Close Reach Read Online Free Page B

that was coming up on them. And that was when their cockpit radio came alive with a crash of high-gain static that dropped away into a pounding scream of guitars.

Dean scanned through the VHF channels, but it was the same as when Lena had made her last cry for help. The music spanned the spectrum. Kelly looked back at the crab boat and saw black smoke coming from the twin stacks just aft of the bridge. It had throttled up the diesels and was coming for them.
    “Dean?”
    “I see it.”
    He was already moving to the winch station. They were flying a tiny storm sail, but Dean could unfurl a piece of the big genoa and increase their speed in twenty seconds.
    That was about all the time they had.
    Kelly turned from Dean and looked astern, seeing the crab boat come up over a wave, the bulb under its bow showing briefly in the air before the rest of the boat tipped past the wave crest and buried the bow into the trough with an enormous explosion of white water. Kelly turned back to Dean and stood at his side, ready to help trim the genoa sheet as the sail unfurled. When the sail was halfway out, Dean cleated the furling line and Kelly winched in the sheet. With their sail area doubled Freefall heeled to starboard as if she were shouldering through a locked door. Kelly felt it beneath her feet: a battle between weight and force, between heeling moment and speed. Then the door burst open, and Freefall charged through it and down the next wave face, racing with the wave for half a mile before finally pulling ahead into the trough and mounting the back of the wave at her bow.
    Dean and Kelly had sailed Freefall around the world one and a half times, but they had never outsailed a wave. Kelly stood with mouth agape at the sight of it, the seventy-foot boat standing on its feet and surfing, leaning into the gusts, the wind screaming past the taut wire rigging. She put her hand on the helm wheel and through it could feel the rudders hum as they handled the rush of the water and the load of the boat at speed.
    The log showed twenty-one knots. A quarter of a knot faster than the crab boat.
    Dean switched off the autopilot and was hand steering, weaving the boat in shallow S curves to build up their speed by surfing the wave faces and then curving to the north to catch more air on the sails as they left one wave behind and raced up the back of the next. Kelly watched him a moment, then found her breath again.
    “You knew she’d sail like this?”
    “Yes.”
    If anyone knew, it would be Dean. He’d drawn Freefall in his drafting office at Sikorsky during the year she didn’t like to think about. They’d both let their minds wander that year; that much was clear. But Dean’s straying had had a useful purpose. He’d supervised Freefall ’s construction at a Norfolk shipyard and had done the fitting out and sea trials himself offshore of Mystic. Now he stood at the helm and watched his creation fly into the green-gray blur of the Drake Passage, and Kelly saw that he was smiling.
    “Tell me what’s going on with the radio,” she said. “You had me start the engine when we heard it before. You knew something was wrong, and you wanted to get out of there.”
    Dean’s smile vanished, and he looked astern, measuring the growing distance from the crab boat. He nodded.
    “When the U.S. government jams your radio signals right before it bombs you off the map, you don’t hear anything. You think your radio’s fine, that the airwaves are clear. That’s because we’ve got the best equipment, stuff most people couldn’t even imagine. You know?”
    She followed him. When they were still working in Connecticut, they talked to each other about what they did. Dean designed helicopters, and he knew the kinds of things they put inside them when he was done.
    “When some third-rate military jams your radio, you know it’s happening. You hear clicking or static—or music.”
    “So they’re jamming us,” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    “So we