The Mind Pirates Page 9
“Whose thoughts and impressions are you receiving?” Zedekiah Snow wanted to know.
Meanwhile, I was trying to talk some sense to that loony captain before he got us all killed, all the while gaining new insight into where the stereotypical sailor got his language.
“Uh . . . angry, scolding, kind of know-it-all . . .” said Tank. “Big words . . . whoa! Bad words, too.” He grinned with recognition. “It’s the professor.”
Thatch grabbed me. “Take the wheel.”
Horrors! The man was daffy! “I will do no such thing!”
“Trust your captain!” He pulled me over and put my hands on the wheel. “She likes to bear away to starboard without her sails. Make her mind. Circle to the right of that rock sticking up, just to the right of Bindy’s, you see it?”
I was holding the reins of a bucking monster, fighting for control. I nodded as if we were having a reasonable conversation.
“Stay clear of it, then duck behind the island and into the channel. Scalarag’s giving you full throttle.”
“Full—?!”
“Whoa!” Tank laughed. “He is scared poop-less! Sorry . . .”
The captain raised his spyglass to his eye. “Aye, it’s Ling’s men, all right. They won’t let us get away, no way in heaven or hell.” He set the spyglass aside and headed for the companion, leaving me alone at the wheel.
“What are you going to do?” I hollered over my shoulder, my hands welded to the wheel.
“The right thing, if God be my Judge” was all he said as he went down the stairs to his quarters.
The rock to the right of Bindy’s Mayday was a black, jagged tooth, a perfect hull opener. I veered farther to the right to be sure we missed it, then cut a gradual turn to port to head around the island. Now I could see another island beyond this one, and between them, a narrow channel. I steered for the channel and, looking back, saw the Riqueza had veered to port to circle the island from the other direction.
They were going to head us off.
Zedekiah Snow activated another computer, another program, and a real time map of the Caribbean appeared with a tiny blip representing the location of the Reader. “Well, folks, there it is.”
Tank remained in the chair, eyes closed, experiencing the lurching and dashing of the Predator, the wind in my face, the salt spray in my eyes, the roar of the wind in the rigging—and the Riqueza rounding the other end of the island to intercept us. “He’s not having fun. There’s something really heavy going down.”
Brenda stood. “We’ve got to get down there!”
Tank pulled the earring away from his head, blinked to get his own senses back, and said, “Andi’s grandpa! He’s got a jet or a chopper—probably has a boat, too!”
Brenda grabbed her cell phone.
“So you’ve found your friends, whoever they be?”
Andi was startled to hear the captain’s voice behind her, but not alarmed. By now it was clear the captain knew it all: the inquiry from another system, the access code, her responding, and of course her fitting me with a Reader scarf to send a signal to whoever it was. “I think it’s them.”
The captain stepped up and looked over her shoulder. “Look at the tag on the inquiry. You’ve been queried by someone in Florida.” He laughed. “And I can name that party in one guess: Zedekiah Snow! Your friends are in good hands. Come to think of it, so are you! Be assured, lass, they know where you are. Here.” He offered her an inflatable life vest.
The way the ship was rocking and pounding, the vest seemed to her an entirely good idea. She put it on.
“Now I need you topside.”
“For you, Professor” came the captain’s voice over the roar of the wind.
The captain had returned with Andi and was offering an inflatable life vest. As he took the wheel, I slipped on the vest and clipped it tight.
“Ah!” he laughed, sighting the Riqueza at the far end of the channel and closing fast. “Piel’s thinking hasn’t changed. He’s at the helm of that boat with Ling at his side, no doubt, and doing what I thought! So how’s your honor, professor? How’s your truth?”
The face I made must have been hideous. “I fail to see how that pertains to our situation.”
The captain grinned, which I did not find amusing. “So we never talked about it, or you weren’t listening? It has all come down to the rules, and it’s time to face it: Wherever it comes from, we’ll need a little honor . . . in our situation.”
“I would prefer a level head and better driving.”
“Oh, would you now?”
He reached for the engine telegraph and signaled Scalarag to ease the engines back to Dead Slow Ahead, the first sane choice he’d made thus far, in my estimation. The Predator slowed, although I noticed the Riqueza did not.
“Well,” I started to say, still eyeing the Riqueza, “a reasonable first step—”
Andi screamed. I turned just in time to see the captain make his way to the rail, holding her aloft as she kicked and struggled.
What—?
No! I ran, with no other thought than to get her out of his hands.
Too late! I reached the railing only to see her splash into the waves. Her life vest triggered and inflated, bearing her back to the surface where she splashed helplessly, the moving ship leaving her in its wake.
I was about to leap in after her when something bumped me. “I suppose you’ll be wanting this?” said the captain.
He was offering me a bulky package, rather heavy. The label read Life Raft. With no hesitation I clutched the package to my chest, swung my legs over the rail, and dropped into the sea.
I was still beneath the surface, eyes shut in a grimace and breath held, when the water triggered my life vest and the raft and they inflated, the life vest hugging me as I popped to the surface and the life raft unfolding and forming within my reach. I grabbed on and clambered in, blinking the sting of salt from my eyes as I searched the expansive waters for Andi.
There! I could see the yellow flotation around her neck, the red of her hair. She was so distant, so minuscule, bobbing, intermittently vanishing between the swells. But she was waving. She was safe.
The roar of the Predator, again at full throttle, was fading in the distance. I turned to see Thatch looking back and giving a farewell wave, satisfied, no doubt, that we would be all right. Then he looked ahead, closing on the Riqueza as if he fully intended to ram her.
Which, I still marvel to report, he did. I suppose Piel, at the helm of the Riqueza, expected him to turn tail and run, or perhaps shoot it out, or surrender, being so outgunned. But Thatch would not turn away, nor would he slow down. With cunning and skill, he even anticipated every evasive maneuver the Riqueza made, staying in her path no matter what she did.
First came the ball of fire and the flying debris—lumber, sails, canvas, and rigging exploding skyward—and then, a second or two later, the roar and shock of the explosion. I was transfixed. Stunned.
“Hey!” Andi called. She was kicking and paddling my way.
I assembled a plastic oar that came with the life raft and paddled toward her, all the while staring over my shoulder, trying to fathom what I’d just seen, even when nothing remained but steaming embers on the water.
Epilogue
With both of us paddling the life raft, Andi and I easily made the sandy beach of Bindy’s Mayday, and it was the need to de-pressurize, I imagine, to make some sense of all that had happened, that launched us back into the discussion we started on the Barbee Jay but never finished: Was there an ultimate truth and therefore a basis for right and wrong, and was the existence of God necessary for such a truth to exist? What happened aboard the Predator—everything from our being kidnapped to the horrendous destruction we barely avoided in the channel—amounted to a practical experiment. The devil was in the data, of course, and our differing interpretations. As a result, three hours passed as mere minutes, the intensity of our debate broken only by the sound of an approaching airplane.
It was the nickname given to her grandfather’s floatplane. We could see Tank, Brenda, and Daniel waving from the plane’s windows as it set down in the channel like a big aluminum goose.
I thought it best to wrap up our discussion before we rowed out to meet it. I granted her the possibility—since it brought her comfort—that nature, physics, and morality could make sense because there was a Superior Mind behind it all; she granted me the fact that, despite the danger and with no thought of what a supposed God might require, I still jumped into the sea to save her.
As for the captain . . . though I assumed he’d acted upon a spark of good in his own nature, Andi preferred to think our being there may have fanned that spark to life. Well . . . either way, I suppose.
But most of all, I summarized feelings I felt no need to explain. “All things considered,” I said to my assistant, “I am boundlessly glad and relieved that you’re safe.”
She smiled and nodded. “Same here.”
I’ll close my recounting of the tale with a certainty and an uncertainty.
The certainty: Zedekiah Snow was a decent fellow—at least, as one such as myself might measure such a quality as “decent”—and knew his own technology well enough to isolate memories and impressions in any brain that were not native to that brain. In Andi’s case, he quickly identified the memories and impressions of Ben Cardiff and neutralized them in a two-second treatment. Andi is well again, no longer plagued by any past tampering with her mind.
The uncertainty: While we were lifting off from the channel, we flew over the blackened debris where the two ships had collided and saw on the nearest shore a familiar little craft: the Predator’s wooden boat that first carried Andi and I to the ship. It couldn’t have gotten there unless someone had rowed it. Had the captain granted Scalarag a dismissal to safety as he had granted us? To add to that, the ships were quite a distance away, too far to tell if Captain Horatio Thatch was still on board when they exploded.
At any rate, to our knowledge, neither man has ever been found . . . and perhaps that was the whole intention.
A strange thing, honor. I’m sure more discussions will follow.
Fair winds.
Selected Books by Frank Peretti
Illusion: A Novel
This Present Darkness
Piercing the Darkness
The Oath
Prophet
Tilly
The Visitation
Monster
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