He had been almost a mile offshore already and still swimming hard by the time their dinghy rounded the point. They had searched the coastline for almost an hour, but they never turned around, looked behind, never figured he’d head out to deep water.

He turned to face the woman. She looked to be in her early thirties, maybe five foot five, and with a body that showed she worked out often. But there was something different about her, too, like a cool air of competence.

“Where you headed?” he asked her.

“The capital, Pointe-à-Pitre.” She’d been looking at him with a guarded stare since he’d let out that little laugh, but now she pointed at the small GPS chart plotter affixed above her compass. “It’s a little over thirty miles. I can drop you off in town once I clear customs and immigration.”

“I sure would appreciate that, Miz Maggie.” After all the years he’d spent on the Outer Banks, he could imitate their southern speech and manners. Given that he hadn’t a stitch of clothing, there was little else he could use as a disguise. “And after you clear in, where you headed?”

She engaged the autopilot, set her course, and then climbed back down the companionway. He could see her wariness. She didn’t trust him. Smart woman.

“The Saintes, probably, for a day or two,” she said. “It’s where most cruising boats go. And please, it’s just Riley.”

He nodded, then looked back at the island. There was no sign of the boat or the men. For now.

“Don’t know many women who go by their last names. Especially when they got such a nice name as Miz Maggie Magee.”

The woman had disappeared into her cabin and she didn’t respond. In her absence, he checked out her boat. He didn’t know much about sailing, but he knew boats well enough. She kept a tidy ship. A handheld VHF radio sat in a bracket within reach of the helm, she had jack lines for securing her safety harness, and a pod of navigational instruments surrounded the helm. Up on the foredeck, a canister containing an inflatable life raft was bolted to the deck. From the water, as her boat approached, he had noticed the radar, wind generator, and the insignia on the mainsail: a large letter C with the number forty.

She reappeared in the companionway with a first aid kit and was about to hand him the box when she paused, set the box down and took out the bandages and a tube of antibiotic cream. She tossed them to him.

“For your hands and feet,” she said.

“Thanks.” He knew what she was thinking. She didn’t want to give him the box because it contained sharp implements.  She was very savvy for a civilian. Surely, they wouldn’t have thought ahead and sent a woman? No, they were good, but not that good. Besides, his instinct told him she was not one of them.

When he rested his ankle across his knee, he saw the sole of his foot was criss-crossed with white, puckered lacerations. Most of the bleeding had stopped, but his feet still left faint pink footprints on her white decks. It stung like hell when he massaged the cream into the cuts. He began to wrap his foot with the white gauze bandage. Walking was going to be a bitch for a while.

She was standing on the companionway ladder, her elbows resting on either side of the hatch, watching him.

“What kind of boat is this?”

“A Caliber 40.”

“That’s a lot of boat for one person to handle.”

“Yeah.”

“Must be nice just sailing around the Caribbean without a care in the world.”

“Yeah, must be.”

She turned to look across the water toward the point they were approaching. She crossed to the far side of the cockpit and began pulling on one rope and easing out another. The sail at the front of the boat unrolled like a window shade, and the boat leaned over a little. They picked up speed.

“Sailboats don’t go very fast, do they?”

“Nope.”

“Four hours, you said?”

“Yup.”

“Guess you’d never outrun anybody on a boat like this.”

She turned and looked him straight on, no blinking, no fear. “You don’t like the speed we’re making,” she said, “you could swim instead. I’d be happy to drop you off right here.”

“Seems you really don’t want to talk to me, do you?”

“Nope.”

He woke with a start. He had not intended to fall asleep, but when he stretched out on the foredeck with the sun warming his face and the trade wind breeze riffling his hair, he had started again trying to figure out where he had gone wrong in his calculations. He thought he had deciphered the text correctly, but if so, he should have found the wreck by now. Something wasn’t right, he’d thought. And that was the last thing he remembered.

He sat up and looked past the bow. He massaged the muscles at the back of his neck and rotated his head around in a circle.

The tall buildings of the capital city of Guadeloupe lay a few miles ahead, spread out against the backdrop of the lush green highlands of Basse Terre on one side, the rambling cane fields of Grande Terre on the other. If one looked at the chart of this island, its shape resembled a butterfly, and Pointe-à-Pitre, a combination of bustling commercial port structures and crumbling colonial architecture, lay on the body where the wings joined. He had thought the place was a dingy, dirty backwater at first, but in the months he and his mate Theo had spent around the island, he’d grown to like the city with its combination of French and Creole cultures. Off to the east stood the pink and white hotels and condos on the beach at Le Gosier, the resort the European tourists flocked to by the thousands. Few Americans visited the island of Guadeloupe at all, and Cole had decided that was one of the place’s principal charms.

When he glanced aft, he saw the woman, Riley, was sitting behind the wheel holding the binoculars in front of her face. Her short-cropped auburn hair accentuated her long, graceful neck, and the white T-shirt she wore fit tight enough to show the swell of her breasts above the flat belly. Her hips were slender, almost boyish, and the skin of her upper arms was carved around her taut biceps.  As the boat rolled and a shaft of sunlight struck her hair, he noticed fiery streaks of gold. She was a fine-looking woman to be out here all alone. After watching the way she handled herself and her boat, though, he suspected she was pretty damn good at protecting herself.

In the shadow of the binoculars, he saw her lips moving. She was talking to herself, and he decided he liked that. Maybe she wasn’t quite the hard-ass she was pretending to be.

Off in the distance, behind her, he saw a large white sportfisherman pushing a big wave and churning toward them at nearly twenty knots. The man who stood on the side deck looked familiar, even at this distance. He hoped he was wrong, but there weren’t many people as funny-looking as this dude. Cole hobbled back to the cockpit on his bandaged feet and slid onto one of the cockpit cushions. He picked up the binoculars from the seat where she had just set them down, and he focused on the big fishing boat. It was him. Things were starting to make sense. Did they know he was aboard the woman’s boat? No way. Damn!

CHAPTER EIGHT

The harbor at Pointe-à-Pitre

  March 25, 2008

  3:35 p.m.

Riley did not like having this stranger down alone inside her boat, but after they had been motoring for over four hours, when he’d asked to use the head, she couldn’t refuse him.

Bonefish was passing the entrance buoy at the start of the long channel leading into the harbor off the capital city when a big Bertram sportfishing boat with gleaming stainless steel rails and the name Fish n’ Chicks in gold letters on her transom cruised past at twenty knots throwing a monstrous wake. She’d wondered at first if it had been the same boat she’d seen anchored that morning, but the Yank fish boats all looked pretty much the same. The man on the bridge deck had long hair under a baseball cap pulled low on his head. She figured him for a mechanic taking the owner’s boat out for a sea trial. Another weird character with a white Afro and dressed all in white stood on the side deck holding tight to a railing, looking like a seasick ghost.