Close Reach Read online

  Close Reach is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Hydra eBook Original

  Copyright © 2014 by Jonathan S. Moore

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39094-0

  Cover design and illustration: © David G. Stevenson

  Illustration of the S/V Freefall: Robert Perry, Robert H. Perry Yacht Designers LLC

  www.readhydra.com

  v3.1

  This is for Maria Wang, Jon Wilson, and Nathaniel Boyer. I’d sail anywhere with the three of you.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: Dead Reckoning

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part Two: Deception Island

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Three: The Flensing; the Harvest

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Part One

  Dead Reckoning

  The timer above the narrow pilot berth started buzzing at 2:50 a.m., but Kelly had been awake at least an hour, thinking about the last radio call. The signal had come the morning before, while they were still anchored off the Antarctic Peninsula’s Adelaide Island. She’d been making breakfast before they weighed anchor, when the voice of a young British woman came blasting out of the ether and into the bulkhead-mounted VHF.

  It’s coming, this girl had screamed. It saw us and it’s coming back! Oh, God, Jim, hurry, please hurry!

  And then her voice cut off.

  What replaced her was more terrifying than her words. At first it was like someone had touched an arcing high-voltage wire to the British girl’s transmitter. But that sharp crackle had faded in a few seconds and was replaced by music. Not any kind of music Kelly listened to, but she thought she knew what it was called. Death metal. Or maybe black metal. Heavily distorted, pounding guitars. A singer screaming guttural lyrics that might not have been words at all. The music had gone on and on, with Kelly frozen in front of the stove, waiting for the girl’s voice to come back. Dean was on deck rigging the sails but ducked his head into the companionway. He’d heard everything on the VHF repeater in the cockpit.

  “What’s going on?”

  The VHF was set to monitor emergency channel 16. Kelly had put down the spatula, wiping her hands dry on the front of her polar fleece sweater as she stepped to the navigation station. She switched the VHF to channel 9, the backup emergency channel, but the music was there, too. Then she’d tried scanning all the channels up to 86.

  The deafening music was on every VHF channel.

  She looked at Dean, and he pointed silently at the single-sideband radio. She powered up the long-range SSB and ran through the frequencies from 2 megahertz to 26 megahertz. It was the same there. The terrible music was distorted on the extremely long-range frequencies at the high end of the SSB spectrum, but it was there.

  “That’s impossible,” she said.

  “Turn it off,” Dean said. “And get the engine started.”

  He shut the hatch doors, and she heard his footfalls overhead as he went to the bow. In a moment she heard the electric whine of the windlass and the steady clink of anchor chain feeding into the forward locker.

  * * *

  They’d checked the radio thirty minutes later as they were motoring out of the lee of the island. The music had given way to a full spectrum of static and silence on the short-range VHF. On the SSB they picked up the usual chatter of faraway yachts. They listened to cruisers discussing the weather in the Marquesas and Galápagos, another pair of yachts arranging a rendezvous at coordinates that might have been the Minerva Reefs, off New Zealand. There was no interference and no music. This far south, there was no help to call on the SSB. Dean tried calling out on the short-range VHF, hoping to hail a nearby ship or the girl who’d cried out earlier.

  But the only reply was silence and then static when Kelly turned down the radio’s squelch.

  They looked at each other and at the glowing face of the radio panel, and Kelly knew there was nothing else they could do.

  * * *

  They set the storm staysail and tied a third reef into the mainsail before they broke out of the shelter of the island and into the open wind. Then they pointed the bow north, into the Drake Passage.

  North, toward home.

  * * *

  Kelly hadn’t thought much of home in thirty-nine months of sailing, but now she wanted to be there badly. She lay in her bunk, listening to the buzzing alarm and wanting nothing more than to be back in Mystic under the covers of their bed in their house overlooking the harbor. To have this passage, and the eight thousand miles after it, finished. To have the S/V Freefall tied to her own dock, the miles a memory under her keel instead of a threat.

  She thought of the young woman’s voice again, the terrible music that had drowned her.

  It’s coming, she’d cried before the electronic tide carried her away.

  Freefall was rolling in a heavy cross sea. Each wave tossed Kelly against the bunk’s lee cloth as the big yacht slipped sideways up the face of the swell. Then, as the boat fell down the back side of the receding wall of water, she slipped the other way across the narrow mattress until she banged against the padded hull liner. She could hear them out there—big, rolling ocean waves. They’d be frothy on top where the crests were breaking in the wind.

  Kelly switched the alarm off and crawled out of the bunk. The pilot berth was just behind the companionway steps and aft of the galley. She went to the stove, hands moving along the overhead grab rails. She lit the gimbaled burner under the teakettle and then went to the hanging locker for her foul weather gear. The jacket and bib overalls were still wet and salt-crusted from her last watch four hours earlier. She pulled them on slowly to keep her balance in the rolling cabin and then put on her insulated sea boots.

  When she was dressed, the kettle was whistling.

  She poured the boiling water into a thermos and dropped in a tea bag and a packet of sugar. Then she slipped on her hat and waterproof gloves, put the thermos in the deep pocket of her jacket, and climbed the companionway steps to the pilothouse.

  Dean was there to give her a hand when she opened the hatch doors and climbed into the semiopen pilothouse.

  “I was gonna let you sleep another hour,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t do that. Anyway, I was up.”

  She turned and shut the hatch doors, sealing the heat in the cabin below. Then she sat in the pedestal chair across from
Dean. The pilothouse was enclosed in aluminum and glass on three sides but was open to the stern, where the helmsman could stand behind the huge wheel and have an unobstructed view of the sails. Right now the boat was steering itself with the autopilot, with the wheel spinning by the force of an invisible hand. It was three in the morning, but the sun was up. They were below 62 degrees south latitude in the middle of an Antarctic summer. The sun hadn’t set for a week. Their wake trailed back across the steep faces of the waves, twin white trails of bubbles from their dual rudders. Kelly glanced at the instrument panel in front of Dean. The knot log showed fourteen and a half knots.

  “What’s the weather been doing?” she asked.

  “Wind’s been steady out of the northwest. Thirty knots. But the pressure’s dropping.”

  She looked at the digital barometer readout: 980 millibars. It had been 985 when she’d finished her last watch.

  “We’ll see sixty knots before we reach the cape, I bet,” Dean said.

  “What about the radio?”

  They looked at each other for a moment, then Dean turned away and looked through the pilothouse windows. The bright orange storm staysail was iron-tight in the stiff wind.

  “Nothing on the radio. Just static if you turn up the squelch.”

  “On 16, or did you try all the channels?”

  “I scanned everything on VHF. It’s quiet.”

  She thought about that for a while, watching the waves hit the port side of the Freefall’s bow, the spray flying off to leeward with the wind in long green and white flumes.

  “If we heard her on the VHF, she couldn’t have been more than fifty miles from us.”

  “Probably more like five or ten,” Dean said.

  She looked at him, and he shrugged. He pulled off his heavy fleece hat and ran the back of his gloved hand along the stubble of his cheek. The skin beneath his eyes was weighted and dark, and it wasn’t just the four-hour watch on a rough sea. Dean looked at the chart table and then back at Kelly, and when he spoke, his voice was measured and low.

  “VHF is mostly line of sight. But we were right next to Adelaide. Think of the ice and cliffs. Unless her antenna was on top of a five-hundred-foot hill, she must’ve been pretty close,” he said.

  “Jesus. Any idea who it might’ve been?”

  It wasn’t a complete shot in the dark. Not many cruising yachts left the comfort of the tropics. The ones venturing south of forty-five degrees were closely knit. They knew boats on the radio nets and boats they’d met in ports working their way down the Chilean coast.

  “I don’t know,” Dean said. “I looked through my log, going back six months, just to see. Four months ago, when we did the haul-out in Callao, I met a British guy in the boatyard. James something. Or Jim. He was going south. He had a girl with him. Like a backpacker he’d picked up somewhere north, maybe Costa Rica. Was bringing her as crew.”

  “I remember them,” Kelly said. “I met the girl, anyway. Lena. She’d heard I was a doctor and came to see me. She was afraid to go to a Peruvian.”

  Lena’s problem had been chlamydia, and she’d been horribly embarrassed. Kelly had given her a treatment of azithromycin from Freefall’s vast first aid kit and had sent her back to the Brit with a pat on the back, enough pills for both of them, and a warning to be a little more careful. She hadn’t told Dean any of this, but she closed her eyes and remembered the girl’s voice saying, I’m so sorry to bother you, but I think I need a little help. She thought of Lena at the marina in Peru, young and teary and lost. But a good kid. Then she thought of the terrified voice on the radio.

  “It might’ve been them. You remember the boat’s name?”

  Dean shook his head.

  “No, but I saw it. It was a custom steel job, maybe a Bill Gardner design. Smaller than us. Fifty feet or so, with a cutter rig.”

  “I’ll take the watch now,” she said. “You should get on the SSB, see if anyone knows where this guy is.”

  “I’ll come up and tell you if I learn anything.”

  He stood and pointed at her chest.

  “Harness.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  She took the yellow safety tether he handed her and clipped it to the chest harness on her inflatable life jacket. The other end of the tether was secured through an eyebolt beneath the instrument panel. Dean unclipped his harness, opened the hatch doors, and went below. When he was gone, Kelly took his empty seat to be closer to the instruments. She was still warm, but it was just a matter of time before the cold sank like a blade through the layers of her foul weather gear and found her. When it did, she’d drink the tea from the thermos. For now, she just watched the instruments. The autopilot worked so well and the wind was so constant that she did not need to lay a hand on the helm or trim the sails. She could have done either without getting up, as there was a second steering station in front of her and all the sheets were led back to electric winches on the cabin top within arm’s reach. So she sat and watched Dean’s marvel of a boat cut through the sea as she carried them north and listened to the wind and the sound of the breaking waves. After a few moments, she saw the radar screen dim briefly. Dean was transmitting at full power on the SSB.

  * * *

  There was a waterproof aluminum box beneath the compact chart table to her right. She opened it and took out her logbook, thumbing through the pages till she found the most recent entry, from four hours earlier when she’d finished her last watch. She took the ballpoint pen from the spiral binding and braced herself against the chart table to write. Her handwriting was a shaky scrawl because of the thick rubberized gloves she wore and Freefall’s constant motion. But she could read it. Kelly knew when she began the entry that she would get sidetracked, but she began as she always did: she logged the weather and the falling pressure, noted the sail plan and Freefall’s speed, heading, and current position. She copied the instrument gauge readings so that they would have a record of them.

  Then she stopped and looked for a long moment at the radar screen on the lower console. It showed heavy bands of clouds forty miles to the west. Probably the leading edge of the low-pressure system. The set’s sensitivity was dialed up so that she could read the weather, but the consequence was a screen filled with ghostly green radar returns. She knew these were waves over fifteen feet. She switched off the target enhancement, and when the screen refreshed, much of the clutter was gone.

  There were two strong returns fifty and fifty-five miles directly behind them.

  Vessels of some kind, five miles apart, following in Freefall’s track.

  She watched those two returns for a long while and then slowly bent back to her logbook.

  She thought of the girl on the radio. She was now sure it was Lena’s voice. It’s coming, she’d screamed. But Kelly thought what she said after that might be more important. It saw us and it’s coming back! Oh, God, Jim, hurry, please hurry!

  Why would Lena call Jim on the VHF if they were on the same boat?

  The answer was obvious. Jim hadn’t been on the boat. Kelly thought of all the hundreds of times either she or Dean had gone ashore in the dinghy and the other had stayed aboard. Hadn’t they always taken a handheld VHF in the dinghy, just in case? So Jim was in the dinghy with a handheld, and Lena was calling to him. She’d seen something. Something she’d seen before and didn’t want to see again. And it was coming for her.

  Kelly looked up from the logbook and scanned the horizon. It took her almost a minute to make a 360-degree check because she had to wait for the moment when Freefall was at the crest of a wave. Down in the troughs, all she could see was gray-green water.

  Maybe Lena and Jim had ducked their boat into a tight cove or a narrow fjord to try to hide. There were plenty of places like that: narrow cuts in the ice and rock, just big enough for a careful skipper to maneuver into. But in such a tight anchorage, Jim would have had to drop the bow anchor and then lead stern lines to shore to keep the boat from swinging in the katabatic winds that blew down
from the mountain passes and valleys of the islands. So he would have taken the dinghy and gone ashore with the lines, and Lena would have stood watch. Waiting in the cockpit with the VHF and binoculars, watching for whatever had chased them into their hiding place. A hiding place that hadn’t worked.

  And what was chasing them?

  Kelly penned the last of her thoughts into the logbook and then looked back to the radar screen. The two vessels were still out there, but they were seven miles apart now. The lead vessel was leaving the other behind, and it was closing on Freefall. It had gained a quarter of a mile in a little more than ten minutes. She flipped the logbook over and did the rough math on the back cover. They had a good lead. If the other boat maintained its course, it would take thirty-two hours for it to catch Freefall. Almost a day and a half. They’d be in the middle of the Drake Passage when they met, midway between the tip of Chile and the Antarctic Peninsula. Three hundred miles from land in either direction.

  Kelly looked back at the instrument panel and saw that the barometer had ticked down another millibar: 979. She looked out at the western horizon. The sky overhead was a dim and hazy blue. But in the west it was darkening. The low-pressure system sweeping in from the west would reach Freefall in far less than thirty-two hours. But she’d seen the storms down here and knew what to expect. Storms lasted for days. They lined up one after another like beads on a terrible necklace, and you could weather one and survive only to be hit a few hours later by the next.

  She was certain of one thing: they’d still be in the middle of a storm when the other boat came. And that thought left her as cold as the sea spray pelting the pilothouse glass.

  By the time Dean came back into the pilothouse, the cold had found her and she was drinking tea from the thermos. It was five in the morning. Though it had never gotten dark, the day was growing brighter as the sun rose to make another low transit of the sky. She handed him a harness tether, and he clipped in after he sat in the second pedestal chair.