Clive Cussler - Shock Wave

There were no ghosts or phantoms lurking in the shadows, but Pitt did find himself staring into the empty eye sockets of a skull attached to a skeleton.

It lay on its back in a berth salvaged from the sailboat. Pitt identified the remains as a male from the heavy brow’ above the eye sockets. The dead man had lost teeth. All but three were missing. But rather than having been knocked out of their sockets, they appeared to have’ fallen out.

A tattered pair of shorts covered the pelvis, and the bony feet still wore a pair of rubber-soled deck shoes. There was no flesh evident. The tiny creatures that crawled out of the dampness had left a clean set of bones.

The only indication of the dead man’s former appearance was a tuft of red hair that lay beneath the skull. The skeletal hands were crossed above the rib cage and clutched a leather logbook.

A quick look around the interior of the hut showed that the proprietor had set up housekeeping in an efficient manner, utilizing the fixtures from his stranded boat. The sails from the Dancing Dorothy had been spread across the ceiling to keep out any wind and rain that penetrated the branches laced in the roof. A writing desk held British Admiralty charts, a stack of books on piloting, tide tables, navigation lights, radio signals and a nautical almanac. Nearby there was a standing shelf stuffed with brochures and books filled with technical instructions on how to operate the boat’s electronic instruments and mechanical gear. A finely finished mahogany box containing a chronometer and a sextant sat on a small wooden table beside the bunk. Sitting beneath the table was a hind bearing compass and a steering compass that had been mounted on the sailboat. The steering helm was leaning against a small folding dining table, and a pair of binoculars was tied to a spoke.

Pitt leaned over the skeleton, gently removed the logbook and left the hut.

“What did you find?” asked Maeve with burning curiosity.

“Let me guess,” said Giordino. “A humongous chest full of pirate treasure.”

Pitt shook his head.’ “Not this trip. What I found was the man who sailed the Dancing Dorothy onto the rocks. He never made it off the island.”

“He’s dead?” queried Maeve.

“Since long before you were born.”

Giordino stepped to the doorway and peered inside the hut at the remains. “I wonder how he came to be so far off the beaten track.”

Pitt held up the logbook and opened it. “The answers should be in here.”

Maeve stared at the pages. “Can you make out the writing after all this time?”

“Yes. The log is well preserved, and the hand wrote boldly.” Pitt sat down on a rock and scanned several pages before looking up. “His name was Rodney York, and he was one of twelve yachtsmen entered in a solo nonstop race around the world, beginning in Portsmouth, England, and sponsored by a London newspaper. First prize was twenty thousand pounds. York departed Portsmouth on April the twenty-fourth, 1962.”

“Poor old guy has been lost for thirty-eight years,” said Giordino solemnly.

“On his ninety-seventh day at sea, he was catching a few hours’ sleep when the Dancing Dorothy struck” Pitt paused to glance up at Maeve and smile— “what he calls the ‘Miseries.’”

“York must not have studied Australian folklore,” said Giordino.

“He quite obviously made up the name,” Maeve said righteously.

“According to his account,” Pitt continued, “York made good time during his passage of the southern Indian Ocean after rounding the Cape of Good Hope. He then took advantage of the Roaring Forties to carry him on a direct course across the Pacific for South America and the Strait of Magellan. He figured he was leading the race when his generator gave out and he lost all contact with the outside world.”

“That explains a lot of things,” said Giordino, staring over Pitt’s shoulder at the logbook. “Why he was sailing in this part of the sea and why he couldn’t send position coordinates for a rescue party. I checked his generator when we came on site. The two-cycle engine that provides its power is in sad shape. York tried to repair it and failed. I’ll give it a try, but I doubt if I can do any better.”

Pitt shrugged. “So much for borrowing York’s radio to call for help.”

“What does he write after being marooned?” demanded Maeve.

“Robinson Crusoe, he was not. He lost most of his food supplies when the yacht struck the rocks and capsized. When the boat was later washed up on shore after the storm, he recovered some canned goods, but they were soon gone. He tried to fish, but caught barely enough to stay alive, even with whatever rock crabs he could find and five or six birds he managed to snare. Eventually, his body functions began to give out. York lasted on this ugly pimple in the ocean for a hundred and thirty-six days. His final entry reads ‘Can no longer stand or move about. Too weak to do anything but lie here and die. How I wish I could see another sunrise over Falmouth Bay in my native Cornwall. But it is not to be. To whoever finds this log and the letters I’ve written separately to my wife and three daughters, please see they get them. I ask their forgiveness for the great mental suffering I know I must have caused them. My failure was not from fault so much as bad luck. My hand is too tired to write more. I pray I didn’t give up too soon.’”

“He needn’t have worried about being found soon after he died,” said Giordino. “Hard to believe he lay here for decades without a curious crew from a passing ship or a scientific party coming ashore to set up some kind of weather data gathering instruments.”

“The dangers of landing amid the breakers and the unfriendly rocks are enough to outweigh any curiosity, scientific or otherwise.”

Tears rolled down Maeve’s cheeks as she wept unashamedly. “His poor wife and children must have wondered all these years how he died.”

“York’s last land bearing was the beacon on the South East Cape of Tasmania.” Pitt stepped back into the hut and reappeared a minute later with an Admiralty chart showing the South Tasman Sea. He laid it flat on the ground and studied it for a few moments before he looked up. “I see why York called these rocks the Miseries,” said Pitt. “That’s how they’re labeled on the Admiralty chart.”

“How far off were your reckonings?” asked Giordino.

Pitt produced a pair of dividers he’d taken from the desk inside and measured off the approximate position he had calculated with his cross-staff. “I put us roughly 120 kilometers too far to the southwest.”

“Not half bad, considering you didn’t have an exact fix on the spot where Dorsett threw us off his yacht.”

“Yes,” Pitt admitted modestly, “I can live with that.”

“Where exactly are we?” asked Maeve, now down on her hands and knees, peering at the chart.

Pitt tapped his finger on a tiny black dot in the middle of a sea of blue. “There, that little speck approximately 965 kilometers southwest of Invercargill, New Zealand.”

“It seems so near when you look at it on a map,” said Maeve wistfully.

Giordino pulled off his wristwatch and rubbed the lens clean against his shirt. “Not near enough when you think that no one bothered to drop in on poor Rodney for almost forty years.”

“Look on the bright side,” said Pitt with an infectious grin. “Pretend you’ve pumped thirty-eight dollars in quarters into a slot machine in Las Vegas without a win. The law of averages is bound to catch up in the next two quarters.”

“A bad analogy,” said Giordino, the perennial killjoy.

“How so?”

Giordino looked pensively inside the hut. “Because there is no way we can come up with two quarters.”