"That explains a lot of things," said Giordino, staring over Pitt's shoulder at the logbook. "Why he was sailing in this part of the sea and why he couldn't send position coordinates for a rescue party. I checked his generator when we came on site. The two-cycle engine that provides its power is in sad shape. York tried to repair it and failed. I'll give it a try, but I doubt if I can do any better."
Pitt shrugged. "So much for borrowing York's radio to call for help."
"What does he write after being marooned?" demanded Maeve.
"Robinson Crusoe, he was not. He lost most of his food supplies when the yacht struck the rocks and capsized. When the boat was later washed up on shore after the storm, he recovered some canned goods, but they were soon gone. He tried to fish, but caught barely enough to stay alive, even with whatever rock crabs he could find and five or six birds he managed to snare. Eventually, his body functions began to give out. York lasted on this ugly pimple in the ocean for a hundred and thirty-six days. His final entry reads `Can no longer stand or move about. Too weak to do anything but lie here and die. How I wish I could see another sunrise over Falmouth Bay in my native Cornwall. But it is not to be. To whoever finds this log and the letters I've written separately to my wife and three daughters, please see they get them. I ask their forgiveness for the great mental suffering I know I must have caused them. My failure was not from fault so much as bad luck. My hand is too tired to write more. I pray I didn't give up too soon.' "
"He needn't have worried about being found soon after he died," said Giordino. "Hard to believe he lay here for decades without a curious crew from a passing ship or a scientific party coming ashore to set up some kind of weather data gathering instruments."
"The dangers of landing amid the breakers and the unfriendly rocks are enough to outweigh any curiosity, scientific or otherwise."
Tears rolled down Maeve's cheeks as she wept unashamedly. "His poor wife and children must have wondered all these years how he died."
"York's last land bearing was the beacon on the South East Cape of Tasmania." Pitt stepped back into the hut and reappeared a minute later with an Admiralty chart showing the South Tasman Sea. He laid it flat on the ground and studied it for a few moments before he looked up. "I see why York called these rocks the Miseries," said Pitt. "That's how they're labeled on the Admiralty chart."
"How far off were your reckonings?" asked Giordino.
Pitt produced a pair of dividers he'd taken from the desk inside and measured off the approximate position he had calculated with his cross-staff. "I put us roughly 120 kilometers too far to the southwest."
"Not half bad, considering you didn't have an exact fix on the spot where Dorsett threw us off his yacht."
"Yes," Pitt admitted modestly, "I can live with that."
"Where exactly are we?" asked Maeve, now down on her hands and knees, peering at the chart.
Pitt tapped his finger on a tiny black dot in the middle of a sea of blue. There, that little speck approximately 965 kilometers southwest of Invercargill, New Zealand."
"It seems so near when you look at it on a map," said Maeve wistfully.
Giordino pulled off his wristwatch and rubbed the lens clean against his shirt. "Not near enough when you think that no one bothered to drop in on poor Rodney for almost forty years."
"Look on the bright side," said Pitt with an infectious grin. Pretend you've pumped thirty-eight dollars in quarters into a slot machine in Las Vegas without a win. The law of averages is bound to catch up in the next two quarters."
"A bad analogy," said Giordino, the perennial killjoy,
"How so?"
Giordino looked pensively inside the hut. "Because there is no way we can come up with two quarters."
"Nine days and counting-" declared Sandecker, gazing at the unshaven men and weary women seated around the table in his hideaway conference room. What was a few days previously a neat and immaculate gathering place for the admiral's closest staff members, now resembled a war room under siege. Photos, nautical charts and hastily drawn illustrations were taped randomly to the teak-paneled walls; the turquoise carpet was littered with scraps of paper and the shipwreck conference table cluttered with coffee cups, notepads scribbled with calculations, a battery of telephones and an ashtray heaped with Sandecker's cigar butts. He was the only one who smoked, and the air-conditioning was turned to the maximum setting to draw off the stench.
"Time is against us," said Dr. Sanford Adgate Ames. "It is physically impossible to construct a reflector unit and deploy it before the deadline."