Buried At Sea Read online

  "Can you give me a hand, Jim?'

  "Put down the gun."

  "Can't. My fingers are locked. Help me off of here. Get me loose."

  "I'm not walking in front of that gun," Jim said, even as his mind fastened on the absurdity. Will's shotgun would shred the thin teak bulkhead as it had shredded the African girl's chest.

  "Oh Jesus, Jim, are you nuts? I won't hurt you. Pull the knife out."

  Will was nearly sobbing. Jim looked into the cabin again and this time saw the long knife sticking out of Will's chest.

  "What?" He lunged through the door and bent over the old man. Will was dead white from shock or blood loss. His pupils were dilated and he was gasping for air.

  "I can't believe I fell for the oldest trick in the book." "I'll get a doctor."

  "Pull the knife out."

  "I'll get a doctor."

  "There's no time."

  "I can't just pull it out. What if I cut an artery?" The blade had pierced him where his breast met his shoulder.

  Will bit his lips. "I'll take the chance, for Christ's sake. Pull it out. Pull it out. It's killing me. I can't breathe:'

  Left side. An inch from his heart? A quarter inch? "I can't—there's an oil rig tender in the lagoon. Americans. They can radio in a helicopter. Fly you to a hospital."

  "No! They'll find me in the hospital. They'll kill me."

  The Nellie H blew her horn, the blast racing across the lagoon and reverberating off the walls of mangroves.

  Jim whirled from Will's bunk, pushed out of his cabin, and scrambled up the companionway. He could hear the engines start to thunder and he thrust his head out of the hatch just as the rig tender began to depart from the dock. Perry waved frantically from the wheelhouse.

  "Jim," Will called.

  There was just time to jump into the dinghy. The hell with his stuff. Leave it and get out of here. The hell with

  crazy Will. When they saw him rowing, the rig tender would pick him up.

  "Jim," Will called again. His voice sounded as if it were clawing the hot, still air, as if he had channeled every last remnant of his strength into one final, desperate bid to be heard.

  Jim prayed to Shannon, prayed for her advice. She had a clearer eye than he did behind her ready smile: a survivor's eye.

  "Jim!"

  They said you saw your past flash by when you died; what Jim Leighton saw was his life plowing across the lagoon, trailing a heavy wake, and vanishing into the narrow creek that led to the Calabar River and the Atlantic beyond if he didn't run now.

  "Run for it, Jim," Will yelled. "I'm a goner."

  Jim slumped halfway out of the hatch and whispered, "Oh my God."

  He clung to the cockpit sill, watching the ponderous curl of the Nellie H's big wake roll toward the anchored sailboat. It wasn't guilt that held him, nor fear that he would hate himself later. But the much more powerful and insidious grip of need—need that he had to serve.

  Then he saw the deadly threat of the rig tender's wake.

  He plunged down the companionway ladder, picturing the effect on the knife when the track of the passing vessel seized Hustle and threw her violently from side to side.

  The sloop was already leaning into the cavity of the wake when he burst into the cabin.

  The old man was still conscious, eyes murky. He flinched at Jim's approach, pawed at the sheets, and struggled to lift the shotgun.

  "It's Jim. Hang on."

  He knelt beside the bunk and cradled Will in his arms, hoping to cushion him from the rocking. No good. As the boat leaned further, Will's body shifted hard and it was clear to Jim that nothing he did could prevent the man from rasping against the sharp steel in his shoulder.

  He reached for the knife, closed his hand gingerly around the handle, which was wrapped in dirty cord, and forced

  himself to tighten his grip when all he wanted to do was let it go. Still kneeling, he braced every muscle in his body, counted to three, and yanked up.

  Steel ground on bone. Will screamed.

  The blade slid free. Jim flew backward and crashed into the bulkhead with the knife held high, dripping blood on his face. Before he could untangle his arms and legs, the rolling water tipped Hustle in the opposite direction and he fell facedown on Will's bunk.

  Fearfully, he pulled the sheet away and watched the blood flow from Will's chest. The skin around the one-inch wound puckered out where the knife had exited, oozing red like a lipstick kiss. Jim noticed with faint hope that the blood was not spewing in the rhythmic pumping from a sliced artery. The boat was still rocking violently. As gently as he could, he lifted Will to inspect his back.

  His skin was unblemished. The knife hadn't gone through him. But God knew what was going on inside the man. "Jim," Will groaned. "Douse me with alcohol."

  "What?"

  "Goddamned Africa, every germ in the world. Douse me good before they get inside me.

  There's a bottle in the big medical kit."

  He screamed when Jim dribbled the antiseptic onto his chest and struggled to break away. Appalled, Jim let go. The pain had turned Will into a frightened animal. But he moaned, "Sweet Jesus, get it over with. Do it! They probably cleaned fish with that goddamned thing. Do it!"

  With a prayer that the old man would faint, Jim poured the alcohol into the wound. Will's scream pitched to a shriek. His whole body convulsed and he flipped onto his back and flailed out, pummeling Jim with his fists.

  Jim took the weak blows, and as they subsided, he laid Will down again, wondering how to bandage the wound. Will lay still for a moment, his breath whistling through his teeth.

  "I'm bleeding," he said. "You have to pack the wound. Go to the medical locker. Get Iodoform gauze."

  Jim pawed frantically through the locker. "I got it!"

  "Stuff it in—Oh, Christ! ... Good. Good. Well done. Well done. . . . Okay, we have to get out of here. Before her people come back."

  "We have to find a doctor."

  Will closed his eyes. "A doctor won't do us any good in a Nigerian jail."

  The words we and us forced Jim's thoughts along a predictable series of events: the dead woman's friends return; they call the police; the police—or, more likely, a squad of thug soldiers like the one on the rig tender—arrest both him and an unconscious or dying Will Spark; Jim claims he wasn't even on the boat; ask the boys at the dock. What boys? Four stoned teenagers with machetes who tried to rob me?

  Will whispered, "Do you really want to defend yourself against murder charges in a lawless state?"

  "Me? What about you?"

  "I'll have worse problems. They will kidnap me out of a hospital in twenty-four hours—listen to me. It was self-defense. They sent her to kidnap me—now help me up on deck.

  We've got to get out of here."

  He raised his head and moved as if to swing his legs off his bunk, but fell back, sucking air. "I can't move, Jim. It's up to you."

  THE TEENS WITH the machetes had returned to the dock. There was no time to waste booming the dinghy aboard. Jim tied it to a cleat on the stem, then hurried forward to the bow to figure out how to raise the anchor. Will had lowered it by stepping on a switch under a rubber jacket that controlled the electric windlass. But all that did was let the chain further out. A closer inspection revealed an up-down toggle that reversed the windlass. The chain began clanking aboard, dragging a stinking coat of mud and slime across the deck and into its locker below.

  When the anchor itself finally emerged from the lagoon, stock and flukes trailing oily grass, it took Jim two tries to lock it into place and he still wasn't sure he had seated it correctly. But by then the boat was drifting toward the dock and he realized too late that he should have started the engine first.

  When he tried the starter, it ground over but wouldn't fire. Again he pushed the starter button. Nothing. He glanced back: there were more people on the dock.

  When Will started the engine, an alarm sounded first. The fuel alarm. He was so rattled, he had f
orgotten to flip the fuel

  switch. He cranked the starter again, and the diesel rumbled to life.

  He steered for the narrow opening through which they had entered the lagoon. He had gotten comfortable steering under sail, but under power, in these close quarters, the boat seemed extraordinarily long—the bow far, far away. She was slow to respond to the steering wheel and the creek mouth was coming up fast.

  Then the boat was in the creek, the trees hanging close and darkening the sky. Hustle's exhaust echoed in the tunnel-like space.

  Standing on tiptoe to see over the cabin, he was distracted by motion down the companionway. The dead woman seemed to be moving. He locked the wheel, started fearfully down the companionway, and stopped abruptly when he saw what was moving.

  Her bloodied chest was carpeted with flies.

  How long would they have to carry her body? A cold voice from deep inside his head spoke firmly to that topic. He couldn't throw her overboard so close to the village. They'd have to wait until they were far out at sea. How far out would the flies—and the Nigerian police—follow?

  Suddenly, directly ahead, something large hung suspended inches below the water's surface. The ominous dark cylinder of a huge waterlogged tree trunk. Jim spun the wheel, but it was too late. A loud thunk slammed through the decks and echoed from the cabin. Hustle staggered. The impact threw him against the spokes and the boat veered toward the forested creek bank, bumping along the heavy log.

  What had he done? Had he damaged the hull? Terrified of sinking, he ran down the companionway, edged past the dead woman, and raced forward to the forepeak, where the extra sails were stowed.

  He grabbed a flashlight from its charger and, wrestling with the heavy sailbags, probed the cramped space praying all the while that the beam wouldn't reflect the gleam of water. Nothing. He cocked his ear, listening. Nothing. No gushing water; no dents or cracks. He couldn't believe that the hull would survive such a hit unscathed. He backed out of

  the forepeak, pulled up the floorboards, and shined the light in the bilge. There was water, dark and oily, but no more than he had last seen under the floorboards while helping Will rewire the depth finder.

  Lucky, lucky, lucky.

  Then he heard a distant muttering. A chain saw? No. The noise was an engine approaching—like the high-pitched whine of the outboard canoe he'd last seen heading out of the creek.

  Jim ran back through the main salon, jumped over the dead woman, climbed the companionway, and looked out. The sound was loud, close, coming from ahead. Just ahead to the left he saw an indent in the bank. He engaged the prop and swung cautiously into the opening, which led a hundred feet into the mangroves and then stopped at a wall of trees. High overhead, one of the spreaders jutting out from the mast caught on a hanging branch and the boat slewed to the side. An instant later, he felt the keel plow into the mud and then the sailboat was standing stock-still in the near darkness cast by the forest canopy.

  Jim shut the engine. How stupid could he be? In his panic he had trapped himself in a dead-end canal.

  As the outboard pulled abreast of Hustle, a glance in the creek mouth would reveal her white stern reflected on the water, or her mast rearing straighter than the trees. He looked up. Would the vines obscure it? Could he pull them over the boat? No time? He saw a flicker of motion through the mangrove forest; the canoe sped on the main creek, bearing down on the inlet.

  What had he told Will when Will razzed him about bulking up? Muscle came in handy.

  Do it! He scrambled up the backstay, climbing the steeply inclined wire cable hand over hand. Fifteen feet above the deck, he let go with his right hand, gripped the wire with his left, and lunged for a thick, leafy vine.

  The vine and several attached to it swung closer to the mast. Giddy with fear and flying on adrenaline, he almost laughed at the sight he cut, suspended between the backstay and the vine like a crucified monkey. Then a huge ant

  crawled off the vine onto the back of his hand and started down his arm. And Jim saw to his horror that the rough bark he clung to was filled with them.

  The canoe pulled abreast of the inlet. Jim watched through the leafy scrim. There were three men in the boat: one standing in the bow, one driving, and one seated between them dragging on a blunt that was as fat as a cigar. The driver glanced down the inlet.

  The man in the middle reached back and passed him the smoke. The canoe flashed past and was gone.

  When the noise of the motor had faded to a quiet buzz, Jim let go of the vine, frantically shook the ants off his arm, and slid down the backstay, burning his hands. Something was crawling inside his shirt. He stripped it off and slapped more ants from his back and chest. The canoe had left in its wake the stink of gasoline and oil, which lingered in the thick air, sweetened by a whiff of marijuana.

  Jim started Hustle's engine and engaged reverse. The propeller churned. Mud roiled and darkened the water. But the boat wouldn't move. Jim increased the power. She shuddered, decks vibrating, and threw mud. Then with a heart-stopping series of hesitations she began to move. Shoving the dinghy, bumping bottom with her keel, and dragging her spreaders through the branches, she backed out of the inlet. As soon as she reached the main channel, Jim shoved the throttle forward and drove her as fast as she would go toward the Calabar River.

  The equatorial night was closing in quite suddenly, even more abruptly than it had at sea, abetted by the Harmattan haze and the storm clouds. It was dark among the trees, but the slot of sky he could see above the creek began to glow from the distant offshore oil well flares. And it was by that fiery orange and red light that he finally saw the creek open into the Calabar River. Breaking out of the trees, he steered for a string of lighted buoys, which marked the channel through the flat expanse of the estuary that led to the Atlantic. An expanse, he knew from their morning passage in, that was an illusion. The water was shallow, the channels treacherous.

  THE FAIRWAY BUOYS appeared sporadically, and many were unlit. But ship lights moving downstream gave him a clue to the deepest water. He could follow a ship out to the main channel. Except that the Sailing Directions said that local pilots were mandatory for ships traveling on the river. What if the river pilots saw the sailboat? As soon as they knew a police manhunt was on, they'd radio his position.

  He was getting ahead of himself. No one had seen the dead girl yet. Even if her friends realized she was missing, nothing he had seen ashore suggested it was the sort of place you dialed 911.

  I'm overthinking this. Just sail away. No one would know until he was a hundred miles at sea. Unless, of course, Will's mysterious "they" really had sent the girl to kill him or distract him until they caught up. "They"—who, if Will were to be believed, could sic the cops on them, or the Nigerian army, or the oil company helicopters, or all three. Now I'm going mental as Will. Jim was so scared he couldn't think straight.

  If only the night were truly night. But with the gas flares reflecting enough light from the low clouds to read by, night offered no cloak. To his right along the broad estuary he could see the low shore rise abruptly to the bluffs of Tom Shot Point, and anyone there could see him. To his left, a tall container ship and a low-slung tanker were passing on a main channel of the Calabar.

  A dozen miles beyond the ships—invisible in the fine, gritty dust of the Harmattan—

  Cameroon lay on the far shore. Another country, but surely as strange. Will was right.

  Only the open ocean guaranteed sanctuary.

  Jim ran below for the Sailing Directions and brought the book up to the cockpit. The channel that Will had used to enter the Calabar was described as a minor channel. Local knowledge was strongly recommended. Even Will had run aground. There was no way Jim could pilot it at night. But the main channel was too busy.

  A secondary channel crossed the wide flats where the river met the sea. It ran between the shoals formed by Tom Shot Bank and Bakasi Bank to the east, and was too shallow for large ships: vessels drawing more than three meters
, ten feet, were warned off. Will had steered it on the way in, before he cut across Tom Shot Bank. Jim switched on the depth finder—he kicked himself for not doing it earlier—and steered a new course that would bring him across the main channel to a less populated route through the flats.

  He crossed behind the two ships. Suddenly, lightning flashed and turned the red-orange sky bright white. Everything stood in stark clarity and Jim saw a third vessel between the tanker and the freighter. It was smaller, low-slung, and moving fast. Patrol boat? He studied it with the binoculars.

  A gun was mounted on the bow. Army? Or an armed oil company boat? Neither was a friend.

  They hadn't seen him yet, because the sailboat was so low to the water. Surely they were tracking with radar. Will had claimed that Hustle was "invisible." She better be.

  He ran the motor at top speed, spotted a buoy marking the secondary channel, and turned south, toward the sea. He held that course for more than an hour. Once he glimpsed the patrol boat's silhouette, tearing north at high speed, vaporizing in the fire-lit haze.

  Then things quieted down and the sailboat was alone except for the distant ships plodding seaward in the parallel channel. They, too, faded in the strange light as the channels veered apart. Ahead, he saw a lighted oil well to the left of his channel. To the right he saw an angry white line on the water.

  His stomach clenched with the memory of the line storm that had almost destroyed them in the Atlantic. As the sea began to roll the waters of the estuary and the line got closer, it grew thicker. A foamy white line bordered the channel. He checked the Sailing Directions and stopped the engine to listen.

  Muted thunder confirmed that he was seeing surf—huge Atlantic waves fetching a thousand miles from Cape Town were breaking on Outer Reef. He was almost out. Now all he had to do was get past Outer Reef, skirt the oil fields, whose flares he could see dancing against the horizon, and break for the open sea.

  He locked the wheel and went below to check on Will. Ignoring the body on the floor, he went into Will's cabin and played a flashlight over his face. The old man was sleeping.