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Giving in, Maeve found an old rum bottle cast off by Rodney York and filled it with seawater for the launching. "I christen thee Marvelous Maeve," she said, laughing, and broke the bottle against one of the beech logs lashed to the buoyancy tubes. "May you swim the seas with the speed of a mermaid."
"Now comes our fitness exercise," said Pitt. He passed out lines attached to the forward section of the middle hull. Everyone looped one end of a line around their waist, dug in their feet and leaned forward.
Slowly, stubbornly, the boat began to slide over the tree trunks laid on the ground like railroad tracks.
Still weakened from a lack of proper food and their ordeal, the three quickly used up their depleted strength dragging the boat toward a two-meter precipice rising from the water.
Maeve, as was to be expected by now, pulled her heart out until she could go no further and sagged to her hands and knees, heart pounding, lungs heaving for air. Pitt and Giordino hauled the great deadweight another ten meters before casting off the lines and dropping to the ground ahead of Maeve.
Now the boat teetered on the edge of the ends of two beech-log ways that angled down and under the low rolling waves.
Several minutes passed. The sun was a quarter of the way past the eastern horizon, and the sea was innocent of any sign of turbulence. Pitt slipped the rope loop from around his waist and threw it on the boat. "I guess there's no reason to put off the inevitable any longer." He climbed into the cockpit, swung the outboard motor down on its hinges and pulled at the starter rope. This time it popped to life on the second try.
"Are you two up to giving our luxury yacht a final nudge over the edge?" he said to Maeve and Giordino.
"After having gone to all this work to stir up my hormones," Giordino grumbled, "what's in it for me?"
"A tall gin and tonic on the house," Pitt replied.
"Promises, promises. That's sadism of the worst kind," Giordino groused. He slipped a muscled arm around Maeve's waist, pulled her to her feet and said, "Push, lovely lady, it's time to bid a fond farewell to this rockbound hell."
The two of them moved aft, stiffened their arms, hands against the stern, and shoved with all their remaining strength. The Marvelous Maeve moved reluctantly, then picked up speed as the forward section dipped over the edge onto the ways, and the stern lifted. She hung poised for two seconds, then dove into the water with a heavy splash that flew to the sides, before settling flat on the surface. Pitt's rationale for starting the outboard motor now became apparent as he had instant control of the boat against the flow of the current. He quickly circled it back to the edge of the low cliff. As soon as the bow gently bumped against the sheer rock, Giordino held Maeve by her wrists and gently lowered her down onto the roof of the deckhouse. Then he jumped and landed on his feet, as agile as a gymnast, beside her.
"That concludes the entertainment part of the program," said Pitt, reversing the outboard.
"Shall we raise my sails?" asked Maeve, personalizing the pride of her accomplishment.
"Not yet. We'll motor around to the leeward side of the island where the sea is calmer before we test the wind."
Giordino helped Maeve step past the deckhouse and into the cockpit. They sat down to rest a moment while Pitt steered the boat through the channel and into the swells sweeping around the north and south end of the two deserted islands. They no sooner reached the open sea than the sharks appeared.
"Look," said Giordino, "our friends are back. I'll bet they missed our company."
Maeve leaned over the side and peered at the long gray shapes moving under the surface. "A new group of followers," she said. "These are makos."
"The species with the jagged and uneven teeth only an orthodontist could love?"
"The same."
"Why do they plague me?" Giordino moaned. "I've never ordered shark in a restaurant."
Half an hour later, Pitt gave the order. "Okay, let's try the sails and see what kind of a boat we've concocted."
Giordino unfolded the woven-mat sails, which Maeve had carefully reefed in accordion pleats, and hoisted the mainsail successfully while Maeve raised the mizzen. The sails filled, and Pitt eased over the tiller, skidding the boat on a tack, heading northwest against a brisk west wind.
Any yachtsman would have rolled on his deck in laughter if he had seen the Marvelous Maeve bucking the seas. A boat designer of professional standing would have whistled the Mickey Mouse Club anthem.
But the peculiar looking sailboat had the last laugh. The outriggers dug into the water and maintained her stability. She responded to her helm amazingly well and kept her bow on course without being swept sideways. To be sure, there were problems to be ironed out with her rigging. But remarkably, she took to the sea as if she had been born there.
Pitt took a final look at the Miseries. Then he looked at the packet wrapped in a piece of Dacron sail that held Rodney York's logbook and letters. He vowed that if he somehow lived through the next several days he would get York's final testament to his living relatives, trusting that they would mount an expedition to bring him home again to be buried beside Falmouth Bay in his beloved Cornwall.
On the tenth floor of a modernistic all-glass structure built in the shape of a pyramid on the outskirts of Paris, a group of fourteen men sat around a very long ebony conference table. Impeccably dressed, wielding enormous power, immensely wealthy and unsmiling, the directors of the Multilateral Council of Trade, known simply to insiders as the Foundation, an institution dedicated to the development of a single global economic government, shook hands and engaged in small talk before sitting down to business.
Normally, they met three times a year, but this day they met in an emergency session to discuss the latest unexpected threat to their widespread operations.
The men in the room represented vast international corporations and high levels of government. Only one top-ranking member from the South African cartel was entirely involved with the selling of quality diamonds. A Belgian industrialist from Antwerp and a real-estate developer from New Delhi, India, acted as the Foundation's middlemen for
the huge illicit flow of industrial diamonds to the Islamic Fundamentalist Bloc, which was struggling to create its own nuclear destruction systems. Millions of these smaller industrial diamonds were sold underground to the bloc to make the precision instruments and equipment necessary to construct such systems. The larger, more exotic quality diamonds were used to finance unrest in Turkey, Western Europe, Latin America and several of the South Asian countries, or an other hot spot where subversive political organization could play into the hands of the Foundation's many other interests, including the sale of arms.
