Force Twelve by James Thayer

Author:James Thayer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 13

Fast Eddie Lash had insisted on watches, though Rex Wyman had said none were necessary, that Victory kept its own watch. Gwen stood in the cockpit, wearing a harness that was clipped to the boat. Over her sweaters and pants was an ocean-racing drysuit that had a reefing hood collar, neck and wrist seals, integral booties that fit inside her boots, and an oral inflator to adjust insulation. Her gloves were also insulated, sealed at the cuffs, and had leather palms for gripping, though she had nothing to grip, as the boat was doing all the work. Her drysuit and gloves and boots were bright yellow. Gwen thought she resembled a banana.

The cockpit was self-bailing, and was small for the size of the boat, so that the area wouldn’t take on a lot of water if swamped, which would push the stern down and slow the boat lifting to the seas. The cockpit’s drains could clear a water-filled cockpit in less than ninety seconds.

Victory had sailed through Unimak Pass, between Akutan Island and Unimak Island in the Aleutians. The boat was now in the Bering Sea, approaching fifty-five degrees north latitude, and bearing northwest toward the Pribilofs. Gwen knew that yachtsmen tend to exaggerate wave height, that the wave is measured by comparing it to the mast, but that this is an optical illusion. Wave height is only half its apparent height. So these waves looked forty feet high, but were only twenty, and were coming at the boat off the port quarter, one after another, endlessly.

Victory soared up a wave, then fell down its backside, and when the prow lanced one of these walls of water, green foam tumbled across the foredeck, bubbling and splashing and hiding the deck, then falling away to the sides again as the boat rose. The wind was westerly at fifteen knots, and some of the waves were breaking, sending curls of tumbling white water down their steep gray sides. Water is the only element that offers more resistance the harder it is hit, and Victory, rather than slicing through the waves, smacked them solidly. Wind whistled in the rigging. The sky was a vast leaden bowl overhead.

The boat was twenty-five hundred miles into the race. The nearest competitor, Genevieve DeLong in Remember the Bastille, was twenty miles behind Victory, already in the Bering Sea. Rex Wyman was chagrined that Victory had gained only twenty miles on its nearest rival, and he was still apprehensive about the two as-yet-unexplainable bugs in Victory’ s system—bugs that had caused the mystery jibe and the dangerous hatch closure—but the boat had since been free of mistakes. The Boise office was still working watch-and-watch, searching for the glitch.

He had also hired an outside consultant to look for the problem, a company called Vi-Block, Inc., which served dozens of Fortune 500 companies and was accustomed to wading into an ocean of data looking for culprit code. The company was as secretive as it was indispensable to its clients.

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