Close Reach Read Free

growing brighter as the sun rose to make another low transit of the sky. She handed him a harness tether, and he clipped in after he sat in the second pedestal chair.
    “None of the SSB nets get going till later in the day, so I didn’t learn anything on the radio,” he said.
    “I should’ve thought of that before you went down.”
    Dean waved it off. “But I used the satellite link and got on the Internet.”
    A wave hit them broadside, and Freefall lurched in her forward progress, then pressed on at greater speed into the trough. Dean went on: “Lena and Jim were definitely in Antarctica. Lena updated a website pretty regularly.”
    “You found it?”
    He nodded. “Yeah. It had pictures of both of them, of the boat. The boat’s named Arcturus. They were anchored on the southwest end of Adelaide three days ago. Lena even put in the GPS coordinates. They were seven miles from us.”
    “So it was them.”
    “But that’s where it gets weird. The last entry is dated two days ago at one-thirty in the morning. Almost five hours before we heard the transmission. She said they were sailing nonstop to Easter Island, that they’d left that afternoon. She signed off with their coordinates, and I plotted them on a chart. The position was over a hundred miles west northwest of Adelaide, in the open ocean.”
    “But you said the max range was five to ten—”
    “There’s no way we could’ve gotten a VHF transmission from them if Arcturus was where she said it was.”
    “If they turned around for some reason, right after she did the update, couldn’t they get within range of us?”
    He shook his head.
    “Not enough time. And that’s the other thing. I don’t see how they could’ve gotten to that position in the first place. The weather’s all wrong for it. Her coordinates were a hundred and ten miles dead upwind of where they were anchored the day before. No way they could’ve gotten to that spot in under twelve hours, fighting the wind and the waves. Tacking back and forthwould’ve added another hundred miles for them. There’s just no way.”
    “There’s a low-pressure system out there, coming at us. I think it’s a big one. If they were headed west, they’d have gone right into it,” Kelly said. She tapped the barometer to make her point, and Dean nodded.
    They sat in silence again and watched the boat ride the waves. Kelly scanned the horizon in quadrants, searching for ships. Or ice. The little broken bits of icebergs—growlers—were her biggest fear. They floated just inches above the waves and could punch a hole in the hull if they hit one dead on. Then she remembered the radar and told Dean about the two targets she’d been watching. She explained her quick calculations. Dean listened, then looked at the screen. The radar was in target tracking mode, and so the two targets left ghostly trace lines marking their paths.
    “Follow the tracks backward and where do they point?” Dean asked.
    She looked at them. They pointed to the southeast. To Adelaide Island.
    They looked at each other, and that was all it took to show him she understood.
    “Yeah,” Dean said.
    Kelly thought to herself: What’s going on?
    But she didn’t ask it. She wasn’t in the habit of asking Dean questions he couldn’t answer. Instead, she looked at the chart. They were six hundred nautical miles from Puerto Williams, the southernmost town in Chile. The GPS was telling her they’d reach it in forty-two hours, but she knew that was wrong. Somewhere along the way they’d slow down. They always did. Headwinds, chop, countercurrents. Something would keep them from making a steady fourteen knots. So whatever was coming up from the south would catch them. And that was the question she wanted to ask Dean.
    “Should we do anything or just hold course?”
    He didn’t have to think long before he answered.
    “We don’t know enough that it makes sense to change course. All we know for sure is there’s a low-pressure system