completely.
‘I’ll be on the end of the line if you need me,’ he said, like he had heard her. ‘Good luck.’
He decided he was going to miss her in a way. Companionships made in these kind of circumstances were unlike any others. They had forged a bond between them. If they both were somehow to survive this, they would never forget each other.
He leaned back, looked up at the night sky and kicked his feet.
‘You too,’ she said, though he couldn’t have heard her. His hands joined in the stroke and he rode the swell as he moved away.
She never took her eyes off him. He remained visible all of the time at first, then only when he rode the peaks of the swell. Every few seconds she felt a tug on the line. Soon he had disappeared completely and she was all alone.
She looked around for signs of the pirate boat but could see none. The horizon was brightening, the sun about to emerge any moment.
She felt like she had passed through another significant porthole in her life. Maybe because she was on her own again. As she looked around her, she believed in her heart that it would be the final chapter in her story. She wasn’t going to be surrounded by a loving family like she had always imagined. It was an ending she would never have predicted.
The fishing line tugged on her harness and she smiled. She wasn’t quite alone. Not yet.
Stratton went into a zone as he lay back and kicked his legs while paddling his arms. He watched the reel slowly turning as the line paid out. He thought he might still see the girl beyond, the line showing the way before it went into the water. But she was long out of sight.
The reel still looked pretty full. With the tide and the swell he had no way of knowing how far he was from her. He amused himself with the thought of the possibility that after several hours he might even bump into her, having swum in a huge circle.
He looked to the east. The sun would be up very soon.
He dropped his head back and maintained an easy, relaxed stroke. It was a good time to think and take his mind off the problems. But as soon as he did, the same thoughts came nagging at him, the first of them being about Hopper.
He concentrated on clearing his head and focusing on his stroke as he moved easily through the water. It worked, for a while at least. He had no idea how much time had passed since he drifted off into a kind of trance. When next he looked at the reel, it was halfway empty and the sun had begun its slow rise above the horizon.
Then something else blew him out of his semi-dazed state of mind. He saw the silhouette of a vessel in the distance.
He let his feet drop below him and sat up in the water and stared at it, trying to figure out what type of craft it was and in which direction it was heading. After studying it for a good minute, he decided it wasn’t getting any smaller and was in fact growing in size, quite possibly heading towards him.
He felt a rush of adrenaline. Their first chance. He suddenly felt confident that even if they missed it there would be others. It couldn’t be much more than two or three hours since he had left the girl and a ship had already come into their vicinity.
The plan might not be as crazy as it seemed after all.
14
Stratton kept his eyes on the boat. It came on towards him. He realised he was seeing just a little more of the starboard side. Which meant it would pass by his right side, where the line stretched out towards the girl. He looked at the reel, still turning on his chest. It was about three-quarters empty.
There was a good chance the line would snag.
As the sun rose higher into the sky, Stratton could make out the shape of the superstructure. The bridge wings stuck out of the sides near the top like a stumpy crucifix. It had to be a cargo ship of some kind, a bulk carrier. Quite a large one.
He dropped his head back and paddled, deciding not to look at the boat for several minutes and just swim. Longer gaps between assessing its progress would provide a better picture.
He felt parched, not helped by the sea water that constantly splashed into his mouth. Sea water could turn a person insane before they died of thirst. If he missed this boat and all went wrong, he hoped the night cold would take him before that happened. There were so many ways to die in such a short period of time.
Another of which he was well aware of. He hadn’t overlooked the possibility that he and the girl wouldn’t be detected once they were trailing behind a snagged boat. He knew what it was like on board carriers like that. Minimal crew, and those on duty would usually be too busy to take the time to look outboard. The few people whose job it would be to look out to sea, namely those on the bridge, would concentrate forward. He hoped that this crew would be security conscious and have a lookout to the rear while transiting through hostile waters. But even then, if Stratton and the girl were being towed hundreds of metres behind the boat, they would be difficult if not impossible to see. And he wasn’t as confident as he had sounded about being able to reel them in closer. He did not expect either of them to last very long if they were being dragged. The water would constantly pass through their clothing, sucking the heat from their bodies. They could succumb to hypothermia in a short time indeed. They might also drown while being towed.
Nothing about it was going to be easy.
But he would rather die making an effort than lying around in the water doing nothing.
When he looked for the vessel again it had closed the distance a great deal more. He could make out individual windows in the superstructure. It was definitely going to cut across his path, south of him where the fishing line headed towards the girl. He checked the reel. Still a couple hundred metres of line left.
He decided to stop paddling and stay where he was. The setup looked good enough. The bulker would snag the line in the next few minutes. No one in the bridge would be able to see him unless they had a pair of binoculars trained directly on his position. He estimated that he would be closer to the stern of the carrier than the girl would be.
He watched the oncoming vessel, counting the seconds, the life jackets tied around him, stuffed up under his chin.
He became aware of a distant hum. Engines. He took it to be coming from the oncoming cargo ship. Then he realised the bulker was too far away to produce such a sound.
He turned in the water and saw the pirate mother craft heading towards him. As he stared at it in horror, he judged that it wasn’t in fact on a direct line towards him but to the cargo ship.
Stratton looked between the two vessels to gauge their relative tracks. Both were going to cut across his line but from opposite directions.
And it looked like the pirate vessel would snag the line first. Stratton’s choices were limited indeed. He could think of two in the time he had. He could cut the line and hope the pirates didn’t see him as they pursued the bulker. But then he would be stranded. Or he could try stopping the pirate boat from snagging and take his chances from there.
Only the latter had an element of a possibility to it.
Stratton shot his arms into the air. He waved and shouted, and ripped away his sweater to reveal the bright orange life jackets beneath. He knew the Somali vessel would pass by him considerably closer than the bulker but the eyes on board would be focused on their prey. He untied the outermost life jacket, pulled it off and started waving it around in the air.
Almost immediately, the front of the pirate vessel dipped as its engines decelerated and the nose came around to aim directly at him.
He stopped shouting and watched it approach. An unqualified success, for the time being. He glanced at the cargo ship. It was still coming on. If its crew had seen the pirate vessel and were in any way suspicious, it showed no outward sign of it.
The pirate vessel slowed as it approached. Men gathered in the prow to look at him.
