Close Reach by Jonathan Moore Read Free Book Online

the mast, at forty feet. She turned and scanned behind her, seeing nothing but waves. She checked to port and starboard and didn’t see it and supposed it must be hanging back somewhere behind her and to the south. When she turned Freefall , she’d follow the wind and waves on the fastest course to the northeast, toward Cape Horn and maybe safety. If La Araña kept its last course and if its radar was useless, too, perhaps they’d draw away from each other at right angles.
    She looked at the electronic chart plotter. It displayed a color map of the Drake Passage, with the Antarctic Peninsula at the bottom and the Strait of Magellan at the top. A little red arrow somewhere in the middle should have marked Freefall ’s position. But there was nothing.
    She couldn’t remember looking at the chart plotter since La Araña had come into view. If its jammer had blotted out the EPIRB, of course it would have taken the chart plotter, too. Dean would have known what to do about it. That thought summoned the sound of his knuckles stretching and popping in her grip as the crab boat reeled him in. The way he screamed when shesaw him in the cage above Lena.
    What would he do?
    He’d stay calm, first of all. He’d do what needed to be done, and that was turn the boat around first and take care of navigation second. She nodded and thought of Dean standing beside her to help her with this. He was always confident, and that soothed her. Her guts twisted with the enormity of her mistake: to have confused everything for boredom, as though a man like Dean could ever be common. She’d acted as though he could be thrown away and replaced at her leisure. But she’d needed him then as much as she needed him now. She let her imagination bloom until Dean’s hands were on her shoulders and his calm voice was in her ear.
    Start the turn now, Kelly.
    She waited till the top of a wave crest and spun the wheel to starboard, swinging the bow from west to north and then around to northeast. The sails slammed over to port as the wind crossed the centerline and came from the starboard quarter. The storm sail was self-tacking, but the big jib wasn’t. She used the furling gear to roll it in till the clew was past the inner forestay, then let it back out on the new tack by winching in the port sheet, giving the wind more sail than before.
    The boat lifted up from astern and caught its first surf on a fifty-foot wave. She prayed the bow wouldn’t bury itself in the trough. If that happened, the boat could pitchpole and land upside down. With its weighted keel and watertight hatches, it probably would right itself, but she might not be alive to appreciate it. Not if seventy-five thousand pounds of boat landed on top of her. She adjusted the sail trim to match the boat speed to the wave, finding the balance point by feel. She surfed the next wave for over a mile, her wake as clear as an icy contrail in the jet stream.
    When she could, she turned to the paper chart under the Lexan cover at the chart table. She tried to work out her current position by recalling all the maneuvers Freefall had made since the last-known plot. Although the GPS was gone, the knot log was a simpler instrument and still worked. And she had the compass. So she could dead reckon her way to Cape Horn, though she knew she might be off by as much as 20 miles. With 350 miles to reach the cape and La Araña still out there, she might not need to worry about the last 20 miles.
    * * *
    In an hour, the pressure fell another 2 millibars, and by then the waves were too big for the autopilot. Steering in big waves wasn’t about setting a straight course but about curving along the path of least danger. It was a walk on the razor’s edge: a slip either way, and Freefall couldspin sideways and roll with a wave or capsize end over end. So Kelly tethered herself at the helm station and hand steered.
    Dean would have been better at this.
    Dean.
    She saw him in the cage on La Araña, gripping