Swimming to Catalina (Stone Barrington 4)

They cut the engines and tied the Whaler to a teak swimming platform on the stern. Stone stuffed the duct tape and the socket wrench kit into his jacket’s large pockets, climbed up the boarding ladder, and stuck his head above deck; there was no one in sight, but operatic music wafted from somewhere. The rubber dinghy was gone. Stone looked around for another tender, but all he saw were two large speedboats, slung in davits. Maybe somebody had gone ashore; he hoped so.

With his flashlight in one hand and his pistol in the other, Stone started forward toward the bridge. Along the way he looked into every port and window, watching for anyone stirring on the yacht, but he saw no one.

He climbed the stairs to the bridge and peeked in. There was one deckhead light on, and a radio was playing, but no one was in sight. Very slowly, he opened the door and stepped onto the bridge, the pistol out in front of him. There was no sound but the radio.

He carefully opened two doors on the bridge; one led to a stairway below, the other was, apparently, the captain’s cabin. A lamp was on, and the bed was mussed, but not unmade. He poked into the captain’s toilet, and that was empty as well. Surely the crew wouldn’t leave the big yacht entirely untended?

It seemed preposterous, but perhaps there really was no one aboard. He opened the door to the stairway and started slowly down, listening at every step.

51

0ne flight down, Stone looked into the large saloon and dining room, then into the galley. A light was on in there, and an open jar of mayonnaise with a knife stuck in it sat on a countertop. Looked as though someone had made a sandwich earlier.

Stone went back to the stairs and descended another flight. He could no longer hear the music now; there was only an unearthly silence. Surely the ship’s generators would be running. He bent down and placed a hand on the deck, feeling for vibration. Nothing. The ship must be on battery power. He walked down a hallway, still keeping quiet, and looked into every cabin, switching on a light in each. No one. Good.

Having searched the deck, he walked down another flight of stairs, where he found a door on either side of him. A sign on the one to his right read CREW QUARTERS. A sign on the other door read GUEST QUARTERS. The crew must be asleep instead of on watch, he thought.

He put the flashlight in his jacket pocket, set down the bag he was carrying, removed the roll of duct tape, opened the door to the crew’s quarters, and listened. Silence. Leaving the bag in the hallway, he checked every cabin and found no one. Bad crew, he thought, ashore drinking when there was an intruder on the yacht in their charge. He went through the other door and checked the guest cabins on that deck, finding them all empty.

Finally, he descended to the lowest deck and went into the engine room, switching on the lights. There were no ports in here, so no one could see the light from shore.

Now he had his work to do. He set down the bag, took out the socket wrench kit, and went to the nearest seacock. The valve was joined to the cooling water pipe by two flanges—one on the seacock and one on the pipe. He closed the seacock, selected the proper socket, and went to work on the six bolts holding the two flanges together. When he was done the two flanges remained stuck together with some sort of sealant, and he couldn’t pull them apart by hand. He’d come back to that.

He went to the seacock for the other engine and repeated the process, then turned to the big ones—the seaboxes. The two six-inch pipes rose vertically from the steel-plated deck, each capped by a steel plate that sealed the top of the pipe. Smaller pipes branched off the sides of the larger one, each with its own seacock. He closed all the valves, found the right socket, and removed the eight bolts securing the sealing plate to the top of the pipe. Water began to leak through the seal, but the plate remained in place. He left it there while he performed the same operation on the other seabox.

“Now,” he said aloud, “I’ve got to find something that will dislodge the sealant on each pipe, and I’m in business.” He looked around and saw a workbench nearby; he walked over to it, opened a closet adjacent to the bench, and found a selection of large tools. He chose a small sledgehammer with a three-foot handle.

He went to the first engine cooling pipe and fetched it several blows with the hammer. Gradually the sealant let go; then he repeated the action with the other engine’s pipe. He dropped the sledgehammer on the deck near the door, then went back to the workbench, found a chisel and a hammer, and went to work on the sealing plate of the starboard seabox. After his first blow, water began to squirt under high pressure; he hit it twice more. The plate flew off, and a six-inch column of water rose from the pipe, striking the deckhead. The noise, echoing off the steel plates, was deafening.

Working quickly now, he chiseled off the plate on the port seabox and another column of water exploded from the pipe. Finally, he opened the seacocks for the port and starboard engines, and he had two more three-inch blasts of water pouring into the engine room.

He stepped back to the door and admired his handiwork. All told, he had the equivalent of a sixteen-inch column of water flowing, under great pressure, from the Pacific Ocean into the big yacht.

Pleased with himself, he went back to the stairs and started up. Then he stopped and remembered. On the other side of the engine room was yet another corridor of guest cabins. Shit. He’d have to check them.

He ran back down the stairs and was greeted by a good two feet of water at the bottom. He waded through the engine room to its other door and into the corridor, checking cabins on both sides. The last cabin on the port side was locked. He’d have to hurry now, because soon access to the forward stairs would be under water, and unless there was an aft way up, he’d be trapped. Already the angle of the deck told him the yacht was increasingly down by her bows. He was about to turn back when he thought he heard a noise over the roar of incoming water, a kind of thumping. He listened, then walked aft and listened again. It had stopped. He turned to leave, and it started again. He put his ear to the last port cabin, the one that was locked, and was rewarded with a thump. Someone was inside the cabin, and he had no idea where the key was.

He rammed his shoulder and all his weight against the door, but it didn’t budge. He put his back against the opposite side of the corridor, grabbed a handhold above his head, lifted his feet, and kicked with all his might at the lock. Again and again, he kicked, and suddenly the door burst open and water flooded from the corridor into the cabin. The lights were still working, and he hit the switch in the cabin. The lights flashed on, and Stone looked inside, stunned. A woman was lying on a berth, her hands bound with duct tape and her mouth taped as well. Her frightened eyes stared at him. She had been kicking the bulkhead at her feet.

“Arrington!” he shouted. He ran to her and yanked the tape from her mouth.

She made a noise of pain. “Stone! Dear God, how did you get here?”

“Never mind that,” he said, yanking at the tape that bound her wrists, “we’ve got to get out of here; the yacht is sinking!”

The tape came free; he grabbed her wrist and pulled her toward the cabin door. Then she stopped with a jerk.

“Wait,” she yelled over the roar of water, “my ankle!”

Stone looked down. He had seen such shackles a thousand times when moving prisoners, but this one was longer. One end closed around her right ankle; the other was attached to a U-bolt in a plate welded to the hull of the yacht. He remembered seeing it on his inspection, and now he knew what it was for. “Who has the key?” he shouted.

“The captain!”

“Oh, shit,” Stone said.

“What?”

“Let me think!” He thought. Dino would have a handcuff key on his key ring, he was sure of that. Almost. But he wouldn’t have time to run up three decks, get the key, then get back down before the lower deck was completely swamped and Arrington had drowned. He’d never make it. He had one other chance, though.