Chapter 38: Attack

“As soon as Archara screamed, everyone on the yacht was headed for the small stateroom. I saw the incoming hoard and stepped into the adjacent stateroom. It only took me a moment to spot it.

Every stateroom in the twin hulls, by code, has to have an escape hatch. I found it, opened the hatch and wiggled through. Then I crawled the length of the hull to the rear cabin and popped up through the hatch in the floor. From there it was easy to sneak up the stairs and out into the cockpit and finally the bridge. Captain Alfred was the only one on the bridge. He arched his eyebrows at me as I came up.

“They were holding a senate committee meeting and I didn’t want to get subpoenaed,” I told him.

He just smiled and returned to studying something on the bridge console. However, the peace didn’t last very long.

We heard it before we saw it. Voices. Lots and lots of voices. And they were angry voices, growing in intensity as they swarmed up the stairs to the flying bridge. Finally, Archara arrived and she was pulling a sobbing Charlotte by the ear.

When she reached the bridge console, she stopped and the bridge became eerily silent.

“I suppose that there is a legitimate reason for all this hubbub on my bridge?” Captain Alfred asked as he gestured at the room.

From this point on, the conversation between Alfred and Archara was in French with a good amount of Thai thrown in. However, you didn’t need an interpreter to understand what was happening. (Although Carina told me later that one of Alfred’s milder threats was to make her walk the plank).

After much yelling and cursing and the good old fashioned weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, cooler heads finally prevailed. Thanks in large part to Roland. It was his calm in the midst of the storm that calmed the others and he was able to convince Alfred and Archara not to kill their youngest daughter, nor to bend her over and thrash her within an inch of her life. At least not right then.

Instead, it was decided to wait until cooler heads could prevail, then tomorrow Charlotte would be brought up on deck and in view of everyone, thrashed within an inch of her life.

Was I mad at Charlotte? Not really. I had figured it out yesterday and already had my chance to be angry. But I figured she did it for the oldest of reasons, misguided love. And since I am a romantic at heart, I just couldn’t stay mad once I understood why she did it.

But her parents and the rest of the ship were not seeing it that way. They sent her to the forward buoy locker, hauled out the buoys and dropped her inside, slamming the hatch closed.

Now before you start with how awful her parents were to treat their youngest daughter that way, remember that Henri and Phillipe were sharing the other buoy locker and calling it the forward stateroom. These were massive buoy lockers with wet heads and twin bunks. Or you could call them tiny staterooms that could also be used for storage. Either way, it wasn’t as inhumane as it seemed.

I guess what was inhumane was the way they slammed the hatch cover down and then Alfred placed a large padlock through the hasp. If they had thought about it, they would have remembered what I just recently told you. Every room has to have an escape hatch. In this case, her escape hatch led to the room that Vivienne and she were sharing. I wondered if they would figure it out.

It was a strange afternoon and evening as the skies darkened, and the waves became larger as the winds swung around to the northwest. We eventually had to reef the sails and change our heading a little more south than west. But thank goodness for the big genoa sail. We were still able to maintain a respectable twelve and one-half knots. But there were clearly storms on the horizon, and it didn’t look like we were going to out-sail them.

There were also storm clouds in the galley, so I just eased my way in, grabbed a plate and headed back for the bridge. “I’ve got the bridge duty,” became my mantra as I worked my way through the mini buffet line.

Once on the bridge, I checked the compass and the weather, (both unchanged) and then plotted our position with the GPS. On a hunch, I stepped out on the bridge wing to see if I could sense the GPS satellites, but no such luck. Then I sat down to eat my dinner. It was pita sandwiches tonight.

A few minutes later, Vivienne made her way, alone up the steps to the bridge.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” I answered back.

“What ‘cha doing?” she asked.

I did a quick double take to make sure it was Vivienne.

“Charlotte’s been teaching me how American’s talk,” she explained.

“I think you need a different teacher.”

“I had one, but he doesn’t seem to come around very much.”

“Touché,” I told her. “Now, tell me what you want.”

“Well ... could you really heal me without making love to me?” she asked.

“Too late! I already did it!” I told her.

“No way! Really! But I think I still like girls. I mean I do sorta like Charlotte,” she said.

“The way the healing works is this: From now on, if you heart says you love somebody, it won’t matter whether they’re male or female, black or white or any other color. It won’t even matter where they came from or even if they are Catholics!”

“That is so cool!” she cried. “Thank you so much for healing me. Anna was right, you are very wise for an American.”

“Oh, well,” I thought.

“Ker-Blam!”

I literally had my head in the refrigerator, looking for some leftovers to tide me over until after my watch when it happened. It was so loud and so close that it sounded like it was in the cockpit.

“Ker-Blam!” Went a second one just off the port side, seconds later.

“Those god-damned-mother-fucking sons of bitches are bombing our ship,” I cried as I raced for the fantail. I looked into the night sky and saw nothing, but I could hear them. And then, as if by magic, I could see the electronic circuitry in the two aircraft as they made their turn for another run. As they started their second run, the planes began to sizzle and crackle and pop. This caused their ejector seats to automatically fire the tiny explosives that hurled the pilots, seats and all, into the night sky.