8 SURVIVAL AT SEA

The Pacific Ocean

Somewhere off the coast of northwestern Costa Rica

May 16

2130 hours

The five-story drop into the water was terrifying, but it wasn’t even close to the worst part of being thrown overboard.

I had fallen from great heights into water surprisingly often in my brief time as a spy, so I knew how to plummet in the safest way possible. I assumed the pencil position, keeping my arms to my sides and holding my legs together, and thus plunged straight into the water like a needle going through a piece of fabric, rather than painfully thwacking into the surface. Still, I got a great deal of seawater up my nose, and the ocean was shockingly cold.

And yet, this also wasn’t the worst part.

Since I had been dropped off the stern, I landed dangerously close to the three enormous propellers that drove the Emperor of the Seas. Each was the size of a house and spun rapidly, churning the ocean and creating turbulent vortexes of water. My pencil position had prevented me from fracturing every bone in my body on the ocean’s surface, but it also sent me slicing down deep into the sea, where I was immediately caught in the maelstrom behind the propellers. In the cold, dark water, I was spun wildly, tossed about, nearly torn apart by dozens of currents acting at once upon me—and then finally sucked right toward the blades of the propellers themselves. I was nearly diced like a carrot in a food processor, but at the last second, a gyre of water yanked me upward and spit me out on the surface, racked with pain and coughing up salt water.

This still wasn’t the worst part.

When you are aboard a giant cruise ship, it’s hard to get a good idea of how fast they move. But when you are in the water behind a giant cruise ship, you have more perspective. The ships travel surprisingly fast for objects with the mass of the Empire State Building. The Emperor of the Seas was quickly leaving me behind in the ocean. The enormous, dark, incredibly deep ocean. Now that I was bobbing on the surface, I discovered that the waves were far bigger than they had appeared from the Promenade Deck. Each was at least ten feet high. Meanwhile, the coast of Central America was many miles away. I was already exhausted and aching after nearly being julienned by the propellers. I would have been lucky to swim the length of a swimming pool, let alone dozens of miles through choppy, shark-infested waters. And that was assuming that I could keep my bearings straight and not get turned around or dragged farther out to sea by currents.

There was nothing in my utility belt that I could use as a flotation device.

So the chances of my survival were slim. It was extremely likely that I was going to drown out in the ocean, all alone, and no one would ever see me again.

Or I was going to get eaten by a shark.

This was the worst part. The realization that I was doomed, and that my end wasn’t going to be sudden and merciful, but drawn out, dismal, and terrifying.

For a moment, I considered simply giving up. What was the point of struggling to go on? All I would succeed in doing was making the next few hours of my life miserable before I died. So why fight the inevitable? I could just stop trying, let the ocean suck me down into its depths, and have the whole horrible ordeal be over within only a few seconds.

But I didn’t do that.

Erica Hale wouldn’t have given up. And neither would Catherine. Or Mike. Alexander probably wouldn’t have given up either (although there was a good chance he might not have grasped how dire his situation was). Because giving up would be letting Murray Hill win. It wasn’t only my life at stake; when the forces of evil were at work, there were countless other lives at stake as well.

I had to at least try to survive.

The Emperor of the Seas was already disappearing from sight, getting smaller as it moved away and being blocked by the swells of the waves. I treaded water, fixing its location on the horizon and then looking up to the sky above. It was a crystal-clear night, allowing me to easily pick out the constellations. Since the ship was heading south, I could figure out which way east was. The constellation of Virgo hung in the sky in that direction.

So now I had my bearings. I started swimming toward Virgo, battling my way through the rolling waves.

It was only now that I realized I was still clutching my flashlight. Somehow, despite everything that had happened, I had kept a firm grip on it, as though some part of my subconscious felt I was going to need it. I was about to tuck it back into my utility belt when I heard someone calling my name.

I was quite sure this was a hallucination. Even though I had been lost at sea for only two minutes, my mind was obviously playing tricks on me. The ship was too far away for me to hear anyone yelling from the decks, and there was no way someone who knew me could be all the way out here in the middle of the ocean.

But then I heard it again. It was faint, almost swallowed up by the roar of the surf around me, but it was definitely my name. And this time, I recognized the voice.

Mike was yelling for me.

I treaded water once again, trying to keep my head as high above the surface as possible, desperately searching the dark expanse of the ocean for what was going on.

The beam of a searchlight swept over my head.

I looked toward the source and spotted a life raft bobbing on the waves.

My heart leapt, but I tried to restrain my emotions. There was still a great distance between myself and the small boat, and the night was pitch-black. Even though Mike was coming for me, the chances of him spotting me in the dark, churning expanse of ocean were minuscule. I couldn’t assume I was rescued yet. I had to do everything in my power to get Mike’s attention.

Which was where the flashlight would be useful.

I held it over my head, aimed it in the direction of the life raft, turned it on and started screaming at the top of my lungs.

The beam of light was thin but strong, and it was the only light out there on the ocean.

I was already exhausted, and the cold water was sapping my energy. The waves kept sucking me under. Every time I yelled, I got a mouthful of seawater. But I fought as hard as I could to scream and keep the flashlight high above my head.

It worked.

I knew Mike heard me, because the tone of his voice changed. It went from despairing to hopeful. And then the searchlight stopped sweeping the ocean and focused in my direction. Several times, it lit me up, only to bounce away due to the motion of the water. But it was definitely coming closer.

I hoped Mike could get to me before I drowned.

I struggled to keep afloat, well aware of how annoyingly ironic it would be to die when rescue was so close. But I could feel my strength flagging quickly. Every time the ocean pulled me down, it was harder and harder to get back up again. Twice, I saw the life raft come close, only to have Mike lose sight of me and head off in the wrong direction.

It was a big inflatable raft, designed for twenty-four people (I had learned this during safety training), although it appeared that Mike was the only one in it. It was propelled by a small outboard motor attached to the stern, which Mike had to steer manually, making it difficult for him to also search for me at the same time. Luckily, Mike had some skill with small boats, having spent many a summer day water-skiing on Chesapeake Bay. If our roles had been reversed, I would have been hopeless, but Mike had a possibility of success.

Each time he lost me, I managed to get his attention again, although the process was agonizingly slow. Minutes crept by, and with each one, the chances of my survival grew worse and worse. Even as the life raft got tantalizingly closer, I was losing stamina. My hands trembled from the cold and the effort of holding the flashlight. It was an ordeal to keep my head above water. And then, when the life raft was only a few yards away, I lost the light. A wave knocked it right out of my hand.

I tried to grab it as it sank into the depths, taking my eye off the ocean, and another wave caught me by surprise. It came over me from behind, swamping me and forcing me downward. I fought back toward the surface, and even got the tips of my fingers through, but then another surge came and shoved me down again.

I could feel darkness closing in all around me.

And then something splashed into the water beside me. Someone grabbed hold of my arm and yanked me back to the surface.

“You picked a heck of a time to go swimming,” Mike said.

While I was relieved to have been saved, I was also terrified that Mike had sacrificed his own life to save me. “Why aren’t you in the raft?” I screamed.

“Relax. I’m tied to it.” Mike pointed to the safety line he had wrapped around his torso.

Even so, I knew he had taken a big risk. Getting both of us back to the life raft on the bobbing seas wasn’t going to be easy, and I wasn’t going to be much help. But Mike did it. He hooked an arm around me and used the safety line to find his way back to the raft, which was idling in the waves. That took another five minutes, by which point I was completely spent. It was all I could do to cling to the gunwale while Mike clambered aboard and then hauled me in.

Then, while I lay there, sputtering and trembling like a landed fish, Mike wrapped me in emergency blankets and handed me a cup of fresh water, which I gulped down quickly, and some emergency rations, which turned out to be a chocolate bar. “You probably ought to get out of your wet clothes,” he advised.

He was right. So I shrugged them off and then clutched the blankets around me while Mike wrung several gallons of seawater out of my pirate clothes. My teeth were chattering so badly, I couldn’t even ask a question. All I could manage was, “H-h-h-how…?”

“Did I get here?” Mike finished. “I got worried when your radio went dead, so I came looking for you. Unfortunately, I went the wrong way, up toward the bow, so I lost valuable time. I got to the stern just in time to see Dane toss you overboard. If I’d gone that way first, I could have rescued you.”

“Or gotten yourself tossed over as well,” I tried to say, although it only came out as “Or-or-or-or-or…” through my chattering teeth.

“Anyhow, I called to Erica and Catherine, but I knew I couldn’t sit around waiting for them to come to the rescue. You didn’t have that kind of time. So I launched the life raft and jumped down into it.”

“By-by-by-by…”

“Myself? Yeah. I guess Erica was right: That safety presentation was important. It actually wasn’t too hard to launch this thing. The instructions were right on the side and easy to follow. They said the rafts were only supposed to be used in case of emergencies, but I figured this qualified.” Mike grinned at me in the night.

It was so dark, I could barely see him, even though he was only a few feet away from me. The Emperor of the Seas was now long gone, only a distant blip of light on the horizon. There was no way we could catch back up to it. The life raft’s motor wasn’t nearly big enough to race after a cruise ship.

The raft was built for a lot more people than us, so we had plenty of room. It was mostly made of a foul-smelling rubber—a rubber floor with inflatable rubber pontoons around the edges—but there was also a large box in the stern that held the emergency blankets, food rations, and drinking water.

I had warmed up to the point that I could now control my voice a bit better. “Is there an emergency beacon on this?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of?”

“There is one. But it might have been damaged when I jumped into the raft. I think I landed on it. And then the global positioning system sort of fell into the ocean.”

“Ah.” I scanned the night sky for Virgo. While Mike had been tending to me, we had been bobbing randomly around the waves. Eventually, I spotted it and pointed. “That way is east. Land’s in that direction.”

“How far away, do you think?”

“It might be up to thirty or forty miles.”

“Then I guess we’d better get moving.” Mike fired up the motor, pointed us east, and we set off across the ocean, hoping like heck that we’d find land before our fuel ran out.