Twelve hours out of Angra do Heroismo’s white harbor, just past the barren rock of Formigas, at sunset, the sky turned the color of dried blood, and the sea went brown and mottled as the shell of a turtle.
Wilson had never seen sea and sky such colors—a whole palette of warning.
“Thirty years of sailing, you realize the sky is hardly ever blue,” the captain said, a grim tone in his voice. “When it gets like this, you know there’s trouble on the way. Going to be one for the record books. A real killer.”
The Compound Interest pitched and rolled in the swells. Its beach umbrella sails stuttered nervously in the wind. All of a sudden, the shortwave was full of faraway distress signals, anguished voices calling out in the naked, unintelligible language of men in fear for their lives. A wild front of rain, hail, and hurricane-force wind was blowing off the Serengeti and across the Atlantic to form a solid gray barrier of terrible weather one thousand miles wide and two thousand miles long. The captain bent an ear to the receiver as a crazy riff of Morse code came across the wire, then he shook his head and switched off the set.
“There’s nothing to do now but plow right through it,” he said. “It’s heading right for us, coming fast. If we turn back, it will catch us from behind. Let’s put up the bubble and see what this tub can do.”
They took down the canvas foul-weather cowling, retracted the beach umbrella sails, and switched over to the turbo-diesels. Then the captain and Wilson and Cricket went into the hold and brought up the eight Plexiglas sections and bolted them into place over the octagon. The Compound Interest was now watertight as a submarine. The air-purifying system cranked on with a comforting whirring sound. Sealed hatches divided the vessel into three airtight sections, each section equipped with its own supply of drinking water, freeze-dried food, and emergency locator beacon. If the vessel broke apart in heavy seas, the three compartments would float free, beacons pulsing distress through the airwaves to a five-hundred-mile radius.
The navigational octagon, sealed by a hatch from below, could turn into a sort of self-contained microvessel. It came equipped with a compressed gas—hydrofoil propulsion system—no larger than a suitcase, but with a range of three hundred miles—manufactured by Newland Marine of Santa Barbara. In the event of structural collapse the octagon could separate from the foundering wreck and scoot off to Africa under its own power, a tiny plastic bubble of high-tech engineering on the trackless sea.