He remained on deck despite the wind and rain that wrapped round Absolution, glad, almost, that he didn't have a barometer. In a way, it would have been too much to watch the falling glass and have to acknowledge the worst: This way, he could at least minimize the unmistakable symptoms of the weather and hope his fears were ungrounded until they could no longer be denied.

Days out from the nearest land and with the currents against him, there was nothing he could do. Neither wind nor wave would permit him to successfully move under sail and, since he didn't want to be caught with his sails up anyway, he'd resisted the urge to raise them again. Doused and in their stops, they were as impotent as he felt against the impending hurricane. With nothing else to do, he seated himself cross legged on top of the deck house and stared out at the horizon, watching and waiting.

By late afternoon he was encountering a series of mean squalls, ever darkening skies, and a restless, tossing sea. Even hours later, though, there was still nothing definite so he went below for a hurried meal--cold lima beans and ham eaten straight from one of the cans the captain of the Roldana had left him. In fact, he wouldn't have appreciated it if it had been a lavish banquet: All that was important was to feed his immediate need and, that done, return topside where he could watch in dread as his fears to take shape. Rain poured heavily from the ragged, lowering clouds now, and a gale-force wind had set in, whipping the seas so they charged down around him, tossing Absolution high and then dropping her abruptly to into the water again.

There was no more guesswork about the hurricane. Every instinct now told him he was about to have one dumped right in his lap. Grimly, he took his anchor below and stashed it in the forward compartment in a wooden box that had previously held canned goods. He made one last check of all his gear, though there was little enough he could do. There was, in fact, no such thing as being ready for a storm at sea, especially a hurricane. All he could do was to make sure he was as ready as he could be and hope for the best. One more trip topside and he rigged his make-shift storm sail, sheeted it flat, and crammed the staysail below. There was one last thing to be done--cinching the tiller down doubly secure. When that was finished, he stood uncertainly in the cockpit for a moment and then took his seat on top of the deckhouse again, one arm locked about the mast as he watched over the bows for what was coming.

MacLeod. Look up, MacLeod.

Gray saw-toothed clouds raced past barely above the mast top, unburdening their torrents of stinging, cold water on top of him. The wind had steadied in the north and the fact that it hadn't changed direction in the past hour or more was troubling. Night closed in and heavy rollers, growling a flashing gray, were the only indication that the night was anything but wind and rain. With nothing else to be done, he went below at last, closing the sliding door to the cabin, and toweled down. Cold to the bone, he considered changing clothes, but saw no sense in it. He'd no doubt be summoned on deck at least a time or two in the next few hours, and he'd be wet through again before he could turn around. Restless but with little choice, he wrapped himself in blankets and lay down at last, staring up at the overhead, the straps he'd rigged ready but not yet unnecessary.

About an hour later there seemed to have been a change in things. Absolution began dancing nervously beneath him, and from her pitch he could tell she was no longer rising to the oncoming crests, but breaking into them, taking water over her bow. Instead of a quick roll before the more forceful of the waves, she made a sharp lurch to starboard, leaving her heeled over enough to toss him from the bunk. He'd have found himself face down on the floorboards if he hadn't gripped the sides of the bunk with one hand and snagged one of his stay straps with the other. As it was, he wound up with his feet on the floor and bent at the waist as if attempting a somersault. Having no reason to stay in bed, he righted himself, struggling to keep his feet under him, and snatched one of his two flashlights just long enough to check the time.

It was just short of eight when he managed to wrestle the door open and peered into the night before climbing the short ladder to the deck. Hissing rollers worked with a heavy swish beneath the boat and then ran away, protesting in the blackness. The wind chased after them, howling and calling. For a bizarre moment Absolution lay still, almost as if she lay in the bottom of a trough; a moment later she seemed laboriously to be climbing a hill, and then to teeter on its top; she sank to the bottom again then, not quite pitching, but heaving with the effort.

Absolution's bow was five points off the wind, which continued from the north. Abruptly, the port rail was under, and he grabbed the doorframe, holding on until the fitful boat righted itself. The windward bow was throwing spray high into the rigging and beating into the seas. The rain was heavier than ever now, making it impossible to look straight into the oncoming wind and rain. There were, he knew, three stages to a hurricane's path: At the moment, he was obviously headed into the hurricane, and all he could do was hold on. Later, he'd cross the hurricane's eye, which, at sea, would mean wind from a dozen directions at once and great rollers crashing into the small, crowded arena occupied by the Absolution. With any luck, toward morning or maybe before he'd enter the navigable tail end of the storm and be able to make his way out of it. Since all was as well as he could reasonably expect on deck at the moment, he ducked back in and closed the hatch, bracing himself, arms up against the low overhead, while he swept the light quickly over the still, airless interior. All seemed well for the moment, so he dropped back onto his bunk, wedging the flashlight between himself and the wall, and lashed himself in for--he hoped at least--a few hours of sleep.

Sometime later, Absolution was slapped by the most severe bursts of wind and water yet. She heeled, rattling as if in an earthquake, and then yawed and pounded. MacLeod loosed the hitches across his chest and legs and peered once more into the thick weather. The reason for the boat's change in attitude was plain: His jury-rigged storm sail had failed to hold its own in the high winds and had been blown to loose ends. Unfortunately, it meant going back on deck, but he had to set the sea anchor--a homemade job, rigged while sailing from the Galapagos. He heaved it overboard, stringing it out on a hundred feet of line. After an uncertain moment, Absolution rounded up a bit despite the heavy, noisy water crashing over her gunwales.

Below decks he lashed himself into his bunk again and lay listening to every creak and groan that reached him over the noise of the rumbling seas and the winds shrieking in the rigging. He could hear the churning water crashing onto the decks and then surging over them. He listened deepest when the heavier gusts struck, alert for any sound of structural damage to the boat, remembering the aging timbers he'd recently reseated and caulked with his own hands. After sleeping for almost a year with his senses cued to every sound and murmur, he knew the meaning of each sound all too well, including the creaking of the stressed out metal to stern; an image of the rudderpost flashed through his memory, and he remembered how it had previously been wrenched from its keel seat. It reminded him, unaccountably, of this morning's startled awakening, and the sharks, rubbing themselves against the hull; every sound, at the moment, seemed to carry a warning, making sleep an impossibility.

About midnight he heard a quivering shriek he identified intuitively as the loose ends of a snapped shroud. It whined like something alive and wounded beyond bearing. Opening the hatch and peering out, he watched for a moment as huge combers surged to port and then back to starboard, whipped all the while by the wind. Growing harsher and harsher, the wind had the feel of a solid wall to it, driving rain and sea before it like with the force of a horizontal waterfall. Absolution was falling away on the waves, her mast describing a dizzying, ever-widening arc. With the heaviest gusts she heeled over at an angle severe enough to lay the mast nearly horizontal, lopping off the tops of the highest crests of the waves as they swam toward her.

MacLeod shifted his feet quickly, grabbing onto the doorframe for support. Absolution was falling, pointed nose first down the backside of a wave that felt like a moving mountain. She plunged bow-on into the base of the next wave, submerging the forepeak, and quaked under the tons of greenish gray water that washed onto her decks. Pitching her bow out of the water to the keel, she sent a river full of rail-deep salt water cascading along the deck and pouring over the stern. If the deckhouse hadn't broken the river's course, MacLeod would have been swept helplessly into the sea, his only hope the new trail rope he'd secured to the stern while at Floreana.

In the deep trough formed by the surrounding hills of water, the wind was unable to strike; it was abruptly, momentarily, eerily still, and Absolution righted herself. As she neared the curled peak on the climb up the next roller, she once more encountered the blast of wind, careening before it like a drunk. It was too much, and as she was struck by the thundering, wind-driven wave MacLeod lost his footing and cracked his forehead hard against the doorframe. It was enough to make him see his own little phosphorescing light show for a moment, and when he probed instinctively there was blood to go alone with the wet of rain. Absolution's bow dipped again, thrown back in the next instant as if she'd been dynamited, and the little boat yawed wildly under heavy seas, first boarding her, then weighing her down so that she wallowed clumsily, her lee rail now out of sight. Then she seemed to shake herself free of her load and come up yet again, reeling down the backside of another swell of water, with the broken forward shroud flailing all the while like a whiplash on the starboard side, signaling danger to the 35-foot mast.

He grabbed his life jacket, buckling it on, and then secured a heavy line around his middle, making it fast to the handrail that wrapped around the deck house. He waited for a moment when the decks were water free and leaped clear of the hatchway, slammed it shut, and jumped into the windward waist. Immediately, it was obvious that the life jacket had been a mistake. Even flat on his face, the wind caught at him as if it would throw him bodily into the night, and the added bulk of the life jacket only made him a bigger target. The wind ripped into the loose folds of his shirt, filling it at the front, ripping away the buttons and then tearing it down the back and sides so it hung by tatters to him. The life jacket bounced and battered in the wind, giving the wind something to tug at when it took all he had just to cling to the deck. Standing, or even sitting, would be more than foolish--the word suicidal came to mind--and, when he looked into the wind for more than a second he could feel his eyes go instantly dry and depress as his hair whipped against his cheeks and forehead.

Earlier in the day he had strung a life line above the rails from the bow to the shrouds and to the sternpost. Two more life lines lay strung on deck from the forward bit along each waist to the rudderpost. Each line had double knots tied in every two feet or so, and to these he clung each time a swirling sea charged along the deck.

With fumbling fingers he tugged at straps and D-rings, loosening the life jacket; he had only to raise himself minutely for the wind to snag the bright orange jacket, flinging it against the deck house and pinning it there against a port hole. In the next second the wind shifted, whirlwind style, and the life jacket went spinning out of sight into the night sky, sucked away by the up draft. Pulling himself ahead a few feet at a time, MacLeod locked himself in place every foot or so. When the decks emptied themselves of the eddying water, and when--for a moment--he dared expose himself, he freed his waistline on the handrail, moved it forward a length, and slid up under it. It was torturously slow work, but it had to be unless he wanted to go swimming; in this way, a bit at a time, he worked his way to the starboard shrouds to examine the damaged member.

Once at the mast, it was clear what had happened: The turnbuckle on the after shroud had worked loose. The shocks of the mast, reeling in a wide arc, had been absorbed by the forward, weaker shroud, and it had parted. The mast was held only by one shroud, and that wasn't as tight as it should have been since the turnbuckle had unscrewed itself in the constant buffeting of the wind. It couldn't sustain the load being placed on it for long, and with the waves rushing over the rails and the lashing of the wind, he was afraid it would jump completely out of its stepping.

Feeling the deck timbers beneath him crawl, he tightened the turnbuckle as well as he could by hand, knowing it couldn't possibly be enough. The single shroud simply couldn't hold out alone, and if he lost the mast, he might just as well try swimming to Australia. It was, needless to say, not a pleasant alternative. There was only one thing he could think of to do: loosen the forestay at the stemhead and bend it to the chain plate as a makeshift shroud. God willing, it would hold until he could manage proper repairs in good weather.

As the next heavy sea crashed around his shoulders and over him, MacLeod made ready to loosen his body line and fasten it a few feet ahead so he could snake his way gradually to the bow. Moving slowly and carefully across the open deck between sea washes, he shifted his line from one secure fastening to another. Scrambling from the mast to the bitt, though, was riskier still, since there was nothing to attach his waistline to at that point; if not for the life lines, he had to admit, he'd have been washed overboard more than once. Watching the overspilling seas, he counted silently to ten, saw his moment, and jumped. He made it, ignoring as best he could the growing, unhappy sea around and sometimes on top of him. He loosened the forestay as quickly as possible and, gripping it fiercely, slithered back to the shrouds a few inches at a time.

He lay on his back on the windblown decks, working with only his hands and forearms in the wind, coughing and spitting when he accidentally took in a mouthful or lungful of salt water. He forced himself to take his time, to think over each job carefully before committing to it, and, when he'd finished, Absolution was bolstered by full shrouds and the decks, even fully awash, didn't seem so bad with the mast safely held. The job completed, he made the error of sitting up to catch his breath and check his work. An explosive burst of wind bent him nearly double, compressing him to a helpless angle. At the same time, a flurry of bubbling, surging water lifted him bodily and tumbled him into the deck house. Phosphorescence sparked again, and there was a thud and crack he could only identify by the pain.

When he came to--unsure if he had blacked out or died, and unsure if it mattered which--he was upside down with the pull of the sea wrenching at him. Being upside down was unnerving enough, but the fact that he couldn't clearly identify what was happening to his body was worse. He seemed, almost, to be floating in air--although sometimes it was water--and then it clicked. He had fallen overboard, still attached to the Absolution by the line secured to his waist, but was being sucked out to sea by the hurricane. Absolution's rail dropped abruptly below him, and in a moment of crystal clarity he saw the rail rising toward him as he fell in some odd juxtaposition of logic and gravity. He slammed into the rail with bruising force, arms crossed instinctively over his face and head for whatever protection they might offer, and then a heavy sea dropped down on the little boat, too perpendicular to be climbed. Sure of several broken ribs at least, MacLeod watched the wave curl over, towering before him. Bizarrely, he seemed to have misplaced the boat momentarily. He found it again as he was slammed suddenly and bodily into it, seemingly by force of the wind, his arms and legs thrown about at will. Absolution lurched, wallowing, nearly foundering, and MacLeod was submerged again, finding himself hard against the hull one minute, then tossed out of the sea again and airborne, with a bird's eye view of all below him.

Consciousness leaked away, his last memory that of choking down yet another drink of salt and sea before he was dragged under the water again. This time, it seemed, he stayed there for some time; long enough, at any rate, that eventually it no longer mattered to him.

*****************

Continued in Part 5