The Nautical Chart by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Read Free Book Online

Agustin de la Guerra was a rare survivor from other times, despotic and hard on board, but when a Panamanian cargo ship with a drunken Russian watch officer had rammed de la Guerra's stern one night, when rain and sleet saturated radars in the English Channel, he'd been able to keep the tanker afloat and steer her into Dover without losing a drop of crude, saving the company the cost of tugs. Any knothead, he said, can sail around the world these days by pressing buttons. But if the electronics go down or the Americans decide to black out their damn satellites—the devil's own invention—or some Bolshevik sonofabitch runs up your ass, a good sextant, a compass, and a chronometer will still get you anywhere. So practice, my boy. Practice. Obedient, Coy had practiced tirelessly for days and months and years; later too, and with that same sextant, he had performed more difficult observations on cloudy, dangerous nights, or in the middle of strong storms racing across the Atlantic, clinging, soaked, to the .gunnel while the bow slammed down like a machete and he, glued to the eyepiece, awaited a glimpse of the faint gold disk among clouds driven by a northwesterly wind.
    He felt a quiet melancholy as he hefted the familiar weight of the sextant in his hands, sliding the index arm and hearing it tick along the toothed arc that marked from 1 to 120 the degrees on any terrestrial meridian. He computed how much he could get for it from Sergi Solans, who had been admiring the instrument for years. After all, Sergi would say when they were raising a glass at the Schilling, they weren't making sextants like that anymore. Sergi was a good kid who had been buying almost all the drinks since Coy found himself ashore and out of money; nor did he hold a grudge because Coy had gone to bed with Eva the night the Brazilian beauty was wearing a T-shirt diabolically clinging to the size 40 breasts that never saw a bra and Sergi was too drunk to fight for her. He had also studied sailing with Coy, and shared a ship for a few months when both were trainees on the Migalota, a Ro-Ro owned by Rodriguez & Saulnier. Now he was studying for his captain's exam as first officer on a Trans-Mediterranean ferry that plowed the Barcelona-Palma line twice a week. It's like driving a bus, he said. But with a sextant like that in your cabin, you'd feel like a real sailor.
    Coy centered the arm in the middle of the arc and carefully returned the Weems & Plath to its case. Then he went to the dresser, opened his wallet, and took out the card the woman had given him three days earlier when she said good-bye at the corner of the Ramblas. No address, no telephone number, nothing but the two parts of her name: Tanger Soto. Below, in a rounded, precise hand, with a small circle dotting the i, she had written the address of the Museo Naval in Madrid.
    After he closed the cover of the sextant, Coy was whistling "Noche de samba en Puerto Espana."
    The Trafalgar Showcase

    There are nothing but problems on land DIETRICHVONHAEFTEN ,
    How to Cope-with Storms

    Later he learned what it meant to leap into the void, a unique experience for Coy, who could not remember having made a precipitous move in his life. He was the kind of person who took all the time he needed to plot a meticulous route on the nautical chart. Before he found himself on mandatory shore leave, that had been a source of satisfaction in a profession where accomplishing safe passage between two points situated at far-spread geographical latitudes and longitudes was essential. There were few pleasures comparable to deliberating over calculations of course, drift, and speed, or predicting that such and such a cape, or this or that lighthouse, would come into view two days later at six in the morning and at approximately thirty degrees off the port bow, then waiting at that hour by a gunnel slick with early-morning dew, binoculars to your eyes, until you see, at exactly the predicted place, the gray silhouette