Free Dead Sea by Peter Tonkin

– as though the man himself had come down from heaven as a gigantic spirit with a gargantuan autograph pen full of golden ink.
    A siren bellowed like the last trump, so loud it seemed to be sounding inside Liberty’s head. She screamed, really believing for a second that the overwhelming noise had burst her eardrums. But even as she screamed, Liberty was spinning the wheel hard over, tearing the muscles in her shoulders and back, looking up though tear-bright eyes to see the storm-reefed mainsail slam hard over, tight as a drumskin and straining fit to burst. Maya was thrown further back into her seat. The whole hull tilted hard over – so hard, in fact, that the equipment Maya was using began to slide down on top of her. There was a muffled scream as the B watch were actually rolled out of their bunks.
    Liberty found the breath to articulate her terror and her rage. ‘I will NOT,’ she screamed at the oncoming monster, ‘I will NOT be run down and beaten by MICKEY FUCKING MOUSE . . .’
    Robin looked up from
Katapult
’s wheel at the listless sag of her mainsail. The sunlight glinted on her golden curls, hazy but still strong. ‘Four days,’ she said to herself, quietly but dejectedly. ‘What was that song? ‘Don’t say there’s nothing to do in the Doldrums’. Four days of almost total calm. And how far have we come?’
    Rohini Verma the Indian sailboat champion and companion on the A watch looked up. Her brown eyes widened slightly and her forehead gathered into a thoughtful frown between her straight black brows and her severely swept-back hair. ‘Just on two hundred miles according to the GPS,’ she answered. ‘That’s—’
    â€˜About two knots mean speed,’ answered Robin. ‘And when I think that
Katapult
can pull nearly forty-five under full sail . . .’
    â€˜It’s frustrating,’ Flo Weary said, picking up the conversation as the B watch came up at eleven a.m. on the dot, straightening to sweep back her mahogany red mane and stretch her long, lithe body after the constriction of seven hours in a narrow bunk. ‘But it’s not the end of the world.’
    â€˜We might as well be at the end of the world,’ said Robin, uncharacteristically glum. ‘We’re at the heart of a dead calm surrounded by a combination of mist and heat haze you could cut with a knife. If the world ended a couple of hundred metres ahead we’d sail right over the edge and never know it.’
    â€˜Naaaw,’ said Flo with an irrepressible chuckle, coming up past Rohini at the console, stepping up into the well of the afterdeck and up again to stand beside Robin at the multihull’s big wheel. ‘We’d all have died of old age long before
Katapult
sailed another couple of hundred metres.’
    â€˜Look on the bright side,’ insisted Akelita, as she relieved Rohini at the communications console. ‘We could be aboard
Flint
!’ She shivered as she spoke, and her silky skin rose in goosebumps.
    Robin looked down as the island girl shivered, looking very much like she had in the photos Fox had got hold of – wearing nothing more than a micro-kini and mega tan. And coconut-scented sun oil. Flo was dressed much like Akelita – as were the others. Robin emphasized her age and seniority by simply slinging a scarf around her waist and knotting it at her right hip to serve as a short skirt. But her shoulders and the upper slopes of her breasts were as brown and freckled as everyone else’s aboard. And as thoughtlessly on display. They were due to film another half hour of lively footage at noon, she thought wearily. But unless the girls covered up, it would only be suitable for the adult channels.
    â€˜Yes,’ added Rohini. ‘
Flint
’s travelled nearly twelve hundred miles, running down the coast past Portland almost as far as San Francisco, then back up and out towards