Close Reach by Jonathan Moore Read Free Book Online Page B

its volume knob, hoping and praying for static.
    But the death metal was still there, the same loop of screams.
    She switched it off. Dean hadn’t said what the jamming equipment’s range might be, but she couldn’t imagine that it cast too wide a circle. If it jammed a wider area than that, surely someone would notice the dead airspace and report it. Patrol boats or airplanes could triangulate the source and track it down. So they’d limit the range of their jamming equipment, and that meant they were nearby. La Araña was probably within twenty miles of her.
    Twenty miles was a long way in a rough sea. The waves weren’t as bad as before but were still too high for the radar to pick out anything but sea clutter. If it were dark, she’d take any odds on getting to Cape Horn without La Araña finding and catching her. Nothing was harder to see than an unlit boat in a storming sea at night. The more pressing concern would be hitting rocks while running blind downwind at twenty knots.
    But it wasn’t dark and wouldn’t be for at least another week.
    If the crab boat was still jamming her, it was still looking for her. It had run her down once before on a straight-line test of speed, and now she was out of fuel. Besides, she wasexhausted and had never been able to steer for speed the way Dean could. She realized then that it had been at least eight hours since she’d gone into the cabin to get a drink or use the head. She’d had a thermos of tea when Dean was on his last watch and nothing since then. She was exhausted and needed to pee, and her mouth was dry as old paint. Even with the exposure suit, she was shivering.
    As the cold had gotten worse, so had the auditory hallucinations.
    These were common enough on long watches in strong weather. The wind carried whirs and chirps, and singing voices, and screams. Voices she recognized, moans of things that might not have come from this world. Any sailor on a solo watch learns to ignore them or at least keep them separate from the sounds that matter. Usually she could. But twice she’d jerked around at the sound of a voice speaking in low Spanish, and more times than she could count she’d heard her name in the crash of the sea. The low beat of an engine that wasn’t hers.
    She could set the autopilot and go down below for five minutes.
    It wouldn’t take any longer than that to peel off her one-piece exposure suit, pee, make a thermos of soup, put the suit back on, and come back to the pilothouse. Once she thought it out and saw herself doing it, a need that had been merely pressing for the last hour became an imperative.
    Kelly was able to hold out only another minute—just long enough to know Freefall would pass to the north of the ice ahead. Then she set the autopilot, unclipped her harness tether, and went below. In the galley, she braced herself against the stove and shimmied out of her exposure suit, then hurried to the aft head. She’d held her bladder for so long that she was almost sick with the pressure, and the relief when she finally sat down and held on to the bulkhead grab rail embraced her like a morphine drip. Then she was back in the galley, upending a can of tomato soup into a saucepan and heating it over the gimbaled stove burner. While it came to a simmer, she put her exposure suit back on and cinched her chest harness tight again. She found an energy drink in the cupboard, then poured the hot soup into her tea thermos and climbed back into the pilothouse.
    Freefall was passing two miles to the north of the ice. As she’d guessed, there was a thick bank of fog in the lee, pressing heavily against the flat gray sea where the ice gave shelter from the wind and waves. The fog stretched half a mile, then thinned where the wind picked up again and blew it clear.
    It was a scene of eerie calm. The light filtered through the fog, gray and green like the cold atmosphere of some outer planet. Kelly punched off the autopilot and took the wheel, steering