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won’t be able to call for help.”
    He nodded.
    “You said third-rate military. You think it’s a military ship?”
    Dean looked back at it, the rusted crab boat rolling at the crest of a thirty-foot wave. Five hundred yards away now.
    “No. I don’t think they’re military. You can buy a lot of that old equipment on the black market. A lot of it’s probably ours, from back in the sixties or seventies. Stuff that’s supposed to get scrapped has a way of disappearing out the back door.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “They’re trying to cut us off so we can’t call out. We’re already cut off geographically. Just us and them, and whatever happens, no one else will know. What do you think we’ve put into Freefall ? Three million? Three and a half? Even if they chopped her up and sold the parts at a discount, they could probably get seven, maybe eight hundred thousand.”
    Kelly felt her insides loosen.
    “There’s never been a report of that kind of thing down here. I thought it was all in Somalia, off the Horn of Africa.”
    “They’re jamming us,” Dean said. “If we could call out, there’d be a report. But then somebody might do something about them.”
    “And what about us? What happens to us?”
    The VHF was still on, but the volume was low. Guitars and hoarse screaming.
    Dean didn’t answer, but he didn’t really have to. If she didn’t like asking questions he couldn’t answer, he didn’t like saying what she already knew. But knowing didn’t make her feel any better.
    * * *
    “Something’s going on with them,” she said. She handed Dean the binoculars and took the helm for him while he braced himself to watch astern. The crab boat was five hundred yards back. Dean raised the binoculars to his eyes and brought them into focus.
    “Lot of smoke,” he said.
    “It was white before,” Kelly said. “The smoke from the port exhaust. Then all of a sudden it got thick and black.”
    The first plume of black smoke was blowing toward them, snakelike, over the stretch of sea between Freefall and the crab boat.
    “It’s thinning,” Dean said. “Same color as the starboard exhaust. They had someone working on the port engine.”
    “And he fixed it.”
    “Yeah.”
    Dean put the binoculars back into their box and took the helm again. He was better at steering for speed.
    “Watch it on the radar and see if that did anything to its speed.”
    She leaned over the radar controls and adjusted the range to a thousand yards. The crab boat was just inside the five-hundred-yard ring. She watched its green glow, waiting for the sweep of the antenna to pass and refresh the screen.
    “It’s closing on us.”
    “How much time we got?”
    She did the math in her head and looked up at him. “About three minutes.”
    With Dean coaxing every bit of speed he could, La Araña was off their starboard quarter inside of two minutes. It was a hundred feet away, its bow even with Freefall ’s transom.
    “Get on your exposure suit,” Dean said to her. “And bring up mine.”
    She didn’t need Dean to tell her twice. If the crab boat rammed them and opened a seamin Freefall ’s hull, they’d have no time to get on their suits before they went in the water. Kelly tore open the companionway doors and jumped into the cabin, crashing onto the wooden floor so that she somersaulted over her left shoulder and landed on her knees in the galley. She clambered up, ripped open the hanging locker, and pulled out her exposure suit. She pulled it on without thinking, yanking and zipping, and then she was carrying Dean’s suit up the steps and into the pilothouse.
    La Araña was turning to port, charging at their starboard quarter. As it swung past, the tip of its overhanging bow passed inches from Freefall ’s backstay. Then La Araña was to Freefall ’s port side, so that Kelly saw the starboard side of its bow for the first time.
    “Dean!”
    “I saw it,” he said.
    The naked corpse hung upside down from the