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"Release your weight belt and unstrap your air tanks," he said.
Nothing needed to be said to the others. They had already dropped their gear and were tearing open the bundle. The clouds swept overhead and they were hurled into a twilight world drained of all color.
They were stunned at the violent display of atmospheric power. The wind suddenly doubled in strength, filling the air with foam and driving spray and shattering the wave crests into froth.
Abruptly, the bundle that they had so doggedly hauled with them from the Prosperteer burst open into an inflatable boat, complete with a compact twenty-horsepower outboard motor encased in a waterproof plastic cover. Giordino rolled over the side, followed by Gunn, and they frantically tore at the motor covering. The savage winds quickly drove the boat away from Pitt and Jessie. The gap began widening at an alarming rate.
"The sea anchor!" Pitt bellowed. "Throw out the sea anchor!"
Gunn barely heard Pitt over the wail of the wind. He heaved a canvas cone-shaped sack over the side that was held open by an iron hoop at the mouth. He then paid it out on a line which he made fast to the bitt on the bow. As the drag on the anchor took hold, the boat's head came around into the wind and slowed its drift.
While Giordino labored over the motor, Gunn threw out a line to Pitt, who tied it under Jessie's arms.
As she was towed toward the boat Pitt swam after her, the waves breaking over his head. The mask was torn from his head and the salt spray whipped his eyes. He doubled his effort when he saw that the running sea was carrying away the boat faster than he could swim.
Giordino's muscled arms thrust into the water, closed on Jessie's wrists, and yanked her into the boat as effortlessly as if she were a ten-pound sea bass. Pitt squinted his eyes until they were almost slits. He felt rather than saw the line fall over his shoulder. He could just make out Giordino's grinning face leaning over the side, his great hands winding in the line. Then Pitt was lying in the bottom of the wildly rocking boat, panting and
blinking the salt from his eyes.
"Another minute and you'd have been beyond reach of the line," Giordino yelled.
"Time sure flies when you're having fun," Pitt yelled back.
Giordino rolled his eyes at Pitt's cocky reply and went back to laboring over the motor.
The immediate danger facing them now was overturning. Until the motor could be started to provide a small degree of stability, a thrashing wave could flip them upside down. Pitt and Gunn threw over trailing ballast bags, which temporarily reduced the threat.
The strength of the wind was ungodly. It tore at their hair and bodies, the spray felt as abrasive to their skin as if it came from a sand blaster. The little inflatable boat flexed under the stress of the mad sea and reeled in the grip of the gale, but she somehow refused to be tipped over.
Pitt knelt on the hard rubber floorboards, clasping the lifeline with his right hand, and turned his back to the wind. Then he extended his left arm. It was an old seaman's trick that always worked in the Northern Hemisphere. His left hand would be pointing to the center of the storm.
They were slightly outside the center, he judged. There would be no breathing spell from the relative calm of the hurricane's eye. Its main path lay a good forty miles to the northwest. The worst was yet to come.
A wave crashed over them, and then another-- two in quick succession that would have broken the back of a larger, more rigid vessel. But the tough, runty inflatable shook off the water and struggled back to the surface like a playful seal. Everyone managed to keep a firm grip and no one was washed overboard.
At last Giordino signaled that he had the motor running. No one could hear it over the howl of the wind. Quickly Pitt and Gunn pulled in the sea anchor and the ballast bags.
Pitt cupped one hand and yelled in Giordino's ear, "Run with the storm!"
To sheer on a sideways course was impossible. The combined force of wind and water would have flung them over. To head into the thrust of the storm bows-on meant a sure battering they could never survive. Their only hope was to ride in the path of the least resistance. Giordino grimly nodded and pushed the throttle lever. The boat banked around sharply in a trough and surged forward across a sea that had turned completely white from the driving spray. They all flattened themselves against the floorboards except Giordino. He sat with one arm wrapped around a lifeline and gripped the outboard motor's steering lever with his free hand.
The daylight was fading slowly away and night would fall in another hour. The air was hot and stifling, making it difficult to breathe. The almost solid wall of wind-stripped water decreased visibility to less than three hundred yards. Pitt borrowed Gunn's diver's mask and raised his head over the bow. It was like standing under Niagara Falls and staring upward.
Giordino felt icy despair as the hurricane unleashed its full wrath around them. That they had survived this long was just short of a miracle. He was fighting the tumbling sea in a kind of restrained frenzy, struggling desperately to keep their puny oasis from being overwhelmed by a wave. He constantly changed throttle settings, trying to ride just behind the towering crests, warily glancing over his shoulder every few seconds at the gaping trough chasing their stern thirty feet below and behind.
Giordino knew the end was only minutes away, certainly no more than an hour with enormous luck. It would be so easy to swing the boat abeam of the sea and finish it now. He allowed himself a quick look down at the others and saw a broad smile of encouragement on Pitt's lips. If his friend of nearly thirty years felt close to death, he gave no hint of it. Pitt threw a jaunty wave and returned to peering over the bow. Giordino couldn't help wondering what he was looking at.
Pitt was studying the waves. They were piling up higher and more steeply, the wind hurling the foaming white horse at the peaks into the next trough. He estimated the distance between crests and judged that they were packing together like the forward lines of a marching column that was slowing its pace.
The bottom was coming up. The surge was flinging them into shallower water.
Pitt's eyes strained to penetrate the chaotic wall of water. Slowly, as if a black-and-white photograph were being developed, shadowy images began taking shape. The first image that flashed through his mind was that of stained teeth, blackened molars being scrubbed by white toothpaste. The image sharpened into dark rocks with the waves smashing against them in great unending explosions of white. He watched the water shoot skyward as the backwash struck an incoming surge. Then, as the surf momentarily settled, he spotted a low reef extending parallel to the rocks that formed a natural wall in front of a wide, sweeping beach. It had to be the Cuban island of Cayo Santa Maria, he reckoned.
Pitt had no problem visualizing the probabilities of the new nightmare, bodies torn to shreds on the coral reef or crushed on the jagged rocks. He wiped the salt from the mask lens and stared again. Then he saw it, a thousand-in-one chance to survive the vortex.
Giordino had seen it too-- a small inlet between the rocks. He steered for it, knowing he stood a better chance of threading a needle in a thrashing washing machine.
In the next thirty seconds the churning outboard and the storm had carried them a hundred yards. The sea over the reef boiled in a dirty foam and the wind velocity increased to where the driving spray and the darkness made vision almost impossible. Jessie's face went white, her body rigid. Her eyes met Pitt's for an instant, fearful yet trusting. His arm circled her waist and squeezed tight.
