The morning spent in the boatyard had been exactly what Ranya needed. She was too busy helping Brad to get Guajira ready for sailing to do much futile brooding. There was no chance to watch television or listen to talk radio as they got the mainsail ready; instead Brad played music CDs on the boat’s stereo. But she didn’t need to hear the news to know what a hornet’s nest she had kicked open: the police sirens and helicopters converging on the golf course had told her that already. No official confirmation was necessary to be certain that Sanderson was dead. Ranya had known a second after her shot that she had center-punched the top of his head while he was leaning over his golf ball.
After they cast off from the barge they motored out of Crosby’s side-creek and north up the congested industrial sections of the Elizabeth River, past a mile of bulk cargo terminals and container handling facilities. They finally caught a fair breeze as they passed Craney Island on their left, but they continued motoring north until they were in sight of the world’s largest naval base off their starboard bow to the east. Security vessels patrolled back and forth in front of the long line of submarines, destroyers, cruisers, and two aircraft carriers which were docked at the Norfolk Naval Operations Base.
Ranya was wearing a set of light green hospital scrubs which Brad had lent her, with the ankles rolled up around her calves. It felt nice wearing Brad’s clothes; the wind made the light cotton flutter around her legs and her waist. She was steering, standing in the back of the T-shaped cockpit behind the four-foot diameter silver wheel, while Brad moved around the decks getting the mainsail ready to hoist. The center of the wheel was attached to a white pedestal in the middle of the cockpit, on top of the pedestal there was a black compass floating in clear liquid beneath a glass dome. Sometimes Brad gave her a compass course to sail, such as “steer three fifty,” or 350 degrees, almost north. Sometimes he pointed to a distant landmark and asked her to aim for that point: “head for the smokestacks.”
When he was ready he said, “Okay Ranya, put her into the wind, and I’ll haul her up.”
Brad stood a few feet from her in the front of the cockpit, one hand on each side of the open companionway hatch which led below. She turned the wheel until Guajira’s bow was facing west, directly into the wind, and Brad began hauling in on the mainsail halyard line. This white-and-red-flecked rope led from the back of the cabin top, to the base of the mast and up inside of it, to the top of the mast and over a pulley sheave, and then back down the outside of the mast to the top corner of the mainsail. With each of Brad’s two-handed pulls back on the halyard line the entire mainsail slid a yard up the slot on the back of the mast. In half a minute it was all the way to the top and flapping furiously in the wind. He wound the rope around a soup-can-sized silver winch, and put a handle into the top of it to ratchet in the last few inches, and stretch the sail tightly up the mast.
She privately admired his physique from her position behind him at the wheel. He had a nice strong back and broad shoulders, his muscles were visibly rippling under his t-shirt as he hauled back on the line and then winched it in.
“All right, turn to starboard. Steer to the northwest until the sail fills.” Brad moved from side to side in the cockpit and used other winches to adjust the thicker white and blue lines, the main sheets, which pulled the aluminum boom at the bottom edge of the mainsail in and out. Guajira leaned over and increased speed as the triangular main sail stopped fluttering and suddenly took on a single smooth tight curve from bottom to top. The boat continued to pick up more speed under the press of the wind, and the faster they went, the more breeze Ranya felt against her face.
“Now we’re going to hear the sweetest sound in the world, a sound I’ve never heard on Guajira.” he said, standing just in front of her and beaming, holding onto the front of the compass pedestal. They both had to bend one leg to stand upright as Guajira motor-sailed along to windward, heeled over under the force of the wind.
Ranya smiled back at him and asked, “What sound is that?”
“Just…listen.” He turned back toward the front of the cockpit, turned the engine key to “off,” and held down the kill button. The diesel motor, which had been steadily droning in the background since they had left the boat yard, coughed and died. Its persistent clatter was suddenly gone, replaced by the smooth hiss of the fiberglass hull being driven through salt water under wind power alone.
“That’s the sound, that’s the sweetest music there is,” he said. “Turn a little more to the north, steer about 330 degrees for now.” Brad climbed up onto the high side of the cabin top and stood leaning against the slanting mast, sighting up along it, checking that the new rigging wires were still holding it straight and true under the full weight of the wind. The white mast and main sail made a stunning picture against the blue sky, this was the very first sailing mile Brad was making of what could be a life time of ocean voyages aboard Guajira.
“See that mast and sail? It’s the most beautiful thing in the world to me, because it means freedom. It means crossing whole oceans, and not asking for permission, or buying tickets, or standing in lines and getting questioned and searched. It’s tropical islands and warm clear water, and skin diving any time you feel like it. It’s staying as long as you like and leaving when you want, it’s the real freedom of choice, the choice to live where you want, just the way you want.” He paused, staring up the mast again as it swung against the sky.
“It’s all of that?” asked Ranya. She wasn’t sure but she thought she saw him turn and brush away a tear with the back of his hand, but maybe it was just the wind in his eyes.
“It’s all of that and much more. It’s days and weeks completely by yourself to think and read and write, if that’s what you feel like doing. Or time to spend with only your very best friends, if that’s what you feel like, getting to know them on a deeper level than you ever could anyplace else. It’s moonlight across the water, and trade winds pushing giant cotton ball clouds along, and whole tribes of porpoises that stay with you for days on end, playing around your boat. It’s all of that every time you hoist up your mainsail and catch the wind, because it’s the same wind that’ll carry you to any place you want to go.”
She just stood behind the wheel, watching him, the compass, and the sail. He was elated; his long years of planning and work were coming together in these last few minutes, and she was genuinely happy for him and wanted to let him savor his triumphant moment. She kept watching her compass course, the angle of the wind, and the shape of the mainsail. She noticed that when she steered a little more away from the wind, the boat gained a few tenths of a knot, according to the digital speedometer by the engine panel.
“Brad, we’re making almost seven knots under the mainsail alone. How much faster will she go when you have both sails?”
“I don’t know, nine I hope, maybe ten. But you don’t get this kind of a breeze all the time. She should make 150-mile days in the trade winds, that’s what I’m hoping for. That means crossing a thousand miles of ocean on a good week, averaging everything out.”
“When’s the new jib going to be ready?”
“Oh, it should have been ready weeks ago. Never, ever believe a sail maker. They’ll promise anything to get your business. Anyway, he swears it’ll be ready next week.”
“Is that the last thing you need before you take off?”
“That’s the last big thing. Are you getting tired of steering yet? You’re really a natural, you know it? You have a knack for keeping the sail full.”
“I’m just steering 330, like you asked me to.”
“No, it’s more than that. You’ve got a feel for it, I can tell. You must have salt water in your blood.”
****
The STU Team’s new forward operating base was located deep in rural Chesapeake County Virginia, south of Norfolk and only a few miles from the North Carolina border. Through a murky and undefined mechanism they had been given access to a small annex of the old South River Naval Auxiliary Landing Field, which had been abandoned a decade earlier during a round of base closings. The annex adjoined the primary airfield, and at some point in decades past it had been used in training Navy helicopter pilots.
Since the base closure, the landing field and the annex had been used periodically for military exercises and law enforcement training. Navy SEALs, Marine Recon, Army Special Forces, Delta and the Rangers, and certain law enforcement agencies including the FBI and the DEA had used it both as a staging area, and at other times as a target, in various training scenarios. At different times the base had pretended to be an Iraqi chemical weapons depot, a Taliban POW camp, an enemy airfield and barracks, and a Colombian FARC guerrilla cocaine factory.
The few civilians living within earshot were used to blacked-out C-130s roaring in as loud as freight locomotives for midnight landings and immediate spin-around takeoffs. They were nonplussed by off-target parachutists in camouflage uniforms dropping into their soybean fields by day or by night. They paid no mind to all types of helicopters that came and went without any discernable pattern, including many that were painted the military anti-infrared color, which to most civilians appeared to be black. (This had given rise to the much-derided “myth” of black helicopters, which of course actually did exist by the hundreds, flown by U.S. Army pilots.)
So the assorted STU vehicles coming in from several directions at different times passed without notice. The vehicles all fit into one of the two rusting and decrepit fifty-by-fifty-yard helicopter hangars on the landing field annex, with plenty of room left over for their gear.
Malvone had his pilot circle the old base at 1,000 feet in order to get a look at his team’s new home and the area around it. The Naval Auxiliary Landing Field was bordered on three sides by branches of the sluggish black water South River, and tidal marshland beyond that to the edges of dry farmland. A narrow canal off of one branch separated the annex to the south from the runway and most of the abandoned buildings of the landing field to the north. The two parts of the base were joined by a single one-lane vehicle bridge, which was semi-permanently barricaded by a row of refrigerator-sized concrete blocks. The entire base and its annex were surrounded by a rusty chain link perimeter fence.
Scrawny pine trees covered most of the higher ground which was interspersed through the marshland around the old Navy property, and covered most of what was not paved over on the base itself. The concrete runways and service roads and aircraft aprons were webbed with cracks from which grew weeds and bushes and even small determined trees.
The annex was located on the southern end of the base, a mile from the old control tower and the primary cluster of buildings which had supported the landing field operations. The annex had its own separate gates and service roads leading to the state roads. The base was as remote and private a place as was likely to be found only twenty miles from an east coast city as big as Norfolk Virginia.
Besides the two primary hangars, the annex contained several cinderblock workshops and offices, and some smaller metal-sided storage sheds. While he orbited the old base in a bank, Malvone spotted a couple of STU vehicles on a narrow black top state road heading in: a thirty-foot motor home and a blue conversion van. The convoy had, as planned, been arriving in staggered intervals to maintain a low profile. Finally he had the pilot set the Eurohelo down on a faded yellow-circled “H” landing spot in front of one of the large hangars. An old windsock which had once been orange swung from a rusty pole, and that was the extent of the working airport landing aids.
Blue and Gold Team leaders Tim Jaeger and Michael Shanks met him as he stepped down from the chopper. They were dressed casually in jeans and t-shirts and ball caps on the warm day. Their pistols were worn holstered high on their belts on their right sides, concealment being unnecessary on their new base.
“Tim, Mike, how’d the move go? What’s the place like?”
Jaeger answered, “No problem, except it’s a bitch finding your way in here right at the end. The paper road maps don’t agree with our electronic maps, and neither ones match what’s really here. Some real morons made those maps, let me tell you. But we’re thinking that if we had a hard time finding the way in, so will anybody else.”
“Was the gate open? How did that work?”
Shanks had come down first with the advance team on Friday. He said, “No, it was chained shut. Some Navy guy in civvies was waiting for us in a white van. He unlocked it and got the power turned on, showed us around, and left. We’ve got our own lock on it now, and that’s it.”
“Did he ask who you were with?” It was essential that the presence of the STU Team leave no ripples upon the local waters.
“He asked if we were SEALs.”
“What did you say?”
“I gave him the old ‘I’d love to tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’ line. He laughed and then he took off, and that’s the last we’ve seen of anybody from the Navy—or anyone else, for that matter.”
The Navy’s long-haired and civilian-attired counter-terrorist SEAL team was based fifteen miles northeast of the auxiliary landing field on the Fleet Combat Training Center at Dam Neck, right on the Atlantic. This unit had been commissioned in 1980 as SEAL Team Six, and had been renamed the “Development Group” in the 1990s in a rather lame attempt to disguise its identity and its mission.
Many clandestine and covert units gave themselves generic-sounding bureaucratic names as camouflage, much as Malvone had done in naming the Special Training Unit. One of the STU’s commo techs had served with the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity, which was later renamed a half dozen times in an attempt to hide between Pentagon cracks. In more recent years, even such nondescript bureaucratic names had given way to entirely classified nomenclature. These classified units, when they were known of at all by outsiders, were referred to by informal tags such as “Gray Wolf” and “Lincoln Gold.” When their true unit names made it into the press, their names were changed, and the very existence of the units was denied once again.
Along with the propensity for classified government units to turn chameleon, had come a certain acceptance of the necessary murkiness of the sources of their funding, a fact which Malvone had noticed and exploited in his creation of the STU. In the aftermath of 9-11, even more special-operations funding spigots opened up, and Malvone used his Capitol Hill connections to ensure that a good-sized piece of this invisible financial pipeline was directed his way. In the atmosphere of secrecy and compartmentalization prevalent after 9-11, Malvone was able to shield the total amounts and sources of his funding even from his own nominal chain of command within the ATF and the Justice Department.
And the fruit of all of his bureaucratic cunning was that today he had his own domestic special operations unit, answering virtually only to himself, operating as he had envisioned it operating, and all with the President’s knowledge and complete blessing.
STU operational commander Bob Bullard met up with them as they walked into the nearest of the two large hangars. The fifty-foot high overlapping sliding panel doors had rusted into place in their tracks at each side, leaving the hangar permanently open for a hundred feet of its 150-foot width. Inside were five long trailers, lined up with their ends facing the hangar opening. They were generic white-painted government models similar to mobile homes, the plain vanilla types which were sent by FEMA to disaster areas for emergency housing and services. In recent years the sixty-foot trailers had intermittently provided temporary quarters for soldiers, spooks, SEALs and spies.
“Hey, Wally, welcome to STUville,” said the hatchet-faced Bob Bullard, smiling for a change. “The vehicles are all stashed in the other hangar. In here we’ve got two barracks trailers full of bunk beds, a classroom trailer for briefings, a kitchen and chow-hall trailer, and one trailer with bathrooms and showers. All the comforts of home.”
“STUville…I like it,” said Malvone. “Home away from home. And I couldn’t see anything from the air, just a couple of the guys outside walking around. The hangars are perfect, it’s a great setup.”
“Yep, and next to the hangars we’ve got a couple of smaller buildings for offices, secure storage, whatever we need. Club Fed it’s not, but it’ll do,” added Bullard.
“Well the important thing is keeping operational security, and this place looks about as secure as anyplace we could ever find. Is everybody here yet?”
“Yeah Wally, the last of ‘em are just rolling in now, you must have seen the motor home from the air. It’s kind of confusing; the last turns to get in here don’t match the map. But what the hell, even that’s good for opsec.” As Bullard spoke the thirty foot Winnebago which contained the bulk of the STU’s computer and communications capability rolled around the front of the other hangar to the west and parked just outside of it, followed by the blue van which disappeared inside the hangar.
“All right then,” said Malvone, “muster the troops in the briefing trailer in ten minutes. Operators and support pukes. Everybody. We’ve already got a short-fuse real-world mission, and that’s no bullshit.”
****
Just after four PM, when the sun was still high enough to make the day a hot one, they anchored Guajira in twenty feet of water inside the mouth of the Nansemond River.
All afternoon, Ranya had been learning a new vocabulary in the language of sailing. She learned that there were no ropes aboard Guajira, only lines, and each line had a precise name to match its location and function. There were sheets and halyards, vangs and preventers, outhauls and downhauls and a dozen more. She learned about cam-cleats and jammers, traveler tracks and Harken cars and two-speed Lewmar winches.
They practiced tacking and gibing and running and reaching and beating to windward. She learned what the numbered red and green buoys signified, she learned about cans and nuns and channel markers. Very importantly, she learned that while all of the water of the Chesapeake Bay looked the same greenish brown from shore to shore, only certain parts of it were deep enough for Guajira’s seven-foot-deep keel. All afternoon they sailed back and forth across Hampton Roads and the lower bay, using Guajira’s mainsail alone. The area forward of the mast would remain bare until Brad’s sail maker finished his new genoa jib.
She was thankful for this nautical education, to occupy her mind. It gave her a reason to stop her from constantly scanning the sky for helicopters (of which there were many in this Navy town) and to prevent her from being tormented by each approaching Coast Guard cutter and patrol boat. They were sailing within a few miles of the largest naval base on the entire planet, and security was thick and omnipresent.
Any of the helicopters and patrol boats that she saw could even at that moment be receiving the word, that the prime suspect in the Sanderson assassination was named Ranya Bardiwell, and that she had been seen leaving Portsmouth on a sailboat named Guajira. She didn’t think that she had made a mistake; she didn’t think that she had left any clues or forensic evidence behind. But she also knew that she could very well have inadvertently done so, starting with her computer searches in the ODU library, or perhaps yesterday with her pretext phone call to Sanderson’s office in Richmond.
So she was content to fill her mind with the world of sailing and navigation. All day, in the boatyard and while sailing, they had listened only to music CDs. Ranya had not heard a single news bulletin since Friday evening. She didn’t underestimate the police or the FBI, and she could only hope that even now they were not faxing around blown-up college yearbook pictures of her face. But despite her fears, she was glad she’d done it, proud that she’d tracked him down despite his security, found the smarmy self-righteous bastard, and killed him. She had fears for herself, but no regrets for what she had done.
When they decided they had had enough of sailing, they headed for a spot which Brad had previously marked on his chart as an ideal temporary anchorage. He had seen it Monday while motoring down the Nansemond to the James River, on his way to the boatyard. The mouth of the Nansemond was a mile wide where they dropped the hook; it was open only to the northeast with the point of Newport News six miles away on the distant horizon. The other three sides of the little bay were well-protected by bluffs, with stately mansions scattered along their green fields and oak studded crests. The wind from the west meant that the anchorage area was calm and sheltered, and Guajira rode easily at anchor without rolling or pitching.
Infrequently, a ski boat or wave runner passed within a few hundred yards of them, but by and large they possessed their own broad expanse of water, under a nearly cloudless sky on that Indian summer Saturday afternoon. The wind had died under the cover of the surrounding slopes, and Brad had stripped down to a pair of blue swim trunks. They were a little tight on him, Ranya thought, not that she was disappointed… He had wide shoulders and a nice back, which narrowed where it disappeared beneath his blue shorts, and like her own, his skin was not marred by so much as a single tattoo.
She sat across from him on the other side of the cockpit, watching him while he dug under the lifted-up starboard cockpit seat into the locker below. Finally he pulled out a net bag with a mask and snorkel and fins in it, and dropped the hinged cockpit seat back down. The snorkel was not attached to the mask, and he left it in the yellow mesh bag.
“I need to go down and see how the anchor’s set. I’ve never used this kind before. It’s called a Delta, and it’s supposed to be good for all kinds of bottoms. Anchors might not seem very exciting, but when the wind’s howling at midnight a good anchor is worth its weight in gold, and a bad anchor can get you killed, or make you lose your boat.” He was adjusting the clear silicone strap on the mask while he spoke. “So I really want to see how this one sets. I need to know how well it works, it should be soft mud here. Are you coming in? The water’s nice and warm.”
Ranya was still wearing the pastel green hospital scrubs that he’d lent her, with the pant legs rolled up. “Sure I’d love to, if you don’t mind me looking like Old Mother Hubbard going for a swim in about 1905.” They were now sitting across from each other on opposite cushioned cockpit benches, their toes and knees just occasionally brushing, their eyes and smiles sparkling at one another. The backs of the cockpit seats rose up almost to their shoulder heights, and the sheet handling winches that were bolted on top lent them even more privacy from any passing boats.
Earlier Brad had put in a mix of beach and summer music CDs, and following Jimmy Buffet, the Beach Boys were singing about an island off the Florida Keys, a place called Kokomo, where you wanted to go to get away from it all. Ranya was sipping a rum and coke from a glass tumbler, looking into Brad’s blue eyes, imagining that they were anchored off of one of the islands spoken of in the song: Aruba, Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas... It was a dream that Brad was going to live.
“You can go swimming in the scrubs if you want, but I think I might have something a little better in the bathing suit department.” Brad got up and disappeared below, and in a few moments he returned, holding a small clear plastic bag containing a bit of folded red fabric, which he handed to Ranya.
“Oh, and what have we here, Mr. Fallon?” She tore open the sealed bag. “Your basic one-size-fits-all spandex bikini, that you just happened to have on board? Well, aren’t you full of surprises! You’re just like a Boy Scout, aren’t you, always prepared?” She was trying to sound like she was scolding him, as if she somehow disapproved of his forethought in purchasing a woman’s swim suit, but she was laughing too hard. “And just how many bikinis DO you have on board? Well I guess I should be honored to be the lucky girl to try it on first.” She eyed a sticker on the clear plastic bag: “Hmm…50% off clearance sale—good job, Brad, there’s hope for you yet. So was this going to be a present for some lucky island girl?” Ranya held the red triangle-top up over the green scrubs, teasing him.
Brad was blushing and grinning at the same time. “You never know who might decide to come sailing without bringing along a bathing suit… like today. It’s sort of like having a new toothbrush on board for an unexpected guest.”
“And do you have a new toothbrush on board too? For an unexpected guest?”
He paused, not removing his eyes from her. “…Of course…”
She stood up and ‘accidentally’ brushed the shimmering red fabric across Brad’s face as she slid past him and went below. She was a little surprised, but glad at the same time, that he’d had the new suit. She wondered if he had more of them in different styles and sizes and colors, or only this one which seemed to be in her size, meaning that she was the size of girl he was hoping to meet in the islands? She wasn’t exactly huge in the boob department, rather nice she thought though, somewhere between a B and a C cup, depending on the bra.
Plenty of young men had certainly been interested in them since she had developed a figure at about age fifteen. She could never quite understand why, but she knew that she had been forced to remove the octopus-like hands of enough boys from her breasts on dates over the last few years to know there must be something magical about them. She certainly was aware that most guys developed some sort of spontaneous eye spasm when talking to her; their eyes tended to acquire an involuntary downward twitch. Men were such pigs, but she still loved them: crude behavior, rough edges and all. She understood that it was simply the way that they had been designed by God and nature.
She changed in the small second bedroom behind the galley, located half under the cockpit on the port side of the boat. It was a strangely shaped room, with the bottom of the cockpit dropping into it over the middle of the oddly truncated bed.
The green hospital scrubs and her underwear were quickly off and she dropped them on the bed, then she immediately stepped into the stretchy red bottom and pulled it up. It was going to be so embarrassing if her butt was too big for it! But it fit nicely; it was high cut on the sides, and had almost full coverage in back. Thank God he hadn’t given her a thong! She just wouldn’t have worn it. Not that she was totally against thongs, but for what it would have said about her, borrowing a thong! And at least I still have my summer tan, she thought.
The simple wireless triangle top was easier, she tied it together and spun it around, then tied the strings up behind her neck, and she was glad to see that she filled it out more than adequately. She had been briefly terrified that he might have inadvertently given her some gargantuan DD-sized top. She would not have been able to show herself on deck if there had been droopy folds of excess fabric, which her breasts were too tiny to fill out! But she did fill the two soft red triangles, and quite nicely, as she admired herself from different angles, in the small mirror in the micro-sized toilet compartment next to the bed.
Ranya’s big department store shopping bag, with the Tennyson pistol, her .45 and her gray track suit was wedged in the back corner of the bed where she had put it before they left the boatyard. She took out her fanny pack, found her brush, pulled the rubber band out from around her pony tail and quickly brushed out her shoulder length brown hair. She checked her face closely in the mirror, and retrieved the tube of lip gloss from her bag. She applied it looking in the mirror again, and rolled her lips together, satisfied with the subtle improvement. She considered wrapping a towel modestly around her hips, but discarded the idea, and at last she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and climbed up the teak companionway ladder and back into the sun-drenched cockpit.
Ranya tried to be casual and blasé, she was ready to feel Brad’s eyes devouring her, but he played it cool and tried not to look below her neck, at least not too obviously…
He said, “I don’t have another mask, but I’ve got some swim goggles, if you want to try them. I thought you might like to see what Guajira looks like underneath.”
“Sure, I’ll use your goggles, I’m pretty used to them. I usually swim laps a few times a week at school to stay in shape. You know, the lifeguard thing.”
“Let me get some towels and fill the sun shower before we go in.”
“What’s a sun shower?”
“This thing.” While Ranya was below Brad had pulled a square vinyl bag with a spray nozzle on the end of a hose from the cockpit locker. “It’s clear on one side, and black on the other, so the sun heats it up pretty fast. You use it to rinse the salt water off.” Brad went below and filled it with a few gallons of water from the galley sink, and then he laid it in the sun on the outside of the cockpit between the winches and the toe-rail along the edge of the deck. Ranya appreciated that he had waited until she had changed and come back up to the cockpit, before he went below to the galley. He wasn’t taking liberties; he was a gentleman…so far. She adjusted the strap on the goggles and pushed the two black-tinted lens caps tightly down over her eyes.
“I’ll race you,” she said.
“What?”
“I’ll race you to the anchor.” She gestured to the digital depth display inset above the engine instrument panel, to the right of the companionway hatch. “We’re in twenty feet of water. You put out about seventy feet of rope and thirty feet of chain, that’s what you said, and I’ll race you to the anchor.” With that she sprang out of the cockpit past him to the starboard side of the Guajira’s deck, and dived over the lifelines and into the water. As soon as she surfaced she began a fast free-style stroke forward along the side of the boat.
Brad grabbed his mask and ran up the side deck all the way to Guajira’s bow, scrambled onto the stainless steel bow pulpit which wrapped around in front of the forestay, and dived far out ahead into the water. When he surfaced he pulled on his mask, he was already a little ahead of Ranya after his running forty-foot short cut. The thick white nylon anchor line leading from Guajira’s bow disappeared into the water at an angle. As Ranya swam past him, he took a few deep breaths and surface dived, grabbing the rope and pulling himself along it hand over hand.
On the surface Ranya kept on going with her fast free-style, she lost sight of the white rope halfway out to the anchor when it disappeared into the muddy bottom, but she could see the path it cut by the disturbed silty water above it. She thought that she was comfortably ahead of Brad, but then she saw him below her, pulling himself out along the rope much faster than she could swim on the surface! No fair!
He’s cheating again, she thought. She took a deep breath and surface-dived down after him, her ears squeezing with pressure as she passed ten feet, so she did a quick nose blow to equalize pressure. He was already slightly ahead of her, so she grabbed the only “handle” she could find, the back of his blue swim trunks, and yanked them hard, pulling him in surprise off of the anchor line lying along the muddy bottom.
He spun around, shocked to see her right behind him, and while he was turned away from the rope she kicked past him, pushing his shoulder backward with her foot. She reached for where the anchor line was shackled to the chain, grabbed it and pulled herself through water and silt hand-over-hand the last thirty feet to the anchor, with Brad in hot pursuit. He tried to grasp her by her ankle, but she easily wrenched her foot free.
She touched the gray anchor first; it was buried like a plow in the mud except for the tops of its flukes. She held on until he touched it a second later, they were looking at one another through swirling clouds of silt. The water was glittering all around them as the sunlight pierced down into the depths and turned the particles to radiant gold dust.
They broke the surface together, gasping in lungs-full of air, their legs kicking to hold them up, touching at many points, their bodies close. Brad pulled his mask back up onto his forehead and said, “That was cheating, no fair pulling down bathing suits.”
“Oh, you’re a sore loser, are you? You cheated first, running up and diving off the bow.”
Brad lunged for Ranya’s hips and grabbed the sides of her bikini bottom, Ranya tried to pull away his wrists, but they were too thick and slippery in the water, so she reached across to tickle his sides instead. But he didn’t yank her swimsuit down, and the next thing Ranya knew their arms were around each other, they were laughing like children, grinning toothy smiles at one another, their wet noses touching, knees and legs and feet treading water and bumping together clumsily. Then they were kissing, submerging when they stopped treading water in their embrace, kicking their way back up, and all the while laughing, and kissing.
Wordlessly they found a slow rhythm of gently kicking with their legs that kept them at equilibrium, with just their chins above the water. They stopped laughing altogether as they kissed more deeply.
“Let’s go back to the boat,” she suggested softly into his ear.
They swam back together, touching, and at Guajira’s stern Brad pulled a rope handle and the boat’s hinged swim ladder flipped down into the water. He let her go up first, following closely behind her, the water streaming off her smooth skin in the warm sunshine as she climbed aboard and pulled off her goggles.
She sat back down on the cushioned cockpit seat, and Brad sat across from her, their knees and toes touching. They were still catching their breaths from their race, their eyes and noses and lips only bare inches apart. Brad’s eyes were so blue, it was like looking through to the sky. “You’re a pretty good kisser…” she said, brushing her nose over his.
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
“What do you think we should…do about it?” she asked, leaning even closer to him, her hands on the blue seat cushion beside her hips, her bare knees demurely together, her face tilted upward toward his. A scarcely known feeling of animal passion was sweeping through her with waves of electric shivers. The only other times she had felt anything approaching this wild abandon she had been consciously forcing herself to hold back from the edge. Today she felt like she was running for the abyss with something like desperation. This time she was not going to stop.
Brad placed his hands gently on each side of her face, then slid his fingers behind her head and neck under her wet hair and drew her lips to his. Ranya’s eyes fluttered closed as her lips parted and met his, then his tongue found hers and this time they didn’t have to tread water, this time they didn’t need to come up for air.
She felt something entirely new taking over her will, she felt like a helpless but willing witness as this strange new Ranya pushed Brad onto his back on the long blue cockpit cushion, kissing his face and his neck, her knees astride him, grinding herself franticly against his sudden hardness, then he was pulling aside her red bikini top and kissing her right…there…
****
It never hurt her, not for even one second, it was pure sweet pleasure for Ranya from his first exquisite invasion to their all-too-swift first climax. She fell asleep in the sunshine, rising and falling on his chest, her face buried in his neck, breathing him in, capturing his scent forever.
****
The sun was much lower in the sky above the western bluffs when they finally disentangled. Brad hung the sun shower from the mainsail boom above the cockpit, and gently washed every inch of her salty-tasting tan skin and hair with coconut-scented shampoo, then he rinsed her with the warm fresh water, and she blissfully returned the favor.
After they dried each other off with the sun-baked towels, Brad led her more than willingly by her hand down below and forward to his triangle-shaped V-berth in the bow. He made love to her again, his face above hers this time, their eyes wide open, drinking in each trembling reaction, each breath interrupted by a new stab of pleasure.
Within the confines of his small forward compartment, with its oddly slanted hull-side walls and its low ceiling, Ranya discovered that she could place her feet and legs in countless positions. But when he began to move steadily and increasingly deeply, she could only clutch her arms and legs around his back and hold on for dear life as waves of ecstasy rolled and crashed through her again and again.
When they finished his face lay over her shoulder, his lips gently kissing her neck. She was looking up through the open foredeck hatch at wisps of high stratus clouds, which were painted in stripes across a sky which had never been so blue, because now it was the color of Brad’s eyes.
****
A while later she awakened, and a comforter was pulled over them. She was snuggled against his side with her leg over his, and her warm cheek pressed against his beating heart. Turning her head slightly, she could see the three bright stars of Orion’s belt and a million others, through the open deck hatch above them. The constellation was slowly wheeling first clockwise, and then back, as Guajira swung on its anchor.
So much had happened in one day. She wondered how it came to be that she had killed a man, and at long last she had made love to a man, and both on exactly the same day, and that she had killed first. And both inconceivable events had happened precisely one week to the day after the one other man that she had loved had been killed. Killed by agents of the man who she had then killed in return. How unlikely was that? How often do things like that happen?
Three stars on Orion’s belt: one for her father, one for Sanderson, one for Brad. Then falling in love with the man you met on the day you found your father…that terrible Saturday. And making love for the very first time with him, on the same day that you took another man’s life.
How can this not be fate? How could there not be some greater, hidden purpose being served? Or were the gods merely toying with her idly, for their amusement?
She thought of her father’s gifts, and of his hidden arms cache. The disassembled Tennyson Champion sniper pistol was still wrapped in her gray track suit and hidden back in the aft cabin. The Tennyson was now accompanied by her loaded .45 pistol, another gift from her father. A graduation gift…if he only knew. Or did he know? Could he know? Even after his death her father was playing a role in this drama, handing her the tools she needed to find justice.
She considered how easily she could slip out from Brad’s bed and give the Tennyson sniper pistol the deep-blue goodbye. She could just throw the pieces far out over the side, where they would drop through the water and sink into the soft river mud and disappear forever. She could be done with it, and put Sanderson’s murder safely behind her. After a minute’s deliberation she dismissed the idea, because she knew she was not yet finished with her mission.
Ranya wished that she could discuss all of her dark secrets with Brad, but she knew she could never tell him what she had done, at dawn across the water from the golf course. Telling him would draw him in as a conspirator, and it was already bad enough that she had left the murder scene and come to his boat with the killing weapon. She wondered what keeping the secret bottled inside of her would do to her soul, or if there even was such an ethereal entity within her. She had committed the very worst of all the sins, and she could never erase that black stain.
Looking up at the stars turning in the sky above the open deck hatch she thought, I’m sorry Mother; I didn’t wait until I was married…
But coming after the mortal sin of murder, that broken vow seemed much less important now.
She had not even told Brad that she was a virgin, and she had not told him that she was not on birth control, which must have been Brad’s reasonable assumption about a twenty-one-year-old college girl. Well, neither of them had been asking any questions earlier in the cockpit… And anyway, she had practically assaulted him…so whatever happened, it was her fault.
Staring up at the three bright stars of Orion’s belt, one star for each man, Ranya pondered the crushing realization that in one week she had become an orphan, a murderess, and a tramp.