield shook me awake. The husky guy hated my guts all right, but evidently Barclay had told him to lay off. He told me to make some sandwiches and coffee, wake Shannon, and get up on deck. It was while she was dressing and I was preparing the food that the idea came to me. If we could shake these two, all problems were solved. Why go back? Here was the Ballerina, the girl I knew I wanted, and eighty thousand dollars. We could change our names, get married in one of those little Caribbean ports. We’d change the name of the boat and its Port of Registry. We’d stay away from the big ports, cruise the world, and they’d never find us.
The dream faded abruptly. My two friends upstairs were calling from on deck. You couldn’t dream them away.
I had five days, maybe a week. They had to slip up sometime – I hoped.
Shannon helped me bring the food.
Barclay was at the tiller, and Barfield lounged on the port side, his legs outstretched. He drew them in, and grinned. “Going for a swim, honey?” he asked.
She glanced briefly at him as if he were something that had crawled out of a ditch after a rain, and sat down on the starboard side holding the plate of sandwiches in her lap.
He looked to me. “Take the helm.”
He took a sandwich, glanced at me and then at Shannon. “We’re about fifty miles from land. Don’t try any more swimming stunts and forget about the dinghy. I’ve thrown away the oars. We’ll pistol whip you, Blondie, if either of you tries anything again.
“Now let’s get down to business. Tell us exactly what your husband said about that plane crash.”
Shannon stared at him, contemptuously.
“All right. It was late in the afternoon, he said, near sunset, when he picked up Scorpion Reef. He was heading for the Florida coast somewhere above Fort Myers. A few minutes later his starboard engine caught fire. He couldn’t put it out, and knew he was going to crash. He had noticed a reef or shoal below him just a minute or two before, and tried to get to the downwind side of it, where the sea wouldn’t be so rough, but he couldn’t make it. He crashed on the east side of it, about two miles off, and the plane sank almost immediately. He just had time to climb out on a wing and throw the raft in the water. As you probably know, he couldn’t swim at all.”
“Why didn’t he try to get the diamonds off with him?”
“He had stowed the box in a locker so it wouldn’t go flying around in rough weather. The locker was aft, already under water.”
“What about the diver?”
That hurt her. She hesitated, sickness in her eyes. “He said the man didn’t have his belt fastened, and was killed in the crash.”
Barclay lashed it at her suddenly, “Why was he so sure of his exact bearing from that reef? He didn’t have time to take a compass reading before the plane went down, and he didn’t have a compass on the raft.”
She was quite calm. “It was late afternoon, I said. The sun was setting. The plane, the very northern end of the surf on the shoal, and the sun were all in one straight line.”
She looked around suddenly at me. “I remember now, you asked me that, didn’t you, Bill? Whether he could see surf from the raft. And I’d forgotten.”
I nodded. It would make a difference, all right; but you still had to find the reef. It was hopeless.
Barclay lit a cigarette. “Okay. Now, what was the position?”
“Fifty miles north-northeast of Scorpion Reef.”
He stared coldly. “You said westward last night.”
“I’m sure I didn’t,” she replied.
“Make up your mind – fast.”
“It’s north-northeast.”
“We’ll see,” he said crisply. “George, get that chart, the parallel rulers, and dividers.”
Barfield brought them up and the two of them studied the chart. Shannon regarded them as if they were lice. Barclay’s face was thoughtful. “North-northeast—”
I knew what he would find, and waited, tensely.
He picked the distance off and set the dividers along the line. Then he turned his head and stared bleakly at Shannon Macaulay.
“Come again?”
“You asked me what he told me,” she said indifferently. “I have just repeated it, word for word. What else would you like me to do?”