“I will, indeed. Don’t worry. it will only be a matter of a few days.”
Appicella excused himself and left Majorov’s office. He went back into his workroom, closing the door behind him, and pretended to tidy up. He removed the floppy diskette containing the summary file, and with a craft knife, opened the paper envelope meant to permanently contain the diskette. He removed the five-inch disc of thin mylar plastic, and looked around for a place to conceal it.
His eyes fell upon a penlight which he used for seeing into tight places in computers. He unscrewed its cap and shook out the batteries. Then he wrapped the plastic disc tightly around the batteries and reinserted them into the penlight.
It was a close fit, but when he replaced the cap and switched on the light, it worked. He clipped the penlight into his inside jacket pocket and congratulated himself on his ingenuity.
He left the building and strolled down the hillside toward the sea and his cottage. It seemed to him that in the past couple of days, there were a lot more people about. A troop of young men in sweat clothes jogged in step past him toward the gymnasium. Appicella was afraid. He didn’t believe for a moment that a man who could put together this place would have the slightest difficulty in summoning an aircraft whenever he pleased. When he reached the cottage, he picked up the telephone and asked for an outside line. On hearing the dial tone, he punched in the numbers for his Rome workshop. His secretary answered.
“Hello, Angelica? This is Appicella.” He enunciated very carefully.
“I’m afraid I’m going to be stuck with Mr.
Firsov for a few days. Apparently there is a lack of transportation at the moment. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mr. Appicella. I’ll cancel your hairdresser’s appointment for the day after tomorrow, then, and your luncheon engagement with the young lady.”
“Yes, yes. Oh, do you remember the young lady I lunched with last week?”
“The Amer…”
“Yes, that’s the one. Please call her and tell her I am having difficulty keeping our appointment, that I am stuck here. I will call her when I can, though. Tell her, if she doesn’t hear from me by the end of the week, she should forget about our appointment, but please, not to forget about me. Tell her that, exactly, all right?”
“Yes, Mr. Appicella. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
He thought desperately for some other message he could leave that would alert someone to what was happening, but he could not.
“No, that is all, but please call the young lady right away. She will be so disappointed, I know.”
He hung up and took a deep breath. He had not the slightest doubt that he was a prisoner, now, and he could not imagine what, if anything, Katharine Rule could do when she received his message. He felt very alone and frightened. WILL LEE lay back in the cockpit, a cushion under his head, and sipped a cold beer. The y “JL sun warmed his face as the breeze cooled it. He thought he had never felt so perfectly content. He and the boy from the boatyard, Lars, had cruised in a leisurely fashion down the Finnish coast, then among the islands of the Aland group, stopping where they liked, and using the local cruising club’s saunas ashore. The boy had been good company, although his English was scanty. They had tuned the boat together, getting the best performance out of her, and made the small adjustments and repairs that any new craft demands. At that moment. Lee thought, he should have been lubricating a sticky bottom swivel on the headsail reefing gear, but the sun was so pleasant that he could not bring himself to budge.
He had left Lars to catch a ferry on the island of Kokar. past the main island group, and now he was sailing south in open water, singlehanded, and not running into as much shipping as he had imagined he would. With a reaching wind, he had come a hundred miles in fifteen hours, about as fast a time as he could have wished for in a boat of this size, some forty-two feet, considering he was not pushing himself. Sweden was off to starboard somewhere, and Soviet Estonia was off to port, no more than about seventy miles, he mused. He had never been to the Soviet Union; he wondered if this were as close as he would ever get. He and the boat would be in the port of Bunge on the Swedish island of Gotland by midnight, he reckoned, and there he would re provision before setting off on the last leg to Copenhagen. Kate would be in Copenhagen, and he looked forward to her. He fell asleep with that thought, and with conditions so perfect and the beer lulling him, he slept longer than he should have.
He woke only when he felt cold, and the sun had disappeared behind scudding clouds. There was little enough blue sky left as he sat up and scratched his head. The boat was going like a train, and the horizon to starboard looked ominously dark. The wind was up, too, and he would have to shorten sail if it continued to rise. He looked at his watch. Christ, he had been asleep for nearly three hours!
Two beers in the afternoon had not been a good idea. He was lucky he had not been run down by shipping. He scanned the horizon quickly for a sign of anything on a collision course. Nothing, thank God, and he relaxed a bit.
Then he tensed up again. He was twenty degrees off course to port. The wind had backed to the southwest, and, since the autopilot was being operated by a wind vane, the boat had simply changed course. He had an off-course alarm aboard, but he had not set it. How long had the yacht been off course?
He went below and checked the Decca navigator, an instrument that, from a network of special radio transmitters, plotted the boat’s position and gave a constant readout of longitude and latitude. He wrote down the numbers, then plotted them on his chart. Lee stared at the X his pencil had made. It couldn’t be, he thought, it simply couldn’t be. Then he thought about it, and realized it very well could be. He was more than twenty miles off his proper course, twenty miles closer to the international boundary than he should be. He was using a fairly small scale chart for the open water sailing, and there was no boundary marked on it. Still, he felt he must be in Swedish waters, even with the three-hour run in the wrong direction.
The yacht lurched as it took a wave, a bigger one than he had seen all day. He’d better shorten sail and get back on course in a hurry.
Fortunately, that would be relatively easy, with the headsail reefing system. All he had to do was ease the sheet and winch in on the reefing line; the sail would roll up around the forestay like a window blind. He did that, then took a reef in the mainsail, as well. All this took another twenty minutes before he could point up toward Gotland. But when he had sheeted everything in tight, he still wasn’t pointing high enough. Screw Gotland; he’d go there another year.
He continued to sail south with a little west in it, safe on the Swedish side of the international boundary, he reckoned.
The boat was flying along, and he found himself enjoying the brisker weather. He’d been too lazy these past days. He went below to make himself a cup of coffee and had a glance at the barometer. It was falling like a stone.
He looked at the chart. He had sea room. in the usual sense, but the boundary was out there somewhere, and that might be more dangerous than a rocky lee shore. He might end up getting his friend’s yacht confiscated, if he wasn’t careful. The boat took a larger wave, lurching enough to spill his coffee. He put it down in the galley sink and climbed into the cockpit.
The wind was still rising, and the boat was over pressed again. He’d have to reef further. First, the headsail, then the main. He loosened the sheet and started to winch in the reefing line. The line came taut, and the rotating head stay refused to budge. Damn, these things always went wrong at the worst possible time. He went below and slipped into a safety harness, then came back on deck. He hooked onto a wire jackstay and walked along the windward deck, staying crouched to keep his balance on the bucking foredeck. At the bow, he knelt and grasped the forestay, which was wrapped in several turns of sail. He took a grip on it and tried to turn it. Nothing. It wouldn’t budge. If he couldn’t get the forestay to rotate, he wouldn’t be able to use the headsail at all; it would just flog in the wind until it destroyed itself. He took a deep breath, summoned all his strength, and put his weight into turning the forestay.
It moved a fraction, then a bit more. Then there was a crack like a rifle shot. and Lee found himself flat on his back on the deck. What the hell had happened? He looked up into the sky and saw a giant flag waving from the top of the mast. It was the headsail, still attached to the forestay, which had pulled right out of the deck, even while he was trying to turn it. He was on his feet like a cat and running toward the cockpit. The mast was now entirely unsupported from forward, and he had to let go the mainsheet to get the pressure off, otherwise the mast might go. Even as that thought passed through his mind, even as he was throwing himself into the cockpit, reaching for the mainsheet, he heard another, much louder crack, then, suddenly, everything seemed to go quiet.
The wind had dropped, and the seas seemed not nearly so bad. No wonder, he thought. They were no longer sailing, pounding into the seas. They had been dismasted.
The spar had broken cleanly perhaps four feet from the deck and was lying in the water to leeward, still attached to the boat by the steel wire rigging. The yacht was now drifting rapidly to leeward, in exactly the direction he did not want to go.
The next hour and a half was a time of hard work and bitter self-recrimination. This was his own fault. It had been his job to grease the swivel at the bottom of the forestay, and he had not done it. He could not imagine that the swivel could have corroded in such a short time; it must have been loose to begin with, and had he taken the trouble to get off his ass and lubricate it, he would have seen the problem and tightened it before it became critical.
Thank God he had a good engine; now he would have to use it to get the yacht to the nearest port. But first, he had to cut loose the mast. There was no way he could get it and the boom back aboard, alone as he was; the sails would just have to go with it, and Lloyd’s of London could pay for new ones. He dug a pair of bolt cutters from a locker and went to work on the rigging. Ninety minutes later, his hands and forearms aching, he watched the mass of spars, sails, and rigging sink out of sight, freed from the boat.
Exhausted, he went below and rested, sucking a sugar cube for quick energy. Things could be worse, he thought.
At least he had a brand new Volvo diesel engine at his disposal. He did some quick calculations and reckoned he could make four or five knots, going straight into the seas. It wouldn’t be very comfortable, but he could make Got 7 land by morning, maybe. He climbed wearily back into the cockpit, switched on the ignition, made sure the engine was out of gear, pushed the throttle forward, and hit the starter. The engine turned over for ten seconds or so, but didn’t catch. He stopped to let the batteries recover. Come on, dammit, start! He hit the starter again. Immediately, this time, the engine caught and raced. Lee throttled back and let it idle for a minute or so, then pushed it into gear.
He came onto a course for Bunge, then set the autopilot.
It was heavy going, dead into the seas, but the boat was making five and a half knots through the water, and that wasn’t bad at all. He suddenly felt very hungry. He looked carefully around the horizon for signs of shipping and saw none. That was a relief; he would be hard to spot without sails up. He started below for a snack. As he put his foot onto the companionway ladder, the engine noise suddenly shot up into a shriek, then stopped completely. What the hell? The silence was pierced by the buzz of the oil pressure warning. He reached to switch off the ignition, then he saw it. Running from the starboard winch over the side, bar taut, was the windward sheet, the rope that had once controlled the headsail. Lee knew without a doubt that it was wrapped around the propeller.
He started the engine again; he had to know for sure. It ran perfectly well in neutral, but when he shifted into forward, it immediately began to labor. There was one hope; he tried reverse. Maybe it would unwind. In reverse, the engine ran smoothly for a few seconds, then began to strain again. Lee shifted back to neutral. The yacht came off the wind and lay beam on to the seas, rolling with them.
There was a word that described his circumstances. Lee thought, a short but expressive word that said it all. Fucked.
He was fucked, and completely. He couldn’t sail, he couldn’t motor. He lay, drifting downwind at perhaps three knots, toward the waters of a country hostile to uninvited visitors, toward God-knew-what sort of shore, for which he had no large-scale chart. Fucked.
Wearily, he switched off the engine and went below.
The locker under the navigator’s seat yielded a packet of three parachute flares. It had been all the little chandlery in
Jakobstad had had. They were expecting a shipment, they said. Three had seemed enough; now he wished for twenty.
He climbed back into the cockpit and looked around him.
Nothing. Not a ship, not a fishing boat, not a yacht. He opened the packet of flares, removed one, stripped off the top and fired it. It arched high into the sky, then exploded into a red light, which wafted slowly downward, supported by a tiny parachute. If there were a ship just over the horizon, perhaps the flare would be seen. On the other hand, it didn’t get very dark at night at this latitude at this time of year. It wouldn’t be easily seen with this much ambient light. He looked at the two remaining flares; they would have to be saved until he could actually see another vessel.