He was asking her something. They were all at once communicating, and for real, and it was what she had wanted, and she found that she could not even hold his gaze, let alone answer.

“Or,” she suggested awkwardly, “he’s just a real nice guy.” She was very tired and soon they turned in.

Chapter 7

CHAPTER 7

He sailed out of Taihoe Bay at dawn, into a long, slow swell. Lindy was clinking around in the galley, cooking an omelette. Passing under the Sentinels, he glanced back. The bay still slept under smoky copra haze. It would be hot there in two hours, but they would be well out of the lee of Nuku Hiva and into the cooling trades. He did not think they would ever return. He had come closer to losing her than she knew. The vibes here were all wrong.

Tahiti lay nearly a thousand miles away, past the Tuamotos, the Low Archipelago. The name meant “Danger Islands.” They stretched like a nine hundred-mile minefield between the Marquesas and Tahiti. On the chart they were dots, quite widely spaced. To the neo-navigator who had just sailed to the high-rise Marquesas out of Los Angeles or Honolulu, it would seem perfectly safe to weave through the scattered specks. Mitch knew that the risk lay in overconfidence.

Because the dots, in the flesh, were not dots at all. They were vast coral sandspits, pounded by growling surf, impossible to see at night and even difficult to hear until too late. In daytime they hid until the last moment behind a dazzling horizon. Each crouched, more sea than land, stubbled with low coconut palms and embracing a tranquil lagoon, guarded by reefs that might run for thirty miles. The currents among them raped your navigation and you were on them without warning. All this he knew from Tahiti Race sailors and the Sailing Directions, Volume III.

He had heard that there was hardly one atoll among them that did not have its wreck, a ribbed carrion baking in the sun, a year old or a hundred. The whitened spines of clipper ships and the fiberglass hulls of sudden experts shared the same coral slabs. Sterling Hayden’s Wanderer lay shattered on Rangiroa, although Hayden had not put her there, and last month a retired British merchant captain who had not scratched a freighter in forty years had deposited his own ketch on Matahiva, trying to cut the corner to Tahiti.

The atolls were so low that even radar was no help: a Decca-equipped American yawl had recently struck Tematangi, which Bligh on the Bounty, with more primitive instruments but better eyesight, had somehow managed to miss. A French Navy tug had pulled the yawl off, not forgetting to bill her for ecological damage to the reef itself.