CHAPTER EIGHTY

Aboard the Bonefish

March 30, 2008

11:25 p.m.

The target on her radar screen was moving again after stopping for about ten minutes right off her beam. Now they were heading for her boat, but no longer making much speed. They were about five miles off. She should be able to spot their lights by now.

Leaving the radar on, Riley pulled herself back up the companionway stairs, timing every step so that the boat’s extreme motion worked with her instead of against her. The bow lifted again on an extra large wave and then crashed down into the trough, flinging buckets of cold spray across the cockpit and making the hull, mast, and rigging all shudder at impact. She bent her knees and ducked her chin down into her rain gear. Rivulets of water streamed off the bill of the baseball cap she wore under her hood and she shivered. The boat always handled this pounding better than she could.

She crouched under the dodger and scanned the horizon off her port bow through the dodger’s spray-splattered plastic windows. She reached inside the cabin and pulled the binoculars from the teak holder. Standing and risking a dousing, she took a peek over the top of the dodger. She found that even through the glasses, there was no sign of a light or shadow on the horizon.

The boat had to be running dark. No lights.

She sat down on the cockpit seat on the low side of the companionway and leaned her head back against the dodger’s stainless tubing frame. Closing her eyes for a minute felt so good. She was bone tired. Riley hadn’t eaten a regular meal since that sumptuous feast on Niko’s yacht over twenty-four hours ago. Surviving off granola bars, trail mix and coffee was taking a toll. Her stomach was protesting with an acid burn. To make matters worse, this was her second night at sea, and she’d had only four hours bunk time that morning. The body was like a machine, and she knew she’d been treating hers badly. Too little sleep, too little decent food.

Riley snapped her eyes open. No falling asleep. Routine. Discipline. That was what she needed. She checked her watch. Nearly midnight. Soon it would be time to enter her position in the log. She stood and checked all around the horizon once more. The coast of Dominica was falling away. Her course was taking her into the channel between Dominica and Marie Gallante. But she still saw no lights or signs of other boats. The moon should rise in about an hour. It would only be a little bit of a thing, but it would still provide more light than these few billion stars.

When Riley climbed back below to check her radar again, she discovered the other boat was only four miles off – dead astern. She set about heating herself a can of beef and barley soup on the gimbaled stove. She kept checking the radar every couple of minutes. They weren’t closing. In fact, they were matching her speed, staying exactly four miles astern. There was no question about it. That boat was following her. Or perhaps stalking was a better word.

She poured the soup into a large mug and climbed the ladder back into the cockpit. She still saw nothing aft. No lights. The hot thick liquid felt good in her belly. She set down the spoon and drank the rest of it down. Stepping back from the dodger, she looked up at the top of her mast. Her masthead tricolor light was showing a bright white light aft.

Okay, she thought when she’d finished her soup. Two can play at this game. She ducked below and dropped the mug into the galley sink. At the nav station, she glanced at the radar again. Nothing had changed, so she flipped the switch to douse all her running lights.

That won’t do much good though if they have radar, she thought, so she climbed back into the cockpit. First, she clipped the line from her safety harness to one of the jack lines running along the lee deck, and then she climbed out of the cockpit onto the side deck. As she crawled her way forward to the shrouds, the deck was rising and falling under her, the black water rushing past her hull like water from a fireman’s hose. With her boat on autopilot, if she went overboard, she’d never be able to pull herself back aboard at this speed.

When she reached the shrouds, she pulled herself to a stand and wrapped one leg and one arm around the wire rigging for support. Spray from the bow waves splattered across her back. After several minutes effort to untie the knot, she lowered the halyard that supported her radar reflector. Back on her knees again, she carried the bulky thing back to the cockpit then stowed it below.

Seated once again on the high side of the cockpit, Riley found she was sweating inside her foul weather gear from the exertion of moving around on the heaving boat. She unzipped the top of her jacket to let the breeze in and wondered how on earth they had found her and how they knew which boat out here was hers. Her decision to go up the outside of Dominica put her on a piece of water that very few sailboats would choose to be on — beating up a lee shore in the middle of the night. How did they know she was here?

She thought back to the first day she had seen that pony-tailed Brewster character, the day after she had met up with Dig in Pointe-a-Pitre. That morning, she had departed from the Pointe-a-Pitre anchorage to sail to the Saintes. She had awakened early because she wanted to put some miles between her and Dig. When she went on deck, she found that someone had returned her oars. She knew that Dig wasn’t much good with boats, so she assumed he had hired someone else to do it.

Of course, she thought. Her oars. As the realization hit her, she felt so stupid. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t she seen it before? When they’d gone to Dominica on Cole’s boat, they had taken her dinghy along. Her dinghy with the set of oars inside it. They’d made it so easy for Dig to find them. There never was a tracker on Shadow Chaser. It had to be in one of her oars.

Riley slid aft, kneeled on the seat at the back of the cockpit and reached into her inflatable dinghy that hung in davits above her transom. She pulled out an oar and shook it. It didn’t feel like there was anything inside the aluminum tubing. Shaking the other one gave the same result. She depressed the button that held the two halves together and pulled the oar apart. She grabbed the flashlight from her pocket and shone it into the tubes. Nothing. She fitted the two halves back together and stowed them in the dinghy. She repeated the process with the other oar, only the second time, she saw something that looked like paper in one of the halves. She shook the oar and the wad of paper dropped to the cockpit floor. When she picked it up, a clear plastic bag fell out onto the cockpit seat. Inside was a small, silver stick or tube that looked about the size of a AA battery.

“God dammit,” she shouted, flinging the device out into the black waves. “How stupid could I be?”

Then she felt her stomach jump and the soup nearly backed up her throat. Was that a light? To the east, off her beam.

The stalker was behind her — not off her starboard side. From the glimpse she’d had of the bright white light, it looked like the masthead navigation light of a commercial ship. Again, it appeared for a moment before it slipped behind a wave. She waited, searching the horizon. There it was again, brighter this time. And here she was running with no navigation lights at all. That was all she needed now — to get run down by a freighter.

Riley grabbed the binoculars off the low seat and climbed back up to the high side of the cockpit. She couldn’t see a thing because the binocular’s lenses were covered with spray. She slid back down off the seat, reached around into the cabin and pulled a paper towel off the roll that hung on the bulkhead. She climbed back up and hooked one elbow around the winch to hang on to the heeling boat. The light was growing bigger. She rubbed harder at the glass, but she was just smearing salt water on the lenses in a greasy-looking mess. She looked up again.