P Deutermann - The Moonpool

“He’s coming right for us,” Tony said. “Or at least for that buoy.”

“Our nav lights are on, right?” I asked.

He nodded and picked up binoculars to search the night ahead of us. The flashing light from the sea buoy wasn’t helping with our night vision. The seas were confused, and I guessed that the tide had turned. When the sea began to flow back into the estuary, it collided with the outbound river current, creating a crazy patchwork of waves and whorls in the water. Tony was having to work to keep the boat on course as the currents opposed each other over the bar.

I checked my cell phone and found coverage. I called Pardee back at the house.

“We’ve got a contact headed our way,” I said. “We’ll call again after we have our meeting, or in one hour, whichever is sooner.”

“And if you don’t?” he asked. “Where are you?”

“We’re loitering about something called the sea buoy,” I said. “Where the seaward end of the channel into the Cape Fear River begins.”

“Roger that,” he said. “One hour, and then I call the Coast Guard.”

I agreed and hung up.

“Five miles and closing,” Tony said. “We’re right in the main shipping channel. Want to go meet him?”

The water around the sea buoy was getting rougher and rougher. “Might be a little flatter inside,” I said. I wasn’t getting seasick so much as having trouble staying upright as our small boat bounced and pitched in the confused chop. I was glad I hadn’t brought the shepherds.

Tony kicked it up a few knots, and we pointed into the estuary. When the sea buoy was a half mile or so behind us, channel 16 suddenly came to life.

“Hold your position,” a voice said. No call signs, no identification numbers or names, just a voice. It sounded like Trask, but I couldn’t be absolutely sure.

“Roger,” Tony replied, also leaving out any identifying information. It was totally incorrect procedure, but it worked, and anyone listening would be clueless as to who was talking or why. Tony slowed and tried to find a stable course, but the water was still pretty rough. The current seemed to be pushing us into the estuary, although it was hard to tell in the dark.

“Two miles,” Tony said, staring out into the night. He kept checking the radar to see where the other boat should be. I kept looking for lights but didn’t see any.

“Shouldn’t we be able to see his running lights?” I asked. “That’s a big boat.”

“You’d think so,” he said. “Unless he’s turned them off. That thing had radar, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Tony switched the range scale down to five miles, and the blip became larger, halfway in from the edge of the screen. The electronic leader pointed right at the center of our scope, where the rising chop had created a bloom of green sea return on the display.

Tony kept looking out with the binoculars, while I switched the range scale down to two miles. The contact was still visible, but it was getting perilously close to the edge of the blob from the sea return, which now covered the inner one-third of the display. At some point, the radar would become useless. That point was just about now.

“Cam,” Tony said.

I looked up to see Tony staring ahead, no longer using his binoculars. I tried to get my eyes to work, night-blind from having been staring down into that radar screen. I was about to ask, “What?” when I saw the bows of what looked like the Keeper dead ahead, close, very close, and pushing up a huge wave. Tony reached for the controls, but a moment later, she crashed into us and I was spinning underwater in a coil of noise, roiling seawater, shattering fiberglass, and the thrum of two large propellers pulsing the water right in front of my face.

We both popped to the surface at the same time. Our boat was gone except for what looked like the front one-third, which was upside down and bobbing around in a debris field of fiberglass bits, flotation foam, and gasoline. Tony was gagging on a mouthful of gasoline and saltwater; I wasn’t yet in the fuel slick, but the stink was strong. I paddled backward away from the smell and looked for the Keeper, but there was no sign of her, just a muffled rumble of engines disappearing. Then a small wave broke over me from behind, and when I went under, I realized that my clothes were really heavy. It took me several seconds to get my head above water again, and even though I was a strong swimmer, I felt a moment of panic in that black water. That cold, black water.

“You hurt, boss?” Tony called from somewhere in the darkness. I tried to spot him, but the dark out there was absolute, except for the regular pulsing of the sea buoy light.

The sea buoy.

If we could get up on that thing, we might not freeze to death quite so quickly.

“I’m okay, I think,” I shouted back. “How about you?”

“Got a cut on my arm, but I don’t think anything’s busted,” he called back.

“Tell it not to bleed,” I called. I didn’t have to tell him why.

“Where are you?”

“Over here,” I called, raising my right arm, which promptly caused me to submerge under the next wave.

“I’m hanging on to the bow,” he shouted. He sounded farther away, which wasn’t a good sign. “Here. Over here.”

I tried to pop up out of the water, but my clothes weighed me down. I did, however, catch a glimpse of something white over to my right, so I began swimming in that direction. The seas were rising and smacking me from every direction, but I knew I had to get going before hypothermia worked its deadly spell on my shivering body.

Five minutes of thrashing brought me up next to the floating bow section. Tony was holding on with his left arm to a big crack in the fiberglass, and I thought I could see black rivulets running down his hand. He reached out with his right and pulled me alongside. I was more tired than I should have been, but the weight of my clothes had been a real surprise. The gasoline smell was gone now.

“Why’s this part still afloat?” I asked.

“Unsinkable, remember?” he said. “It’ll float until it gets waterlogged.”

“How long’s that?”

“We’ll be dead of hypothermia long before that happens,” he said with a crazy grin. Leave it to Tony to feel this was just another adventure.

“Try for that buoy?” I asked.

“What buoy?”

I looked around and realized I could no longer see the flashes of light.

“It’s anchored,” Tony said. “We’re not. Tide’s coming in, so we’re drifting away from that thing.” He spat out some water and rubbed the gash on his arm. “I think we’re fucked.”

“Well, at least we know who the bad guy is,” I said, and then realized that, no, we really didn’t. I couldn’t prove that it had been Trask driving that boat. I tried to get my bearings, but the waves were just high enough to block our view. I was getting really tired now, and my arms and legs were beginning to numb up a little. My running shoes felt like a couple of bricks. I remembered seeing one of those time-versus-temperature life-expectancy tables for people adrift in cold water, and quickly put it out of my mind.

“Whoa,” Tony said, looking over my shoulder. “I think that’s a ship.”

I turned around, wiped the saltwater out of my eyes, and looked where he was looking. At first I didn’t see anything, then I did: two white lights, one over the other. It looked to be a long, long way away, though, up in the direction of the container port.

“She’s coming right at us,” Tony said. “Those are the masthead and range lights. I can’t see running lights.”

“Too far,” I gulped, bouncing in the water to see over the hump of the shattered bow section. My fingers were like ice.