dozen pros for that. But we should average a good nine knots for a couple of weeks. That’d leave us two weeks to cover the last three thousand miles. We’d only need to average nine knots to make the journey in twenty-eight days. He says it gets done regularly in lesser boats in twenty-six days.”
“Roaring Forties, right?”
“Yup. Hobart stands on longitude 42.53S. And of course it’s midsummer down there.”
“Hell, you make it sound very attractive. When you thinking of going?”
“February. I got a month’s sabbatical while
Former Lieutenant Commander Baldridge, still holding the land prospectus, demurred. Three thousand bucks an acre was a lot of cash for grazing land. “What’s it going to cost us?”
“Nothing. The boat’s completely equipped with all food and drink. She’s fueled up. The crew are paid for, three of ’em, plus the cook. Aside from their quarters, there are three big double berths, two bathrooms. It looks really great.”
“Yeah, but we gotta get there by air. And back.”
“You ready for the good news?”
“Hit me.”
“Still nothing. The guy’s flying us out to Port Elizabeth from wherever we are in the States, and home from Tasmania via Melbourne. He’s flying us up there in his own plane. It’s only about four hundred miles.”
“Jeez, this is getting better by the minute.”
“I told him this was a very serious journey. And that I would be happy to skipper the boat. But I would not do it unless I had another American sailor with me who I knew was a good navigator. I told him that would probably cost him four round-trip air fares. He never blinked. Said that since he was trying to get a seven-hundred-and-fifty- thousand-dollar yacht safely across the world, he was not much bothered by five thousand bucks’ worth of air fares.”
“Sounds a bit too much fun, and a bit too good for me to pass up,” said Bill. “I have to bring Laura with me.”
“Good. Jo’s coming, too. It’s gonna be great. Who’s Laura?”
“Laura is the lady I am marrying when her divorce comes through in May.”
“Not the one you told me you were going to marry a year and a half ago — the one you’d only met twice for a total of about an hour and a half.”
Bill chuckled. “You got it.”
“The Scottish Admiral’s daughter, right?”
“That’s it.”
“Jesus. You’re a man of your word. Where is she now?”
“Asleep.”
“Yeah, where?”
“Right here. The yellow bedroom, on the right, down at the far end of the top landing, view down to the creek. Need more detail?”
“Yeah. Where’s your room.”
“Not that far to the south. Next door actually. As far away from my mother’s room as I can manage. She won’t move out till we’re married.”
Boomer yelled with laughter. “Now I know why you’re coming south. Free at last, you rascal.”
The two men chatted on for another ten minutes about the Navy and mutual friends, and agreed to travel from New York to Johannesburg on January 29, arriving in South Africa on the morning of January 30. That would give them a couple of days to get the yacht sharpened up for the voyage.
News of their impending arrival was faxed from New London to Tasmania the moment Boomer put down the phone. Another fax was sent from Hobart to Port Elizabeth, which had the effect of making the English crew instantly nervous.
The first mate, Roger Mills, read the news glumly. “One of ’em is supposed to be a nuclear submarine Commanding Officer, the other’s a millionaire rancher from Kansas who was a submarine weapons expert for about fifteen years. Both outstanding sailors. Shouldn’t think either of them will stand for a lot of bullshit.”
The following morning in Kansas was clear, bright, and cold. Bill was out at 0700 and back for breakfast at 0830. His mother was out, and the slim, beautiful Laura Anderson was pouring coffee as he kicked the snow off his boots, took off his sheepskin coat, and headed for the great log fire that burned in the entrance hall throughout the winter.
Bill stood six feet two inches tall. As a teenager he had honed his body while wielding a sledgehammer mending fence posts for his father. He had never lost that hard edge even in the Navy, where he served for months on end in submarines. Out here in Kansas, back on the historic family ranch, riding horses all day, he still had the build of a Navy wide receiver, which he could have been had he been prepared to take football seriously. He actually looked like a slender Robert Mitchum. He had unnaturally broad shoulders, and in uniform he had looked like a god, with his piercing bright blue eyes. The fact that he had never lost the rolling gait of the cowboy had caused certain girls almost to faint with admiration as he strode over the horizon.
Laura had not reacted precisely like that when they first met, but anyway, right now she brought him a mug of coffee as he stood by the fire, thawing out. He took it “black with buckshot,” which was a throwback to his Navy days working in Fort Meade with Admiral Arnold Morgan, who thus referred to the tiny saccharine pills he fired into the brew from a blue container.
Laura kissed him lightly on the cheek and told him, as she told him every morning, that she loved him beyond redemption. And that she regretted nothing.
Bill smiled and put his arm around her. “You’ve been very brave,” he said. “And it’ll all work out in the end…I have a surprise for you.”
Laura’s green eyes widened. “You have?”
“I have. We’re going on a vacation. At the end of this month. We’ll be gone for four and a half weeks. And you’ll probably die when I tell you what we’re doing.”
“I will?”
“We’re going to South Africa, and then we’re going to sail a big sixty-seven-foot sloop to the southeastern tip of Australia. We’re going with an old friend of mine, a Navy commander, Boomer Dunning and his wife. It’s a brand-new boat, beautiful interiors, big engine, and a crew of three, plus a cook.”
“Well, it sounds wonderful, my darling. But are you sure I’m ready for the Southern Ocean? That’s the Roaring Forties, isn’t it? Dad says it can be the most fearsome place in the world.”
“It can. But it’s not really so bad in the high summer. Which February is down there. All it really means is that we sail almost the whole way with a stiff, gusting westerly astern, which should get us there real quick. Two of the crew are very experienced hands, and Boomer is a world-class ocean racing skipper. I sailed with him last August in Newport while you were in Scotland, remember?”
“Oh, I do. He’s the nuclear submarine CO, isn’t he? Weren’t you both in that short Maxi race, round Block Island, in the big Greek boat?”
“Whaddya mean, in it? We won it,” chuckled Bill.
He kissed her on the cheek and noticed the tiredness in her face — the kind of tiredness that comes when a person is taking an endless mental beating, as Laura now was. As they had both known she would when first they had embarked on their long adventure together. The divorce had been a nightmare, but the custody battle had been much worse. Bill did not know how much more Laura could take of it, and whether she might, in the end, leave him and return to Scotland.
Boomer’s forthcoming voyage had come as some kind of a godsend to Bill Baldridge. It provided an opportunity to take Laura right away from the endless lawyers’ letters, the government forms, and the court proceedings half a world away. Each one of the cold, emotionless documents seemed to confirm in her mind that in the eyes of the law she had abandoned her two daughters and was an unfit person to raise children. Both she and Bill knew the assertion to be spurious lawyers’ rubbish. But it made no difference. In the Scottish legal system, and in the media, no one else agreed with them, and the wheels of justice ground ever onward. The letter that had arrived only this week suggested there was no chance she would be permitted to see the girls before July at the
