The wind and seas they would strike depended on which of Arlene’s faces they would see. Her gentler, right-hand side would probably be lethal enough. But it would have gales forty knots less than her left side, the “dangerous semicircle,” where her speed of advance would add to the speed of her winds.

The clue lay in the trend of the wind topside. If it shifted counterclockwise, in these latitudes, he was already on her dangerous side.

He closed the book. It was time to go up and find out.

He tugged on his sea-boots, snapped on a southwester for the first time since the California coast, and climbed the companionway ladder. A warm, heavy wind greeted him. Its direction was difficult to judge. It was backing and veering, gusting and easing. But it had been southeast when he went below, and he was very much afraid that it was more easterly now. Counterclockwise. They were in the dangerous semicircle. He looked north, toward Bora Bora.

They had floundered, so far, less than ten miles southeast, but Mount Pahia was already a blurred dark shadow flirting with him from behind a veil of fast-moving scud. The curtain lifted momentarily. “Oh, Jesus,” he breathed.

Far past the island, on the northeast horizon, lay a great black mass. It seemed immovable, as if a new continent were growing there. Tiny flashes of orange lightning played against the velvet backdrop.

It was the bar of the cyclone, and behind it lay Arlene’s eye. He was twenty or thirty miles from the wall of clouds, but the sky above him seemed already to be darkening. He glanced at his watch. Just past noon.

He reefed the mizzen. Lines he had readied for warps were already tied in coils. An old Vespa tire for a drogue was lashed by the dinghy. The sea-anchor was jammed under the dodger. Air-scoops were stowed below. He thanked God that he had not changed Andrew Dugan’s thick little portholes, all dogged tightly, for the windows Lindy had wanted.

He stuck his head below. She was still on the leeward bunk, apparently asleep. Again he remembered the little cubes of lead sleeping below the floorboards. He detached Irwin’s vane and tossed it below; they could stow it later. He closed the hatch.

A twelve-foot wave gathered itself from somewhere astern, crested aboard, and slapped his face.

He glanced back at Arlene’s black heart.

“Bitch!” he yelled at it. It made him feel better.

He took the wheel. From now on it was him and Arlene.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

He steered into the dazzle of the morning sun, powering at three knots. This was his first daylight sweep, since he’d found the boat’s logbook, of the area she must be in. The flash to the east at dawn must have been a hallucination, like the elves around the binnacle light, for he had been steering east ever since, and had seen nothing.