Without remorse - Tom Clancy [23]
'So what do we do now?'
'We wait a little while.'
Sarah and Pam came back in twenty minutes later, holding hands like mother and daughter. Pam's head was up now, though her eyes were still watery.
'We got a winner here, folks,' Sarah told them. 'She's been trying for a month all by herself.'
'She says it isn't hard,' Pam said.
'We can make it a lot easier,' Sarah assured her. She handed a list to her husband. 'Find a drugstore. John, get your boat moving. Now.'
'What happens?' Kelly asked thirty minutes and five miles later. Solomons was already a tan-green line on the northwestern horizon.
'The treatment regime is pretty simple, really. We support her with barbiturates and ease her off.'
'You give her drugs to get her off drugs?'
'Yep.' Rosen nodded. 'That's how it's done. It takes time for the body to flush out all the residual material in her tissues. The body becomes dependent on the stuff, and if you try to wean them off too rapidly, you can get some adverse effects, convulsions, that sort of thing. Occasionally people die from it.'
'What?' said Kelly, alarmed. 'I don't know anything about this, Sam.'
'Why should you? That's our job, Kelly. Sarah doesn't think that's a problem in this case. Relax, John. You give' - Rosen took the list from his pocket - 'yeah, I thought so, phenobarb, you give that to attenuate the withdrawal symptoms. Look, you know how to drive a boat, right?'
'Yep,' Kelly said, turning, knowing what came next.
'Let us do our job. Okay?'
The man didn't feel much like sleep, the coastguardsmen saw, much to their own displeasure. Before they'd had the chance to recover from the previous day's adventures, he was up again, drinking coffee in the operations room, looking over the charts yet again, using his hand to make circles, which he compared with the memorized course track of the forty-one-boat.
'How fast is a sailboat?' he asked an annoyed and irritable Quartermaster First Class Manuel Oreza.
'That one? Not very, with a fair breeze and calm seas, maybe five knots, a little more if the skipper is smart and experienced. Rule of thumb is, one point three times the square root waterline length is your hull speed, so for that one, five or six knots.' And he hoped the civilian was duly impressed with that bit of nautical trivia.
'It was windy last night,' the official noted crossly.
'A small boat doesn't go faster on choppy seas, it goes slower. That's because it spends a lot of time going up and down instead of forward.'
'So how did he get away from you?'
'He didn't get away from me, okay?' Oreza wasn't clear on who this guy was or how senior a position he actually held, but he wouldn't have taken this sort of abuse from a real officer - but a real officer would not have harassed him this way; a real officer would have listened and understood. The petty officer took a deep breath, wishing for once that there was an officer here to explain things. Civilians listened to officers, which said a lot about the intelligence of civilians. 'Look, sir, you told me to lay back, didn't you? I told you that we'd lose him in the clutter from the storm, and we did. Those old radars we use aren't worth a damn in bad weather, least not for a dinky little target like a day-sailer.'
'You already said that.'
And I'll keep saying it until you figure it out, Oreza managed not to say, catching a warning look from Mr English. Portagee took a deep breath and looked down at the chart.
'So where do you think he is?'
'Hell, the Bay ain't that wide, so's you have two coastlines to worry about. Most houses have their own little docks, you have all these creeks. If it was me, I'd head up a creek. Better place to hide than a dock, right?'
'You're telling me he's gone,' the civilian observed darkly.
'Sure as hell,' Oreza agreed.
'Three months of work went into that!'
Т can't help that, sir.' The coastguardsman paused. 'Look, he probably went east rather than west, okay? Better to run before the wind than tack into it. That's the good news. Problem is, a little boat like that, you can haul it