Chapter 10 - The Cold Water Survival
“He left us,” Marcus whispered, falling to his knees on the wet teak deck, his hands gripping his hair as he stared into the empty, foggy darkness where the Zodiac had vanished. “My own brother... I built him... I protected him his entire life... and he left me to burn.”
“He learned from you, Marcus,” I said coldly, stripping off my heavy wool overcoat—a garment I had grabbed from the salon coatrack during our escape—and throwing it onto the deck. “He evaluated his survival assets and liquidated his liabilities. Right now, we are liabilities.”
The fire was advancing rapidly now, the flames consuming the upper deck lounge and spreading down through the internal stairwells toward the main salon. The crackling of burning fiberglass was deafening, accompanied by the periodic, terrifying explosions of aerosol cans and liquor bottles in the bar interior. We had less than three minutes before the structural integrity of the stern deck failed, or the primary diesel fuel tanks in the belly of the yacht reached critical ignition temperature.
I moved to the emergency lockers built into the transom wall, kicking the latches open with my bare heel. I pulled out two Type-1 offshore life vests—the heavy, bulky, bright-orange foam vests designed to keep an unconscious survivor’s head elevated above freezing swells.
“Put this on,” I ordered, throwing one of the vests directly at Marcus’s chest.
He didn't move. He sat on the deck, shivering violently from shock and smoke inhalation, staring blankly at the orange foam. “What’s the point, Kate? The water down there is fifty-two degrees. Without survival suits or a life raft, hypothermia will shut down our motor functions in fifteen minutes. Cardiac arrest follows in thirty. We’re dead.”
I walked over, grabbed him by the collar of his cashmere sweater, and hauled him physically to his feet, pressing my face inches from his.
“I spent three weeks conducting cold-water survival drills in the Bering Sea with Navy SEAL delivery vehicles, Marcus,” I growled, my voice vibrating with an absolute, unshakeable refusal to die on his terms. “You do not die when the water is cold; you die when your central nervous system decides to stop fighting the cold. Now put the damn vest on, clip the chest strap, and shut your mouth, or I will throw you over the rail unconscious and let you float!”
The sheer, overwhelming kinetic force of my training broke through his psychological paralysis. With trembling, clumsy fingers, he pulled the orange foam over his head and clipped the heavy nylon buckles across his chest. I donned my own vest, securing the straps tight against my ribs, ignoring the sharp pain from where Julian had struck me during the initial struggle.
“When we hit the water,” I instructed, leading him toward the edge of the swim platform, away from the roaring inferno of the main cabin, “you execute the H.E.L.P. position—Heat Escape Lessening Posture. Pull your knees tightly to your chest, cross your arms over your sides, and press your body directly against mine. We share body heat to protect our core temperatures. We do not swim; swimming pumps warm blood to the extremities where it cools rapidly and accelerates hypothermia. We float, we conserve energy, and we wait for the Coast Guard.”
“How... how do you know the Coast Guard is coming?” Marcus chattered, his teeth clicking together as the heat from the yacht’s fire suddenly felt like a luxury he was about to lose forever.
“Because before your brother shot up the engine room,” I said, looking out into the freezing, black void of Puget Sound, “I broadcast an automated maritime distress signal with our GPS coordinates on Channel 16. The US Coast Guard sector in Seattle monitors that frequency twenty-four hours a day with automated triangulation. They’re already in the water.”
I grabbed his wrist, interlocking our fingers with a soldier’s iron grip.
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“On three,” I said, as a shower of burning orange embers rained down over our heads from the collapsing bridge deck above. “One. Two. Jump.”
We stepped off the edge of the swim platform together, falling twelve feet through the foggy darkness before slamming into the freezing, black wall of the Pacific Ocean.
