Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [39]
I kept swimming. My fear gave me extra strength, lengthened my endurance. The ephedrine had kicked in at last, but I was still very tired. Then, suddenly, I heard the speedboat coming closer from just to the south of me. He was getting more methodical, exactly as I’d known he would, and had begun to make concentric circles around the area. He would start wide, allowing for the possibility that I had survived the kayak and was in good enough shape to be swimming. The circles would grow smaller and smaller until I ended up at the center like a bug caught in a drain.
The searchlight nearly got me then, but the white arc faded out just a few yards ahead of me. I went under fast and swam away from the boat for as long as I could. Something brushed my leg in the dark, but I kept going. Everything depended on where Williams began his search. If I was outside the perimeter, he would be moving away from me, funneling inward, and I might have time to get away. If not, he would surely see me eventually. My arms parted the darkness in front of me as though I were a blind man moving through a curtain of water that closed and opened around me without beginning or end.
The boat went by maybe fifty feet to the east of me, then headed back out. I came up in time to see it curving back toward the beach, which meant he had underestimated me and had just completed the biggest circle. I was outside that circle, but only for the moment. It would not take long for him to funnel inward and eventually reach the conclusion that either I was dead or somehow had gotten past him. Williams would then start over, and this time he would come in even closer to shore. He could afford to be methodical. I was still miles from land, and he had the speedboat and a good two hours until dawn.
I got over onto my back and kicked with my legs, trying to conserve the strength in my arms. I’d once competed in a triathlon and thought at the time that I had reached the apex of human fatigue. I’d been wrong. I know that there are resources in the human body that can be tapped only in moments of extreme danger and excitement, and I had no doubt that I’d tapped in to them now. By all accounts I should have been too tired to move, but something kept me going. My body went from feeling waterlogged to feeling supernaturally light, as though I were not so much swimming in the water as being the water itself.
Then the heaviness would intrude, and I would be slogging away again toward the single row of lights on the shore that for the life of me never seemed to get any closer. After a while I stopped thinking altogether, as though the blood flow to my brain had ceased, and my body rallied itself and pulled me forward like a horse carrying a rider either half dead in the saddle or else far too weary to care.
When I came to myself again, it was morning. I must have opened my eyes just as my arm had lifted itself for another endless stroke, and I was all at once conscious of the heat of the sun on my back and its fierce silver glare on the surface of the sea. My tongue was swollen with thirst, and there was no strength in me. I could see the shore, now only a quarter of a mile away. But there was nothing left in me, nothing. I managed to get over onto my back, but it was too much like being in bed, and I almost gave in to the fatal luxury of letting go. I saw an orange buoy halfway to the shore and swam for it, knowing that if I could make it that far, I had a chance.
It was only three hundred yards to shore, but no matter how much I swam, the beach never came any closer, still flaunting its promise of safety with the derision of a mirage. I could see people near the shore playing in the breakers; I could hear their voices. I tried to call out to them, but my mouth made only a strange, inhuman rasping sound. Just a little farther and the incoming tide would lift me, drag me in. It seemed stupid, almost sinful, to die so close to land, and yet that was what was happening, for all at once I was no longer moving. My arms