Read Online Dead Sea by Peter Tonkin - Free Book Online Page B

herself. She did not want the world to know what a pain she thought her watch-mate could be at times. At times such as the present, in fact. But Liberty could see Maya’s point. The last three days had been hellish. With the best will in the world they couldn’t have filmed any of it. They had trouble enough keeping up with their scheduled contacts – with
Katapult
, with the back-up teams ashore.
    But in the face of it all,
Flint
had held together. And the stormbound run to the south of their planned course had at least kept them too close to land to make the really big seas a threat no matter how squally the wind became down to the south of Portland. But the girls had all become seasick with morale-destroying regularity. Nelson’s ailment and the relentless cold were really beginning to sap their strength now. To use up the very last of Maya’s very limited supply of good nature. Especially as she was beginning to suspect that the USC watch was pulling a good deal less than their weight.
    In consultation with Robin, on camera for the world to see, Liberty had worked out a watch schedule designed to let the teams she finally selected get a reasonable amount of rest – under the right circumstances. Given her English training, it had seemed an uncomfortable liberty to take with a tradition almost as old as the age of sail, but she and Robin had decided that if they allowed two seven-hour night watches – from nine p.m. to four a.m., then four a.m. to eleven, the rest of the day would split conveniently into five two-hour watches. So team A would get the nine to four night watch on the first night and the four to eleven a.m. one the next day, and so in rotation, day after day as necessary, with everybody up and about from eleven a.m. to nine p.m., notionally taking charge watch by watch in two-hour blocks as the daylight hours passed.
    It had looked OK on paper – but, like everything else they had planned, it had all gone to hell in a handcart in the face of the relentless storms. Now it was just past eleven a.m. Watch A, the Stanford girls, should have been relieved the better part of ten minutes ago. The USC Watch B girls were still asleep – militantly so – almost
mutinously
so, said Maya venomously, thoroughly disgruntled.
    â€˜Look,’ she snarled, pulling herself erect, trying not to let too much moisture get on to the electrical equipment beside her. ‘Why don’t I go and shake a leg for them, Libby? Roll them out and up? Someone has to run this boat right no matter what!’
    Liberty swung the helm over hard enough to make her watch-mate sit down again. Sit down painfully hard, in fact. Water sloshed across the afterdeck and cascaded into the sea. ‘
You
look,’ she snarled. ‘First, I’m the skipper. I run the boat. I say who shakes a leg and when – and who rolls who out. Secondly, it’s
Liberty
, not Libby.
Never
Libby. Thirdly, you signed on for this. Come hell or high water, come what may. There was no clause saying, “When the going gets tough, Maya gets going
home
”. There wasn’t even a codicil saying, “When the going gets tough, Maya starts bitching”! Fourthly . . .’
    But they never found out what ‘fourthly’ might have been because just at that moment, the driving squall-mist to port of them was parted by the cutwater of a ship. A cutwater at least twice as tall as
Flint
’s main mast, its forepeak leaning out and almost over them at once, so steep was the rake of the bow. And the whole thing was coming directly towards
Flint
at what seemed like supersonic speed. Liberty got a horrified glimpse of a sheer, sharp steel blade rising and spreading like a black metal awning above her from an avalanche of white foam at its oncoming forefoot to a broad forecastle high enough to be wreathed in low clouds above. A wide, wide forecastle with, of all things,
Walt Disney
written in gold across it