The Storm

CHAPTER 38

KURT HELD THE BOAT ON A WESTERLY HEADING WHILE Leilani looked for the source of the leak and any way to fix it.

“What do you see?”

“Half a dozen little pinpricks,” she said. “I can feel the air leaking through them.”

He waved her to the back. “Drive the boat for a second.”

She came back to the transom, and Kurt took a look at what she’d found. Eight little holes, some of which were so small he could press the rubber together and the air stopped escaping.

“What do you think happened?” Leilani asked.

The holes were spread out in a weird pattern, almost a spray pattern, running from front to back. “Shrapnel from the plane,” he guessed, “or even tiny drops of burning kerosene. The rubber looks singed in a spot or two.”

Kurt ran his hands along the other air chambers, which were basically inflated rubber tubes, eight feet long and seventeen inches in diameter. The boat had four total, two in the front that ran straight and then angled together to create the blunt nose of the boat, and two in the rear, one on each side. The back of the boat was a metal transom on which the outboard was mounted.

He found two more pinpricks, both in the front right chamber. Worse yet, he could see little dots here and there that looked like they might have been additional impact zones for shrapnel or fuel. He wondered how long until those opened up.

“How does it look?” Leilani asked.

The prisoner seemed anxious to know as well. He might have been gagged, but his ears weren’t blocked.

“The port side seems okay,” Kurt said. “But that’s not going to help us if the whole starboard side goes flat.”

Two small lockers rested in the deck near the front. He opened both, only to find a single life jacket, a couple of flares, a small anchor and some rope.

“Rubber boat without a pump or a repair kit,” he mumbled. “Somebody’s going to hear from my lawyer.”

“Maybe we should turn around,” Leilani said, “go back to that floating island and surrender.”

“Not unless you want to be a prisoner again,” he said.

“No,” she said, “I don’t want to drown either.”

“We won’t drown even if both of them go flat.”

“But we’ll be stuck clinging to the other side like shipwreck survivors,” she said.

“Better than waiting for Jinn to shoot us,” he said. “Besides, I have a bet to win. All we have to do is push on until we find some help.”

“And if we don’t find help?”

“We will,” Kurt insisted, feeling confident.

He reached into the locker and pulled out the flares, which he stuffed into his breast pocket next to the binoculars. He grabbed the life jacket and handed it to Leilani.

“Put this on,” he said. “Don’t worry, it’s just a precaution.”

Next he pulled out the anchor—a fifteen-pound fluke anchor hooked to an anchor rope by a large carabiner. He detached the anchor from the rope and hooked it onto the cord that bound the prisoner’s feet. The man looked up at Kurt in terror.

“Also just a precaution,” Kurt told him.

The man’s face showed little faith in that statement.

Kurt pulled the gag off the man’s face. “I know you understand when we talk,” he said. “Do you speak English as well?”

The man nodded. “I speak … some.”

“I don’t suppose you know the story of the little Dutch boy?”

The man stared at him blankly.

“This boat is sinking,” Kurt explained, “losing air. I can either throw you overboard to lighten our load or you can help us.”

“I’ll help,” the man said. “Yes, yes, I definite want to help.”

“The anchor is on your feet to keep you from trying anything stupid,” Kurt explained, and then he pointed to the forward section. “I need you to cover up these two holes and keep the air in.”

The man nodded. “I can do that. Definite, big-time.”

“Good,” Kurt said. “’Cause if you don’t, you’re going to hit the bottom of the sea faster than the rest of us.”

Kurt loosened the ropes around the man’s wrists and pulled them free. “What’s your name?”

“I am called Ishmael,” the man said.

“Great,” Kurt mumbled. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about. Let’s hope we don’t encounter an angry white whale.”

With his legs still tied together and hooked to the anchor, Ishmael twisted and slithered a foot or so until he reached the prow of the boat. He placed his hands on the two leaks Kurt had pointed out.

“Press and hold,” Kurt said.

Ishmael pressed his fingers on the two spots and held them down. After a few seconds, he looked back, smiling.

“Perfect.”

“What about the other leaks?” Leilani asked.

“I’ll take first shift,” Kurt said, trying to spread his fingers like a piano player, “you keep us pointed west.”

Kurt and Leilani switched positions twice in the next three hours, but the rear chamber continued to deflate and the boat began to list to starboard and the aft corner settled. From time to time seawater washed over the top, soaking whoever was trying to stem the leak and weighing them down even further.

Fortunately, the Indian Ocean was the calmest of the world’s major seas and the swell was very small, only a foot at most. Kurt found that lower speeds kept the breaches to a minimum and he backed off the throttle just a bit.

As noon approached, they still hadn’t encountered anything resembling help, not even a trail of smoke on the horizon. With the sun high overhead, the outboard began to sputter and Kurt had no choice but to shut it off.

“Out of gas,” Leilani guessed.

“We have a gallon or so in the reserve tank,” he said, pointing to a stopcock on the fuel line that could be turned to access the reserve. “But we need to save that.”

“Save it for what?”

“Suppose we see a ship on the horizon,” he said. “We’ll need to intercept it, to get in front of it or at least alongside.”

She nodded. “Sorry.”

He smiled. “It’s okay.”

In the absence of the droning outboard, the silence felt oppressive and ominous, like a sign of their eventual doom. There was no wind. The only sound that could be heard was the light chop slapping against the sides of the boat.

Bathed in this silence, they bobbed up and down, wallowing in the low swells, three people aboard a sixteen-foot inflatable boat in a million square miles of ocean.

“Now what?” Leilani asked.

“Now we wait,” Kurt said patiently. “And see what fortune holds for us.”