Infernal - Страница 24

The first thing Jack noticed was the unmanned helm. He did a slow turn, checking the deck chairs, expecting to find Tom slumped in one, but they were empty.

Jack was the only one here.

His gut tightened. Where was Tom? Had he fallen over—

Another booming honk—louder than ever—shook the boat. Jack turned toward the bow./p>

"Oh, shit!"

Ahead and to his left—port, north, whatever—a looming supertanker, a mile long if it was a foot, lit up like some bioluminescent behemoth, plowed through the black water on a collision course. Obviously the Sahbon had shown up on the tanker's radar or whatever it was ships used to detect each other, and it was sending out a warning that Jack read loud and clear:

Yo, pip-squeak! No way I can stop or turn, so it's up to you.

The tanker's prow plowed along less than a hundred yards ahead at eleven o'clock, with the Sahbon aimed like an arrow across its path.

Jack had a flash vision of the collision, the Sahbon reduced to kindling while the tanker barely noticed the impact—a fly glancing off an elephant's thigh.

Panic hurled Jack to the cockpit, where he grabbed the wheel and—

Which way to turn? Left? Right?

He chose left. Or port. Whatever. If he couldn't completely avoid contact with the tanker, at least he might escape with a glancing blow. He spun the wheel as fast and as far as it would go. Holding on as the deck tilted under him, he found the throttle and hauled back on it, reducing the power but not fully cutting it—no power would mean no control.

The Sahbon was slow to respond, but it came around. It would miss the prow, but a long, long span of reinforced steel remained to be dealt with.

Just then the Sahbon hit the tanker's bow wave square on, lifting the front half of the hull clear of the water as it came over the top. The boat angled downward, plowing deep into the water behind the wave and killing most of its momentum.

Jack yanked the throttle back to idle and looked at the knobby expanse of riveted steel sliding by.

Close… too goddamn close.

Above he saw half a dozen figures backlit by the wash from the tanker's superstructure lights, standing along the rail, looking at him. One of them gave him the single-digit salute.

Jack waved. We deserve that, he thought.

No, wait… not we…

A noise behind him. He turned to see a bleary-eyed Tom emerging from below.

"I just got tossed out of my bunk. What the fuck's going on, Jack? What are you doing up here?"

Jack wanted to kill him—flatten his nose, knock out a few teeth, and toss him overboard—but he limited himself to grabbing Tom by the scruff of the neck and yanking him around to face the tanker.

"Avoiding a collision with that!"

He felt Tom stiffen in his grasp, then go slack.

"Jesus, God!" He looked at Jack, his face a mask of shock. "What… how…?"

"How?" Jack shook him by the neck. "You sack out on your shift—worse than sack out, you left the helm unattended—and you have the goddamn nerve to ask me how?"

"Hey, fuck you, Jack!" Tom said, regaining some of his bluster. "You don't know shit about any of this. I'm the one who's made this trip before. I'm the one—"

"You're the one who was supposed to be up here, watching the store. That was our deal."

"Screw the deal. I've made this trip on my own lots of times. I always sack out while she's running at night. You know what the chances are of seeing another boat let alone crossing paths with one? Astronomical!"

"Well, so far in my experience we're one for one. One hundred percent. But I don't care how many trips you slept through the night before. On this trip we agreed—"

"Would you forget about that? You're like an old—"

Jack punched him. Once. In the gut. Then he headed below. He turned at the top of the stairway. Tom was bent almost double, one hand clutching the gunwale, the other pressed against his stomach.

"Here's a new deal: You set so much as one foot downstairs before sunup and you're shark food."

He slammed the door behind him.

The Isle of Devils

March 28, 1598

The sun was rising behind him and the Isle of Devils lay directly ahead, but Brother Francisco took no pride in his navigational expertise. Instead he looked down at the crew, scattered like jackstraws across the Sombra's main deck, and wept.

Fifty-seven seamen, most dead, and the few figures still writhing below were sick unto death. Fifty-seven souls on their way or soon to be on their way to their Creator.

All his doing.

But not his idea.

Francisco gazed heavenward. Was this truly God's will? He knew the Lord spoke to the world through the Holy Father, but so many deaths… what was so terrible about the relic below that warranted so many deaths to hide it from the world?

He looked back at the deck. Eusebio moved among the littered forms, adjusting the rigging on the foremast. The Sombra was using only two sails to keep her under way—the small rectangular canvas set low on the foremast, and the lateen sail on the aftcastle. With a crew of but two, they dared not raise more canvas.

Francisco wiped away his tears and motioned to Eusebio to take the helm. He gave up the wheel and headed below to the midship cargo hold to check the relic.

He found it where he and Eusebio had left it, wrapped in anchor chain and fixed to the forward bulkhead. He didn't know why he needed to see it again. Perhaps simple curiosity. He was glad that the chest was locked, otherwise he feared the urge to peek inside and see what was worth so many lives might have been more than he could have resisted.

The links of heavy chain were still wrapped around the little chest and secured with padlocks. This hadn't been in the original plan, but a squall on their third day out from Tenerife had worried him about the possibility of the ship going down before he'd guided it to its destination. So he and Eusebio had weighted it to assure that if the Sombra did go down, the relic would go down with it. And stay down, never to wash up on any shores.

Assured that it was secured, he climbed back to the main deck and reclaimed the helm.

His instructions were to bring the ship through the reefs to the shore of the Isle of Devils, carry the relic inland, and there bury it deep in the earth.

Despite the use of only two sails, the Sombra was making good time in the cool, strong wind from the northeast. Francisco wished it weren't quite so strong. It had raised a chop that would make it more difficult to navigate the Isle of Devils' notorious reefs. The lateen gave them more maneuverability than a square sail, and passages existed, he was sure of that. Finding them under any conditions could be difficult. But with all these whitecaps…

He tapped Eusebio on the shoulder.

"Is the longboat ready?"

The older man nodded and pointed. "Food, water, sail, and all our belongings—ready and waiting."

"Excellent. Why don't you—"

Francisco pitched forward against the wheel and Eusebio was hurled against a railing as the ship bottomed against a reef. But it didn't stop. Propelled by the stiff wind it shuddered forward amid a deafening cacophony of grinding coral and splintering, smashing wood.

"She's breaking up!" Eusebio cried.

Francisco pointed to the cargo hatch in the deck below.

"The relic! We have to free it!"

The deck shook beneath their feet as they staggered toward the hatch. The Sombra shook as if in an attack of ague but continued to plow ahead, though more slowly now.

Eusebio knelt and peered into the hold, then looked up at Francisco.

"It's half full already!"

Panic squeezed Francisco's throat. "To the boat!"

With the deck tilting under them—listing to port as the bow sank and the stern rose—they undid the longboat's securing lashes and climbed in. Moments later they floated off the sinking deck. Eusebio rowed them away from the roiling water as the Sombra rolled onto its side and sank beneath the waves.

Francisco had been shocked at how fast it was going down, but then he saw the gaping rent where the keel had been.

Soon all that remained were a few loose timbers and the floating bodies of the crew. He made the sign of the cross and recited the Litany for the Dying—for them and for himself.

Then he thanked God for inspiring him to weight the chest. It wouldn't be buried on the Isle of Devils as planned, but even so, it would never again be seen by the eyes of man.

The water within the reef was calmer than beyond. He unpacked his astrolabe and made as accurate a measurement as possible on the rocking craft.

That done, the next task was to sail to the Isle, find a landmark, and measure the distance and degrees from there to this spot.

After that, he and Eusebio would anchor off the reef and search the horizon for the two lateens of the Vatican caravel that had been following a day behind the Sombra.

TUESDAY

Land ho.

Bermuda's brightly colored, beckoning shores lay ahead. Beyond the pastel splotches of houses with glaringly bright roofs, Jack couldn't make out much in the way of detail. Everything he'd read said it was a beautiful, cultured, civilized place.

Great.

But Jack wouldn't have cared if it was a barren lump of rock, or the relocation of Sodom and Gomorra. It was land. He'd started to believe he might never see land again.