He had traced and retraced his path for fifteen hours and was less than a mile from his track. Two hours to go to where the logbook pinned her down. His stomach cramped nervously. He lurched to the head, barely making the toilet.

Afterward he bounced topside, adjusted Irwin’s course one degree, and climbed the mast.

It was pitch dark. Just after ten, the moon would rise, if the clouds had passed. He was still too far from where he had dropped the strobe to see it, but he began to search anyway.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

On the third day out of San Francisco, under clammy skies, she tried to cook their first breakfast. Mitch, on watch in the steamer lanes topside, smelled alcohol fumes and swung down the ladder. He said she was still too sick to cook, and that soda crackers and beer would do for another day.

Obviously, he needed a hot meal. He would be up all day in the cockpit, for she was so drowsy that she could only stand watch for an hour or so at a time. Besides, she was sure that she would be seasick all the way to Nuku Hiva, with the vicious motion and no Dramamine. In the meanwhile, she had better conquer herself and cook or she would starve them both to death.

To convince him that she was OK, she somehow managed to stow the last-minute gear away and to neaten the icebox, a helter-skelter jumble of soft drinks and Fresca cans. The clothes locker was almost impossible. The inexorable roll was maddening. Every time she let go of a handhold to stuff something in, she lurched across the cabin and got another bruise. Her buttocks were a mottled mass of blues and greens.

Her belly ached from vomiting and her arms from clinging to handholds. Her legs ached worst of all. Her neck was still stiff from scrabbling into bulkhead lockers, during stowage at the dock. She had scraped a knee somehow. Tony had given her his cold, kissing her goodbye; it was the first real kiss he had given her for fifteen years, and it had to be laden with germs.

She was miserable, and the only place she could break down and cry was in the head, and if she stayed too long there she would get seasick again and Mitch would know and make her lie down.