Read Online Antarctica by Peter Lerangis - Free Book Online Page B

yawing!” Cranston cried out.
    As the boat began to climb, the bow drifted south. Jack paddled furiously in the opposite direction. If she turned sideways to the swell, they were dead.
    Up … up … up …
    “Lord ’a’ mercy!” Kennedy pleaded.
    The men pitched forward to keep from falling back off the stern. Sanders screamed.
    And then the boat crested.
    For a moment the clouds stretched above and below them, as if they’d been jettisoned skyward and might now fly away.
    But as the boat tilted down, the men were thrown backward, onto the deck with the yelping, frightened dogs.
    Jack heard the creak of splitting wood.
    The mast had cracked from the base clear up to the midpoint.
    In front of them, the slope dropped into the clouds, with no bottom in sight. On the tiller, Cranston’s knuckles were white.
    They plummeted.
    Jack took Colin’s shoulder, and for a moment he thought of the scrawny little boy on the dock in Harwinton, Alaska, staring at the bay for hours waiting for Raina . And now he was a man, and the dream of seeing her again — both of their dreams — returned as the sea came to claim them.
    The Horace Putney hit bottom hard, raising a wave that broke over the bow. The men scrambled for buckets and began to bail.
    Jack glanced astern, looking for a shadow, any sign of life from the other boat.
    All he saw was the black wall of water, receding in the fog.
    The sea now lapped over the bulwarks, loaded down by the weight of the water. In the frenzy of bailing, no one spoke.
    The mast was useless. Jack ran his hands along the crack and hoped that somewhere they had stored another mast.
    A curtain of white emerged slowly to starboard. The shore was coming closer. “Colin, get the binoculars and find us a cove or a sturdy floe, someplace where we can put in and fix the mast. Mansfield, row us closer. Cranston, turn us forty-five degrees east of south.”
    As the three sprang into action, Philip grabbed an oar and readied himself to row.
    Kennedy gestured for Philip to move aside. “I’ll do it, Westfall.”
    “I’m perfectly capable of rowing,” Philip said. “We do that in England, you know.”
    “Eyes to stern!” Sanders suddenly shouted. “They made it.”
    Jack turned. The Iphigenia, listing to port but intact, floated toward them out of the mist.
    “Thank God,” Jack said under his breath. He pulled a rifle from under the deck and fired a shot into the air. Moments later the Iphigenia returned the signal.
    Colin scanned the shore with the binoculars. “I see a cove.”
    Mansfield looked over his shoulder. “Where?”
    Colin pointed out a small depression in the shoreline. “Beneath that long, jagged ridge.”
    Mansfield began pulling his oar harder. “Two o’clock, Philip!”
    “Thank you,” Philip replied. “How lovely to have a watch that works.”
    “That’s not what I meant! I’m giving you directions. Pretend you’re in the middle of a clock, got it? Now, straight ahead is twelve, behind you is six, to the right is three — “
    “Right-o. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
    Philip pulled as hard as he could. And even though Mansfield’s greater strength kept pulling the boat off course, they managed to gain quickly on the cove.
    Colin was the first to notice the heads of floating seals — and the rocks. They made whitecaps in the waters of the cove, clusters of them all over the place.
    “Oarsmen, take it slow,” Jack said. “Cranston, point her toward the coast.”
    Colin had his eye on the port side. Jack focused on the starboard.
    The rocks came up quickly, large and black. Volcanic debris. The boat was riding low, and the cloud cover made for shallow visibility.
    Jack tried to keep a watchful eye, but the water was blurring.
    His lids were heavy, so heavy.
    He blinked. He shook his head hard.
    Fatigue was out of the question. Alertness was all.
    Eyes front. Focus.
    Something was heading toward them, long and thick like a killer whale. And