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Giordino paused from bailing for a moment and stared at Pitt, sickness in his heart from knowing without question that Maeve would soon be torn limb from limb and devoured by the murder machines of the deep. Grimly, he went back to his work, laboring ceaselessly, throwing a thousand and more containerfuls of water over the side.
God only knew how Giordino could keep going. His back and arms must have been screaming in protest. The steel willpower to endure went far beyond the limits of comprehension. Pitt was stronger than most men, but alongside Giordino, he felt like a child watching an Olympic weight lifter. When Pitt had yielded the container in total exhaustion, Giordino took it up as if he could go on forever. Giordino, he knew, would never accept defeat. The tough, stocky Italian would probably die trying to get a stranglehold on a hammerhead.
Their peril sharpened Pitt's mind. In a final desperate attempt, he lowered the sail, laid it flat in the water, then slipped it under the hull and tied the lines to the buoyancy tubes. The nylon sheet, pressed against the crack by the pressure of the water, slowed the advance of the leakage by a good fifty percent, but at best it was only a stopgap measure that bought them a few extra hours of life. Unless the sea became perfectly calm, the physical breakdown of the crew and the splitting apart of the boat, Pitt figured, would occur shortly after darkness fell. He glanced at his watch and saw that sunset was only four and a half hours away.
Pitt gently grabbed Giordino's wrist and removed the container from his hand. "My turn," he said firmly. Giordino did not resist. He nodded in appreciation and fell back against a buoyancy tube, too exhausted to sleep.
The sail held back the flow of water enough so that Pitt actually stayed even for a short time. He bailed into the afternoon, mechanically, losing all sense of time, barely noting the passage of the brutal sun, never wilting under its punishing rays. He bailed like a robot, not feeling the pain in his back and arms, his senses completely numbed, going on and on as if he were caught in a narcotic stupor.
Maeve had roused herself out of a state of lethargy. She sat up and peered dully at the horizon behind Pitt 's back. "Don't you think palm trees are pretty," she murmured softly.
"Yes, very pretty," Pitt agreed, giving her a tight smile, believing her to be hallucinating. "You shouldn't stand under them. People have been killed by falling coconuts."
"I was in Fiji once," she said, shaking her hair loose. "I saw one drop through the windshield of a parked car."
To Pitt, Maeve looked like a little girl, lost and wandering aimlessly in a forest, who had given up all hope of ever finding her way home. He wished there was something he could do or say that would comfort her. But there was nothing on God's sea that anyone could do. His sense of compassion and utter inadequacy left him embittered.
"Don't you think you should steer more to starboard?" she said listlessly.
"Starboard?"
She stared as if in a trance. "Yes. You don't want to miss the island by sailing past it."
Pitt's eyes narrowed. Slowly, he turned and peered over his shoulder. After nearly sixteen days of taking position sightings from the sun and suffering from the glare on the water, his eyes were so strained that he could only focus in the distance for a few seconds before closing them. He cast his eyes briefly across the bow but saw only blue-green swells.
He turned back. "We can no longer control the boat," he explained softly. "I've taken down the sail and placed it under the hull to slow the leakage."
"Oh, please," she pleaded. "It's so close. Can't we land and walk around on dry ground if only for a few minutes?"
She said it so calmly, so rationally in her Australian twang, that Pitt felt his spine tingle. Could she actually be seeing something? Reason dictated that Maeve's mind was playing tricks on her. But a still-glowing spark of hope mixed with desperation made him rise to his knees while clutching a buoyancy tube for stability. At that moment the boat rose on the crest of the next swell and he had a brief view of the horizon.
But there were no hills with palm trees rising above the sea.
Pitt circled his arm around Maeve's shoulders. He remembered her as robust and spirited. Now she looked small and frail, and yet her face glowed with an intensity that wasn't there before. Then he saw that she was not staring across the sea but into the sky.
For the first time he noticed the bird above the boat, wings outspre
ad, hovering in the breeze. He cupped his hands over his eyes and gazed at the winged intruder. The wingspan was about a meter, the feathers a mottled green with specks of brown. The upper beak curled and came to a sharp point. To Pitt the bird appeared to be an ugly cousin of the more colorful parrot family.
"You see it too," said Maeve excitedly. "A kea, the same one that led my ancestors to Gladiator Island. Sailors shipwrecked in southern waters swear the kea shows the way to safe harbors."
Giordino peered upward, regarding the parrot more as a meal than a divine messenger sent by ghosts to guide them toward dry land. "Ask Polly to recommend a good restaurant," he muttered wearily.
"Preferably one that doesn't have fish dishes on the menu."
Pitt did not reply to Giordino's survivalist humor. He studied the kea's movements. The bird hovered as if resting and made no attempt at aimlessly circling the boat. Then, apparently catching its second breath, it began to wing away in a southeasterly direction. Pitt immediately took a compass bearing on the bird's course, keeping it in sight until it became a speck and disappeared.
Parrots are not water birds like the gulls and petrels that range far over the seas. Perhaps it was lost, Pitt thought. But that didn't play well. For a bird that preferred to sink its claws on something solid, it made no attempt to land on the only floating object within sight. That meant that it was not tired of flying on instinct toward some unknown mating ground. This bird knew exactly where it was and where it was going. It flew with a plan. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was in the midst of flying from one island to another.
Pitt was certain it could see something from a higher altitude that the miserable people in the dilapidated boat below could not.
He moved to the control console and pulled himself to his feet, clutching the stand with both hands to keep from being pitched overboard. Again he squinted through swollen eyes toward the southeast.
He had become all too familiar with clouds on the horizon that gave the illusion of land rising from the sea. He was too used to seeing white tufts of cotton drifting over the outer edge of the sea, their uneven shapes and dark gray colors raising false hopes before altering form and gliding onward, driven by winds out of the west.
This time it was different. One solitary cloud on the horizon remained stationary while the others moved past it. It rose from the sea faintly but without any signature of mass. There was no indication of green vegetation because the cloud itself was not a piece of an island. It was formed by vapor rising from sun-baked sand before condensing in a colder level of air.
Pitt restrained any feelings of excitement and delight when he realized the island was still a good five hours' sail away. There wasn't a prayer of reaching it, even with the sail spread once more on the mast while the sea poured into the boat. Then his dashed hopes began to reassemble as he recognized it not as the top of an undersea mount that had thrust above the sea after a million years of volcanic activity and then nurtured lush green hills and valleys. This was a low, flat rock that supported a few unidentifiable trees that somehow survived the colder climate this far south of the tropic zone.
