Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse

22. A Semblance of Normalcy

In better weather, another day of cycling the minor roads north from Dover brought Andy to the quintessentially Kentish town of Boughton, just short of the town of Faversham. He spent the night in the woods, just off the road from Boughton to Hernhill, uneventfully. After breakfast and a shave the next morning, he cycled back to the main road. Andy felt like he was deep in the heart of the land of thatched roofs and tweed jackets. At Faversham he turned down to the yacht harbor at Oare Creek. Laine was surprised to see such a large number of private sailboats and motor vessels in the harbor.

Although he was first met with suspicion at the harbormaster’s office, he was eventually given a safe place to leave his bicycle and trailer, while he scoured the docks to make inquiries.

He arrived at low tide, with the water so low that most of the boats were resting on their keels in the mud, looking forlorn. The harbormaster explained that it was an unusual “minus tide.”

In a series of conversations, Laine was told that there were three boat sailings expected within the next week: one bound for New Zealand, one for Tasmania, and one for Belize. There were no vessels of any description that they had heard of bound for the United States this winter. Andy sat down on a seagull-splattered bench and prayed. After ten minutes of fervent prayer, he returned to the motor-cruiser where they seemed the best-informed about the upcoming sailings. Asking about the boat headed for Belize, he was told: “Second or third slip from the end on the last dock. Look for a big Tayana: she’s called the Durobrabis.” Andy only had a vague recollection that Belize was formerly called British Honduras and that it was close to Mexico. He couldn’t remember if there was another country in between. To Andy, the Central American countries, other than Panama, were just a jumble on the map.

Laine went to the dock as instructed and found a middle-aged man and woman transferring supplies from a cart onto the sailboat. It was a forty-eight-footer, and looked well cared for. Most of the other sailboats in the harbor were in trim form for intermittent casual recreational use, but in contrast, Durobrabis had some bulky items lashed to its foredeck, covered with brown tarps. Andy recognized the distinct blue color of water cooler bottles beneath one of these tarps. The slightly overweight gray-haired man was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned “Hollowshore Cruising Club” under an open windbreaker. As Andy approached the boat, the man stepped away from the cart, pulled a long kitchen knife from under his jacket and held it at his side, and ordered: “Stop right there!” Andy immediately halted twenty-five feet away and showed his palms.

The man’s wife stood speechless, still holding two sacks of groceries. She looked terrified.

“We’ve been blagged before, and we won’t be again,” the man declared intensely.

“Sir, I can assure you, I’m no robber. My name’s Andrew Laine. I’m an American Army officer, looking to buy passage to Belize. I heard you were headed there.”

“That’s right, but we’re full up. Your money’s no good here, Yank.”

Andy said imploringly, “But I can pay you in gold.”

The yacht skipper blinked, but then said, “Sorry, but what good is gold to me? The family that’s going with us, they stocked up piles of food and fuel months ago, so they’re supplying us with nearly all the provisions-enough for the whole journey. Right now, that’s worth a lot more to me than gold. We can’t eat gold.”

“Well, then, what about lead?”

“What?” the man replied, sounding confused.

“I deal in lead, friend.”

The boat captain laughed nervously and cocked his head.

Laine continued, “I’m willing to wager that you don’t have much more than that knife to protect yourself and all onboard. So I’d like to make you an offer: to provide you with some more substantial security for your voyage as a working crew member.”

“Have you ever crewed a yacht?”

“No, but I’m willing to learn, and I’m very good with a gun.”

“That’s all well and good, but you won’t find a gun to be had in all of England, at any price.”

“I’m willing to offer you mine, and a steady, well-trained hand behind it.” He patted the jacket at the small of his back.

The man still looked hesitant.

Speaking slowly, Laine added: “Look, I really am an Army officer with six years of experience. I’ve done tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m a good Christian man. And importantly for you, I know how to make cutthroats of all descriptions either drop dead in their tracks or turn and run, crying like babies. I’ve been in some very tight spots, so I know exactly how to get out of them. Trust me.”

The old man looked toward his wife and they nodded to each other. Turning back toward Andy, he said, “Come aboard and we’ll parlay.”

Carston Simms, the skipper of Durobrabis, filled Andy in about both the yacht and his background. Simms had served in the Royal Navy as an enlisted seaman for six years, back in the late 1970s. Soon after, he got a degree in psychology and worked as a school counselor and later as a private school administrator. He used the yacht on his long summer vacations. They had two sons, who had both emigrated to Australia twenty years before. Laine got the impression that Simms had strained relations with his sons, since he bluntly described them as “layabout alcoholics.” Simms had lost his job in the recession that began in 2008, which caused private-school enrollments to plummet.

Simms spent a while expressing his concerns about the deteriorating conditions in England. He predicted a massive die-off because the island nation was so dependent on food and fuel from overseas. He put on a grim face and said: “They’ll be eating each other in London and Colchester in just a few weeks. We’ve got to get someplace with a better climate and less population.”

They sat in the boat’s saloon area. The surroundings were heavy on teak and stainless steel, which was unfamiliar to Andy but pleasant. Carston Simms and his wife, Angie, seemed nervous and chatty. Before agreeing to take Laine on as crew, they spent a half hour quizzing Andy about his background, education, and experience. Here, Andy’s DD-214 discharge papers came in handy. Finally, Simms wanted to see the SIG pistol. Pointing it upward, Andy deftly unloaded it. He then field-stripped and reassembled it on the saloon table. This particularly impressed Angie.

Then Carston began to open up about the situation on the boat and their plans to sail for Belize. Andy was nearly right about the Carstons’ kitchen knife. Other than a few small knives and an Olin flare pistol, they were unarmed. The skipper habitually called the single-shot 12-gauge flare gun his “Very” pistol, which Andy thought sounded quaintly First World War. Simms conceded that they’d be easy pickings for pirates without Andy and a real gun.

Angie told Laine about the family that planned to travel with them: Alan and Simone Taft were in their late thirties. They had a fourteen-year-old son named Jules and twin eleven-year-old daughters, Yvonne and Yvette. Alan Taft was an investment banker with no boating experience. The Tafts were just casual acquaintances of the Simms before the Crunch, but their large stockpile of food and Taft’s fluency in Spanish made him a logical choice to make the Belize trip.

Simms told Andy that he had sailed to the Caribbean once before and that he had a few “yachtie” acquaintances there. He admitted that none of these were close friends, but Simms considered the voyage worth the gamble. Carston summed up his rationale for the voyage tersely: “It obviously beats waiting here to see if we get eaten.” They planned to sail on a predawn high tide in three days. In the meantime Andy would stay on the boat almost continuously to provide security.

Accommodations would be tight. Although Durobrabis had berths for seven, one of these was already stacked high with boxes of provisions and secured with heavy twine to both the wall behind and the overhead rail. To make up for this lost berth, the Tafts planned to have staggered sleeping shifts or have their daughters share a berth. Durobrabis was a forty-eight-foot Tayana built in Taiwan. It was a 1997 model but still well-maintained. It was a fiberglass monohull measuring fourteen and a half feet across the beam.

As a true blue-water yacht rather than a coastal sailboat, Durobrabis had watertight hatches and a 230-gallon freshwater tank. The sails and sail covers had been replaced just two years before. The boat’s 100-horsepower auxiliary diesel engine was mostly used for getting in and out of harbors. To fuel it, the boat had an internal 120-gallon diesel tank, and Simms had supplemented this with an additional 60 liters for the voyage, held in six plastic fuel cans.

The only available space for Andy to sleep was the forward sail locker. Simms explained why he didn’t empty the seventh berth for Andy: “I’ll still need to get sheets in and out of the sail locker on short notice. And it will be much quicker to get you in and out of there than it will be a pile of grocery boxes. In a storm I won’t want much weight in the bow anyhow, and we’ll run with just a little spitfire jib and a storm trysail. So at those times we’ll need most of that locker’s capacity for the big sheets. You and Jules, perhaps, can take turns in a bunk in foul weather.” Andy agreed to the arrangement without complaint.

The yacht was well equipped for long voyages, with a reverse-osmosis water maker, an inflatable dinghy, and an impressive array of radios and navigation gear.

Andy was disappointed to hear that there would be no room for his bicycle and trailer. He was able to trade them to another yachtsman at the marina for eighteen cans of corned beef, five 12-gauge red meteor flares that could be used in Carston’s flare gun, and a three-year-old Garmin GPS receiver.

Andy’s only other transaction before their departure came after he spotted a teenager at the marina who was wearing a camouflage jacket that had some bright paint stains on it. Andy recognized these as paintball stains. Striking up a conversation with the young man, Laine learned that he was an aficionado of both paintball tactical training and shooting Airsoft pellet guns. The latter shot low-velocity rubber BBs. Laine persuaded him to trade a few of his Airsoft guns, since he had eleven of them.

In exchange for two Airsoft submachinegun replicas-an Uzi and an H&K MP-5-Laine traded a full set of OCP fatigues with matching boonie hat and shemagh scarf, an older but working iPod, and a Chinese multipurpose tool-a knockoff of an American Leatherman tool. Both of the toy SMGs looked and even felt surprisingly realistic, aside from their bright red plastic muzzle caps that identified them as replicas. A few quick blasts from a can of black spray paint soon remedied that.