Arrow's Fall

Joel Scott

Description

There's nowhere to hide in the Great Sea Reef in this heart-stopping thriller of a yarn In this follow-up to 2018's Arrow's Flight, a tale of an 18th-century sunken ship and a fortune in gold sends Arrow and her crew on a venture that seems harmless enough. That is, until it attracts the attention of the flamboyant owner of the Golden Dragon, a 240-foot sailing machine crewed by cashiered ex-marine Lord Barclay Summers and his band of mercenaries. When Arrow and her crew are viciously attacked, they seek shelter in the treacherous Great Sea Reef where they become ensnared in a life-and-death sailing match against the murderous crew of the Golden Dragon. Continuing the same heart-pounding excitement of Arrow's Flight, Joel Scott weaves together terrific storytelling, breathtaking action, and an in-depth knowledge of sailing. Arrow's Fall will be a battle of instinct versu

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 14 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773052991
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Arrow’s Fall
Joel Scott





Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
About the Author
Copyright


Chapter 1
The water had that stark clarity found only in those rare places a thousand miles from the possibility of man; a clear shining medium that brought the ten-fathom bottom so sharply into focus it seemed I could reach down and touch it. I had seen the fish twice now, a leopard grouper in the five-pound range gliding among the coral canyons like a green spotted ghost, its head swivelling lazily as it checked for dangers, its overhung jaw slightly open as it hunted.
I took a deep breath and planed down behind him, my spear gun extended in front of me, the mask tightening on my face as I descended with long scissor strokes of my flippers. The grouper sensed something in the final second and spurted out of sight around the corner of a sheer cliff so sewn with anemones and starfish that it seemed to undulate as I passed.
I turned in his wake and came out on a large plateau that extended beyond my range of vision, and there, just at the edge, a quick movement. I moved out and saw another quick motion, and then another and now the spotted back of the grouper had changed to stripes, and there were giants in the water, and I choked down the scream that rose up in the back of my throat.
The tigers were loose!
I turned and raced back for the cliff, but I was far too slow, and they curled lazily around in front of me, all the time in the world, the circle tightening, and I spun to face them with my spear but there were too many. As I wheeled, one of them grazed me and I spat out the mouthpiece and screamed and turned, but it was the bloodied mask of Jack Delaney that bumped me, his face rough and sandpapered like that of a shark. The skeletal teeth grabbed my arm and shook me like a dog with a bone and I closed my eyes and screamed in shock and horror.
***
“Wake up, Jared, you’re dreaming again.”
My eyes flew open and the threshing of the shark changed into my friend Danny shaking me.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. Sweat poured from my body and the twisted sheet was damp and clinging.
“What was it, the tiger sharks?”
“Yeah.”
“I think you should start drinking again. This unnatural sobriety is affecting you.”
Danny handed me a cup of coffee and I took a grateful sip. He was serious, a man who had never experienced a hangover or blackout in his life. He refused to understand that it wasn’t the same for everyone. I began drinking too much after Jane left and had cut back in the last month.
“You’re probably right. What number on the job list are we up to today?”
“Thirty-two. The head hoses.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly.”
For the past three and a half months we had been tied up in New Zealand for the South Pacific hurricane season. It was five months of boat preparation and overhaul for the next cruising season, combined with a few tours by car and the occasional coastal junket on Arrow .
Danny MacLean is my travelling partner, fellow Canadian, and closest friend. Half First Nation and half Scots by birth and all Indigenous by choice, he’s a big brown good-looking man who is as strong as an ox and the perennial party animal. He considers it his mission in life to rescue me from introspection and ensure I have a good time, the definition of which usually involves alcohol and, sometimes, women. Two years earlier we had salvaged a large amount of illicit cash from the safe of a sunken drug boat that had been pursuing us. It should have been enough for five good years of cruising, but Danny went through money like the proverbial drunken sailor. I tired of being the whiner who moaned about money and joined in. Now there was barely enough cash for another season in the tropics. We’d have to go home and earn some more. It was a prospect neither of us looked forward to.
“We’d better have a good breakfast; we won’t feel like eating once we’re into the job.”
Danny picked up the cast iron griddle and set it on top of the propane burners we hung on the big Dickinson stove when we set out for the tropics. I topped up my coffee and went out on deck to check the weather.
We were ten miles upriver in New Zealand’s North Island, moored fore and aft on pilings in Whangarei town basin with a couple of hundred other yachts, many of them offshore cruisers. Most of us had followed the same tracks through Tonga and Fiji and had a nodding acquaintance. Tied up next to us on the port side was a forty-foot American registered Valiant, and Rachel and I exchanged friendly good mornings from our respective cockpits. She was minding the boat while her boyfriend was back in Silicon Valley topping up the cruising kitty. We’d become friendly with her, Danny more so than me; our hulls were barely five feet apart, and I had felt the sway of Arrow many a late night and early morning as Danny swung across and back. Women responded to Danny like iron filings to a magnet, and he was never one for resisting the natural laws.
It was a fine morning, cool and overcast with just enough breeze to crank over the wind generator hanging on the mizzenmast and give us enough amps to run the electrics and fridge without having to start the engine. We had done a costly refit in Tahiti two years back after we lost our rig when we were driven over the reef in the Tuamotus, but we hadn’t touched the diesel, an old Perkins 4-108 with the Lucas electrics, ill-tempered and flighty, but never quite reaching the point where it had to be replaced. We had a perverse fondness for it, apart from the serious money it would take to replace it with a new one. We tried to use it as little as possible, and then only when it would have been dangerous not to.
“Here, eat up.”
From the galley, Danny passed up a plate of bacon and eggs and came up on deck to join me. He gave a reserved greeting to Rachel and she responded equally sedately. The rascals.
“Seen Sinbad this morning?”
“No, but I felt a slight list around five o’clock this morning,” I said. “It must have been him.”
Danny chose to ignore it. “Is it a mafia day today?”
“Yes. Likely see Basil in another hour or so.”
The New Zealand Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry was responsible for defending the shores of their country from the depredations of foreign pets. You were not allowed to land an animal on shore until it had been in quarantine for six months under pain of death for the beast and the loss of a large bond by its owner. In addition, there was a biweekly inspection of all boats with pets confined on board. The inspector rowed among the moored fleet, and the owners would bring their pets on deck for his contemplation, the process often accompanied by acrimony on both sides.
Since it was their country, they got to make the rules, and they widely publicized their aversion to foreign pets: if you don’t like it, don’t land here . Danny and I had no problems with any of this. Unfortunately, Sinbad did.
Sinbad was our ship’s dog, a hundred and sixty-five pounds of ugly and muscle. He was devoted to Danny and barely tolerated me, although he did save my life once. We picked him up in the port of Santa Barbara on our maiden passage down the west coast, and he remained with us ever since.
Sinbad grew up on an atoll in the Tuamotus, a free-running village dog belonging to no one, and fed himself for the most part by catching fish. The cruisers loved to watch him working the shallow edge of a lagoon, springing through the water in high stiff-legged leaps with his head on a swivel, then suddenly pouncing to emerge with a fish captured in his jaws. They were less thrilled when he devoured one of the seabirds he varied his diet with.
Sinbad was befriended by an American single-hander who stopped off at the remote island of Ahe in the Tuamotus, and when the cruiser departed he took the dog with him. When the sailor’s voyage ended in Santa Barbara two years later, he deposited Sinbad with the local SPCA, and that is where Danny’s grandfather Joseph had found him and brought him aboard two years previously.
He was unquestionably the ugliest dog I have ever seen: outsized head, with yellow staring eyes above a flat brutal face with something of the wolf in it. His neck was massive, the skin loose and rumpled above powerful shoulders that ran down to a narrow, skinny rump and short muscular hind legs with broad thickly furred feet that propelled him through the water at surprising speed. His tail was thin, mangy, and rat-like and had been docked by the teeth of a shark. Another attack left a thick network of scars beginning under his chin and running back through his neck and chest like twisted silver ropes. It also took half his left ear, and the remaining flap was serrated in little steps.
When Sinbad looked at you with those hellish amber eyes and uttered his low, eager growl, it was sufficient to turn any man’s bowels to water. He still scared me, and I had known him since Joseph first brought him on board Arrow .
We couldn’t declare Sinbad when we reached New Zealand. It would have been his death sentence. No force on earth could have kept him on board for six months and so, a mile from the customs dock on our way up the Ha¯tea River, Danny dropped Sinbad over the side. He followed us along the shore until we berthed in the basin a