Close Reach by Jonathan Moore Read Free Book Online Page A

the wires with his frozen fingers. The wind in the rigging became his scream as he was hoisted aboard with a hook through his knee. These thoughts weren’t even the worst. She tried to concentrate on steering, on keeping Freefall afloat and moving toward help. But she kept remembering other things. There were many, but the worst was Dean on the living room couch with his face in his hands and the photographs spread on the coffee table in front of him. Spread for her to see when she came in and found him like that. She’d still been flushed and hot beneath her winter coat from the afternoon in the hotel room. In the instant she saw him, she understood that all her pleasure in the last six months was something she’d stolen for herself by cutting it straight out of Dean.
    She’d given some of it back since then, but he’d given even more. So the scale would never be balanced.
    “Oh, God, Dean,” she whispered.
    * * *
    He was in his exposure suit, so he’d have a good chance of staying alive in the crab trap. Better, anyway, than Lena in her blanket. Or the frozen dead around them who’d been stripped to their bare skin and left with nothing against the cold.
    Thank God they don’t take his suit away , Kelly thought. And then, more coldly, she thought: And don’t let him find some way to pass it down to Lena. He’d do it if he could, even if it meant his own death.
    * * *
    She hand steered for three hours, covering sixty nautical miles. In the middle of the second hour, the engine’s rhythm developed a hitch. It was sputtering near the bottom of the fuel tank. She shut it down to save the last half hour of maneuvering. At the end of the third hour, the barometric pressure rose 4 millibars. The worst of the low-pressure system was past. The wind dropped to forty knots, and now only one in twenty waves swelled up to fifty feet. She used the furling gear to roll out a little more of the jib, then watched the knotmeter to get the new average speed, doing the math on the chart because she was too tired to divide in her head.
    If she could keep this up, it would be fourteen and a half hours to the cape. Maybe the Chileans could send patrol boats south into the passage to search for La Araña. Or better yet, helicopter gunships. She thought of the warm comfort Dean would feel when he heard the rotors, when one of the big Sea Stallions dropped out of the gray gloom, its downdraft flattening a circle in the sea, its guns hanging down like the legs and stinger of a wasp.
    He’d know she’d come through.

Kelly released the left Velcro wrist cuff of her exposure suit, pulled the end of her glove out of her sleeve, and looked at her watch.
    Five hours since she’d blinded and killed the man at the bow of La Araña. Five hours since La Araña had swerved away from her and given her a last look at Dean in his cage.
    She took the binoculars and scanned the horizon for the crab boat. Nothing. There was a massive iceberg five miles in front of her, visible where the sea was slamming into its western flank and sending geysers of spray skyward. It was so enormous that it sat as solid as an outcrop of rock in spite of the battering the Southern Ocean was giving it.
    Probably it had broken off from one of the ice shelves hugging the southern continent. Its smooth top must have covered ten square miles. Windborne spray from the breaking waves whipped over the edge of the ice cliffs and blew in snaking tendrils across the top. The spray would build to a fog bank on the lee side of the ice. She steered Freefall five degrees closer to north to give the area a wide berth. She wanted nothing to do with the berg, the fog, or the growlers that probably lay in the smoother water behind the ice mass. So she measured the distance with her eyes and set the course northward and then watched her progress against the ice ahead of her until she was sure it wasn’t drifting north on a line of convergence.
    Then she leaned to the VHF and turned up