Hurricane Fever Read online

  “I told you,” Roo said to Delroy. “I have all my tools and everything I want on the boat. I’m particular.”

  Delroy rolled his eyes. “Too cheap to buy anything you need here on Tortola. Have to bring it all over. How much a hammer and some wood cost? Really?”

  The official relaxed at the family bickering, and cleared them back out quickly.

  There were no other boats or traffic as they got back aboard, winched the dinghy back up the davits, and secured it in place.

  Now midmorning, the wind was starting to kick up as they left Great Harbour. The tips of the swells foamed slightly as the wind whipped the sea into a slight salty spray.

  Roo didn’t have to gun the electric motors. The sails filled taut with the wind. He pointed them southwest to get into the channel between St. John and St. Thomas’s East End on an easy broad reach. It didn’t take long before they slipped back out of the B.V.I. and close to St. John, easing back into the U.S.V.I.

  “So your dead friend’s present?” Delroy asked. “What was all the fuss about?”

  Roo leaned against the fiberglass side of the cockpit, standing to look out over the catamaran’s cabin-top and narrow pair of forward decks as they sliced through the waves. The port hull was getting slapped at a slight angle by the growing chop coming down through the islands. A coating of salt crusted Roo’s clothes.

  The ocean was getting angry. This wasn’t brisk fun, there was a darkness uncoiling over the gray humps of the distant easterly hills of Tortola and Virgin Gorda on their stern.

  “Right now, all I see is research,” Roo told his nephew. “I don’t know what it all is. Not yet.”

  It looked like Zee had spent a lot of time obsessed about privately owned space launch programs in Florida, Guyana, and Barbados. Financials, analytics, employee lists. He’d clearly been investigating three companies there, hunting for something.

  But there was a lot of other random crap, Roo thought. Like files on atmospheric particulate data for the Atlantic. “You know how you always complain about scrubbing Sahara dust off the deck?” Roo asked. Several times a year the skies over the Virgin Islands turned slightly ochre, and a faint dust would settle down on everything.

  Delroy grimaced, obviously thinking about having to clean the dust out from the many nooks and crannies of the Spitfire. “Just because we came once from Africa don’t mean Africa should be dumping dust here all the time. And definitely not radioactive dust.”

  “He was looking at that,” Roo said. “The Algerian plant failure. He had a map of the radiation dispersal.”

  It hadn’t been life threatening, but the Cherynobyl-level failure had prompted a huge backlash against Chinese nuclear power installations throughout the North African region, and there had been a major push to launch the Destertec project: massive solar development all throughout the sun-rich Sahara regions that now made North Africa an energy exporter to much of Southern Europe via the Gibraltar Connection.

  And Zee had been digging through the worldwide impact of the vented gases.

  “That’s as far as I got,” Roo admitted. He held the frog up on the end of a necklace he’d attached it to. He was going to keep it next to him. Almost like a talisman. “I’ll dig deeper after the storm, call a few friends. See what I can do. For now we have to get ready for the storm. After … I owe Zee following up.” Particularly if someone was skulking around the mailboxes.

  Delroy caught the look on Roo’s face as he rubbed the green frog. “He was a good friend?”

  Roo looked up. “I told you I was trouble, wasted my youth. Didn’t make many friends. I was never there for … family. The Caribbean Intelligence Group, that was the first time I turned it around. And Zee was someone always there for me. I lived for it. Until I found out about you.”

  The two of them didn’t talk about Delroy’s father. Roo kept avoiding it, and Delroy wasn’t in that place either. Delroy knew there’d been a falling out, knew that they hadn’t been close. In some ways, they didn’t know much about each other’s past, because Roo certainly didn’t ask Delroy about the foster family or his time spent without family. And Delroy could never get much out about the CIG, and the boy was never really sure if he believed his uncle had been an agent.

  But Roo knew Delroy had seen some tough times before he’d gotten to him. When Roo’d come back and offered Delroy a room on the Spitfire, along with a chance to start new on St. Thomas, the boy had started crying. And for a year or so, whenever Roo’d moved too quickly, Delroy would flinch.

  So they both left the past behind them as best either of them knew how.

  Until now.

  A gust of wind hit them hard. The rigging keened.

  They both jumped slightly and Delroy looked over nervously at the ever-darkening clouds advancing on the islands.

  Roo tapped the screens of weather data, pulling up wind maps and satellite video of Makila. “It’s just a tropical storm, we fine.” He smiled. “I sailed worse winter storms up north than this.”

  But Delroy shook his head. “Storms is storms,” he muttered. “And you can’t say for sure it won’t turn on us and get worse.”

  Roo didn’t disagree. “I’ll reef the sails.” He tapped the roller furling controls on the jib. It spun, the sail wrapped itself up, and the amount of exposed canvas shrank a bit. They slowed, but the gusts would be less likely to blow the sail out.

  He nudged the mainsail in as well.

  Better to be cautious, even if he had been secretly enjoying the feel of the Spitfire sprinting beneath him.

  “We’ll be okay,” Roo said, seeing Delroy looking at the black clouds on the horizon. “Storm hits tonight.”

  The wind speed indicator spun merrily away on its perch at the top of the mast, the readout down in the cockpit’s glass indicating it was topped out in the gusts at forty knots. The sustained winds were high twenties.

  They passed back along St. John, and then eventually put St. Thomas on their starboard. Delroy waved as they sailed on by Red Hook. They ran downwind hard, wing and wing with the catamaran waddling from side to side a bit. The mainsail was let out all the way to port, the triangular shape of the jib was shoved out to starboard with a pole, the whiskerpole, to keep it locked into place.

  Spitfire preferred a reach, the wind against her side. She didn’t point to wind as tight as a monohull, and she was a little more fiddly when running downwind. But if you were willing to sit at the wheel and pay attention, correcting the catamaran’s quirks, as tiring as it was, you could get her to move quickly.

  Roo sent Delroy into the cabin to watch a movie and relax as the gusts got snappier, angrily dive bombing them with a mild taste of what was still off beyond the horizon.

  * * *

  Spitfire ran before the gusts as she sailed toward the eastern tip of St. Thomas, moving along the reddish cliffs of the eastern southern coastline that eased, sloped down, and turned into muddy mangroves, then into the greater Charlotte Amalie harbor area. Roo took them past the bright towers and condos of Frenchman’s Reef. Unlike the great ships of old, he didn’t enter Charlotte Amalie harbor, instead passing the mouth of it until he was south of Water Island, which lay just past Charlotte Amalie to the west, across from Crown Bay Marina and the merchant docks stacked high with containers.

  He hauled the sails in and went back to using the electric motors as he pulled into the lee of Water Island, then pointed them in to Flamingo Bay on its southwestern tip.

  The farther into Flamingo Bay they coasted, the muddier and more stagnant the water got. Through the outer harbor and then the cut, and into the shallow and fully protected inner harbor.

  The hills on all sides of the bay kept the wind out. And the currents and swells struggled to get in. Mangroves everywhere, hungry for the nutrient-rich muck and silt, also helped regulate the storm surges. In short, as the cluster of other ships here indicated, it was a natural hurricane hole.

  Roo got the catamaran right up close to the mangroves, then kicked th
e starboard side prop into reverse while gunning the port to spin the catamaran neatly around.

  Delroy dropped an anchor from each of the two bows. Roo set them, pulling against them in reverse for a bit, then they paid out anchor chain until he’d reversed right up to the mangroves. They were churning mud with the propellers now; the low draft keels of the catamaran scraped the soft muck. Just a few feet deep here.

  They used spidersilk-weave dock ropes to tie off to the mangroves. And after an hour of work, the Spitfire now sat cradled in a web between her anchors and the ropes leading to the mangroves just thirty feet away.

  But Roo wasn’t done yet.

  They ran a third and fourth anchor out lateral to the catamaran, with more chain. Sweaty work in the late afternoon. The air had been still in the harbor as they started, only the trees on the hills around them swaying to show how windy it was. By the time they finished the wind was shoving its talons down into the usually mosquito-rich and still atmosphere of the hurricane hole.

  “See,” Roo said as they sat and watched the wind start to kick up the water around them. “No worries.”

  He checked over the forecasts on the chart table’s screen. The bright white swirls of tropical storm Makila were beginning to occlude Anegada, the most easterly island in the Virgin Islands, as seen from live satellite feeds on weather sites.

  Outside the sun hit the horizon; orange and ochre twilight pulled after it over the gray and foamy white seas.

  This was their fifth time bolting into Flamingo this year. Now that they had all the chain down, the stern fastened to the nearby mangroves, he could see Delroy relax into the routine.

  Still, neither of them could sleep once settled down inside. Delroy read a few books, the ghastly backlight of his reader bathing his face in an eerie glow. Roo dozed on the settee, looking out the windows away from Delroy so his night vision wasn’t harmed.

  The wind passing through the rigging of the all the ships in the hurricane hole began to keen and wail.

  It didn’t let up for hours. By midnight the sound had become mundane to them. Roo paid more attention to the shift of the catamaran, the jerk-crack as it reached the end of an anchor’s pay out, or as it yanked against the stern ropes.

  At two thirty in the morning, Roo saw something move out in the dark.

  He stood up, grabbed a pair of binoculars, and flipped them to night vision.

  In the gray and green he saw a forty-two-foot Grand Banks motor sailer moving unchecked across the harbor water.

  “Shit.”

  Roo said it with a half mutter, but Delroy woke up right away, eyes wide. He started breathing heavily. Damn, Roo berated himself. He was going to scare the kid if he wasn’t careful. Delroy was always nervous about storms. And Roo couldn’t blame him. They’d taken almost everything from him.

  On the other hand, Roo was a bit nervous as well. Cut loose, a wild boat was going to do damage in the anchorage. It was going to hole other boats. Probably sink them. At least break some of them loose. If it came for them, they might end up mangled by it. Their lives were in danger from it. It didn’t do Delroy any favors to try and hide him from the truth. The truth was going to be slamming around them soon enough.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Loose boat.” As Roo watched, the motor sailer struck a single-hulled yacht. They couldn’t hear the crunch, but Roo could imagine it well enough. He winced.

  “The wind’s pushing it up toward the dock,” Roo said. “But when the storm’s winds spin around it’s going to be all over here down by us. And bringing any ships it cuts loose with it.”

  The other boat’s mast shivered. Roo squinted and saw flakes of fiberglass fly off with the wind. The motorboat wallowed and scraped on, and he saw that it had gored the fiberglass hull of the yacht a few feet above the waterline.

  “It’s bad?” Delroy asked.

  “It’s bad,” Roo confirmed.

  6

  Roo opened the sliding door out to the rear cockpit. The winds had rotated with the shifting structure of the storm. No longer roaring in from over the hills around the bay, now they swept around and threw waves against the protected spit dividing the inner harbor and outer bay.

  The catamaran wasn’t bucking too hard, but he still staggered as it hit the end of its ropes and unbalanced him. Water slapped and churned in the mangroves behind them. They’d dragged a little bit closer, and normally he’d winch them a bit away.

  But he wasn’t as worried about the mangroves as he was the other dark shapes moving around near the docks. Shapes headed their way any moment now that the wind had changed direction.

  He untied the rear ropes and tossed the lines free. The Spitfire was now held in place by the wind coming at the harbor and the four anchors off her bows, two out in front and one off to each side.

  Roo pulled survival gear out from the cockpit lockers. “Delroy! Did anyone answer?” They’d been on the radio, calling to see if anyone was aboard the motorboat.

  His nephew paused at the border between cabin and cockpit. “No.”

  Roo grimaced and gave him a bright orange survival suit. “It’s cold weather survival gear,” he shouted. “But at night, in the water, even here you can still get hypothermia. So stay zipped up, and stay in the cockpit, okay?”

  Delroy swallowed and nodded.

  “Do not get on deck to help me,” Roo ordered. “If something happens to me, you get in the dinghy and head for the mangroves. Get as deep in as you can. The roots will protect you from the worst of it, the suit from the cold.”

  Once Delroy started pulling the suit on, Roo left him and crossed through the cabin as he zipped himself up. Bulky, plastic, overly warm, the survival suit was designed to be a personal lifeboat to anyone who fell overboard. Filters in the suit could suck in and desalinate ocean water. It floated. It kept you warm. It had a beacon to call for help. If you pulled and sealed the hood completely over your head in heavy waves, you could breathe inside the suit, it had oxygen scrubbers inside to recycle air for forty-eight hours.

  Some models had a snack pouch. Enough calories to keep you going for a week.

  Teflon and Kevlar fiber weave in the material supposedly helped with sharks.

  And so far, Roo had never had to use one of the damn things.

  “They coming right at us,” Delroy shouted through the cabin at Roo, right before he reached the door leading out to the front decks.

  Roo zipped the suit up. “Shut the door. Do not come out front.”

  Delroy did so, and then Roo slid the door leading out front open with a grunt. The wind hit him, shoved him back off his feet for a second as it battered the bright orange suit.

  He leaned forward into it. As usual, it felt like sticking his head out of a car on a highway. He had to strain to slide the door shut behind him, then he leaned into the driving rain as he staggered up the deck.

  Forty-mile-an-hour raindrops stung his face. But it was the gusts that he had to watch out for. Sudden blasts of air that would knock him back on his ass if he wasn’t careful. Take him right overboard if he was unlucky.

  He crouch-walked his way along the netting and looked up through the howling, painful rain as he got to the starboard bow’s windlass.

  A bowsprit glinted, catching light cast by still-standing streetlights from the road leading down to the bay. The bowsprit was a stainless-steel spear of platform and railing that jutted out from in front of the motorboat coming right at the Spitfire.

  “Not this ship,” Roo said as he gauged the direction of the incoming, storm-powered missile. “She ain’t yours to have.”

  He pulled a carbon-fiber machete out from where it was strapped in a holster next to the Spitfire’s own stainless-steel bowsprit. The edge, microscopically thin and diamond hard, could cut through anything on the ship. He kept it up here to cut through fallen rigging, even a mast, in weather like this.

  Roo cut through the anchor chain on the deck with a hard chop. The metal links parted and rattled
off across the deck into the water.

  The anchor off to the side, stopping them from swinging around, took up the tension. The spidersilk rope snapped tight and threw off drops of water.

  The motorboat lolled, drifting with the surge of roiling water coming in through the cut. The bow dipped and the ship yawed, not quite making up its mind where it was going.

  Roo stared at it. Waiting, waiting. Watching the ship grow larger and larger, waiting for that gut feeling …

  … there. He chopped the rope, burying the machete into the deck a little and swearing.

  Spitfire, no longer held in place by the starboard anchors, swung in an arc to port. Roo yanked the machete free of the deck and sprinted back to the netting. He bounded over and across to the port bow and windlass.

  He let the chain out, leaving the port anchor over to their side take the full brunt of holding the catamaran in place.

  The maneuver swung them even farther away from the wild boat in the dark. It roared past, fifteen feet on the starboard side, a ghost ship that madly flung itself into the mangrove roots just behind them. And that was where it remained, waves holding it in place as they slammed against the side of its hull.

  Roo relaxed for a moment, until he saw the forty-foot monohull coming in next. It was driven toward them by the same waves that had hurled the motorboat at them.

  For a moment it looked like it would swing right on past them as well.

  But then it shifted course. Almost like it knew where to go.

  “No no no no.” Roo tried to will the yacht away from them as the red hull, lit up by the jagged streaks of lightning, swept closer.

  It turned at the last second, giving Roo a stupid sort of hope. It crossed their bows, a sleek sailing ship out of control and ungraceful with its sides to the waves.

  And then hit the anchor chain.

  “Ras…” Roo swore.

  Spitfire jerked and shivered. The spidersilk, strong as it was, still twanged and shot apart, cut clean by the other ship’s keel. Then it snapped loudly enough to rival the thunder.