CHAPTER FIFTY

     Crossing the Rubicon

The ship’s fantail had been abandoned, in the Lindy’s pell-mell run for the open sea. After a while, heads reappeared over the high lip of its solid steel railing.

“Indy, how are you doin’ down there?” I heard Don yell into his radio.

I responded as best I could. The ship was throwing up such a jumbled wake that Filipe had everything he could do to hold us in close. The swells of the Bering Sea had grown to thirty feet or more. The wind howled past, even in the lee created by the large vessel’s passage before us. Both boys and Hathoot were sick. Vomit was strewn everywhere. Small bits of sandwich bread invaded every part of the Zodiac’s deck. None of us could have stayed within the craft’s great rubber tubes without holding fast to the multiple ropes tied to rungs all around its interior.