2182 Khz - Couverture rigide

Masiel, David

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0375506063 ISBN 13 : 9780375506062

Editeur : Random House Inc, 2002

Synopsis

Book by Masiel David

A propos du livre

Extrait

Getting into a survival suit was no easy task on flat water. Now it seemed impossible. Seine put a leg in and lost his balance, falling backward against the chart table. He looked up and the Chemist held a hand, reached for a leg. “Here,” he said, and helped Seine’s leg into the wide boot. Then he laughed, a mirthless release out of some primal source. He squinted through lids like some kind of amphibian. He pulled Seine to his feet and yanked the rubber suit, pulling it over Seine’s hips, letting out a little laugh, reaching and pulling the tight hood over Seine’s head. Seine zipped the long front zipper to seal himself into it.

Narvik was still lying on the deck, his unconscious body rolling port to starboard with each wave, the wind howling through the window. “That was one wicked free radical!” the Chemist shouted, nodding in twisted appreciation.
The Chemist reached up and brushed Seine’s face. He wiped away the blood and with that simple gesture Seine felt himself floating in a sea of acquiescence, a languid warmth pervading his muscles, soothing his mind, carrying him off-he knew the feeling, from deep somewhere far off he knew and embraced this moment as an old friend,
a moment of recognition and clarity and self-service. The Chemist seemed to be aware of it too, and for a moment Seine thought the Chemist was really a walking Deadman, a living ghost there to haunt him with the corrupt choice, as if to say, I know you I know you, you let your father die.

In the survival suit, Seine looked like an orange Gumby with nothing but his white face showing. Inside, his scalp itched. Narvik rolled against his legs, stared up blank-faced, blood-wet, shards of glass clinging to his hair, his neck twisted at an impossible angle. Outside the broken window the Gulf roared and hissed, soaring in pitch until somewhere amid all that chaotic sound Seine thought he heard a pattern emerge, a rhythm that blended with highs and lows to become music.

He opened the aft door in slow motion and stepped outside to the wing deck, which sat perched like a penthouse terrace with a view of the abyss. The Chemist was right, he was out of time; he lived out of time, a gone, half-dead, half-made ghost of a human being, wallowing in self-loathing, realizing he had no chance to cut tow, as Fearless took her second knockdown and he flew, ejected by force with a curious feeling through wind and ocean air. He screamed and clawed at the wind, reaching for something-anything-solid.

Then he was overboard and tumbling down the face of a wave. Underwater an instant. Then up-gasping, half air, half water, disoriented, the burning through his chest of salt-water lungs. He felt the tug falling over on top of him; oh, God, it would land on him, crush him, force him down and hold him under. He hit the trough skidding, butt first, the suit buoying his head as he backed up the next wave and saw clearly the tow wire hooked on the quarter bitt just thirty feet from him. The wire lifted up and away from him. The boat let out a metallic creaking sound. The wire chewed the paint from the quarter bitt, bit into the steel, and lifted, and just like that-fast-flipped Fearless on her back. The tall wheelhouse knifed into the wave and disappeared.

The hull bellied up as if exposing herself to the storm, the nakedness striking him even as it sank in a groaning swirl. Seine felt himself cry out, or maybe not; no sound came that he could hear, only the rush of salt water into his body to choke him out and blind him. I’m a free radical now, spinning out of control, flailing through space.

He thought he might die right there, his heart stop dead rather than go forward, but then he was past that moment almost without knowing it. For some reason he thought about Irons and how his frostbitten nose must have looked before some surgeon carved off the black part. It made Seine cover his face with his Gumby hands to keep from freezing his own nose off.

But the crest made covering his face impossible. Despite the impressive buoyancy of the suit-maybe because of it-the violence of the windblown crest tossed him. He flailed his arms to stay righted. Wind and spume tore into his face like a scattershot of pea gravel, and he tumbled.

The wind tossed his legs and he spun on his butt, head down, feet hauling over his head as the wave fell out from under him. He hit the trough with eyes open, belly down, water burning into his eyeballs as if somebody had opened up a pressure nozzle into his face. The spray burned through his skull. He choked on salt water like a balled sock stuffed down his throat. He coughed an explosion. Felt himself foaming at the ears, and with that came deafness and the sound of his own blood. He managed half a breath. He fought panic with an image of a woman, the photograph on the glass, doing duty. Julia-her name was Julia.

The wave crests were physically precarious, but the wave troughs plunged him into the psychological pit. In his mind, that’s what he called it. “Here comes the pit,” he would say to himself, and cover his face and descend, swallowed by a swollen sea. He climbed and dropped and sensed a thousand feet of black ocean eating him from below, and the adrenaline surged.

He closed his eyes and drew inward to combat the torment, to meditate. But closed eyes accentuated the sinking feeling. The pit seemed ten miles deep, twenty miles, stretching down and down, his body falling until he realized his falling was actually rising, a sensation of flying too fast as his inner ear struggled to keep up with the reality of his body’s movement. He had to see. He had to look or he would die, he thought. He opened his eyes and faced downwind, the spray and scattershot of spume blowing away from him and then an instant of hovering. He saw a reach of sky, a distant light gray, a flare of moonlight. He wished for running lights, prayed for warm deck lights making toward him. But he saw nothing but the veined distant shimmer of ocean surrounded by nothing but close clouds and blackness.

And then he was down again. In the pit he heard her voice, the storm sea shouting in Heather’s voice, embittered and lonely, deriding him for his stupidity. He pushed her away and let his mind fall to this woman called Julia. Her picture came to him. A literal black-and-white snapshot now flapping in black current a mile down. The woman
in the photo would be working now. He saw her in the glossy two-dimensionality of the snapshot. A walking photograph, flat, unreal. She would move to the sideband, spin the tuner to 2182 kHz, and depress the mike button. “Ship down,” she would report. “Ship down.”

She soothed him and carried him outside himself. He imagined her motions and tried transmitting them as if by some cosmic radio. The survival suit floated him butt down, legs up, so that he fell into a surfing rhythm of cascading and turning and backing and turning and cascading. He counted troughs and descended and rose and said, inside himself, “Three thousand one hundred and ten” before he saw a blast of light on top of him. At first he thought he’d been found by a UFO until he heard the loudhailer and saw the Coast Guardsmen in float suits lining the cutter deck, and even then he wasn’t sure if he had made it alive, even as they hauled him on board, voices telling him he was the lucky one, that he had Vigilant to thank, the cook-deckhand off Vigilant.

Présentation de l'éditeur

By all accounts, Henry Seine should have packed it in long ago, certainly before he started scanning marine distress channels for fun. But sixteen-hour days spent hauling heavy cargo aboard tugs and icebreakers along the frozen arctic offshore (not to mention smoking copious amounts of Cannabis indica) can warp a man’s sense of reality. Desperate for real human contact, he tunes the sideband radio to 2182 kHz (twenty-one eighty-two kilohertz), the international distress channel, in the vague hope of finding someone he can save.

Soon, though, even the paycheck that fattens his wallet each season isn’t enough to fix his interest. Seine journeys south, but weathers a capsizing that leaves his fellow crewmen dead. Unable to break from his old habits, and haunted by the ghosts of dead shipmates, he flies north for another season. One day, idly monitoring 2182, Seine catches a fading distress call from somewhere out in the circumpolar twilight. A scientist named Louis Moneymaker is trapped alone on an ice floe that threatens to melt beneath his feet. Cobbling together a motley rescue team–the frostbitten Wolf, a six-foot-eight Russian known as Big Man, a tattooed Eskimo nicknamed the Buff, and an intrepid, dark-eyed sailor named Julia–Seine travels farther north than he’s ever gone, determined to save Moneymaker and exorcise his demons in one grand sweep.

2182 kHz combines the white-knuckle adventure of The Perfect Storm with the dark humor and deadpan wit of Chuck Palahniuk to create an absorbing tale of search-and-rescue. David Masiel introduces us to a compelling antihero who is only one step away from either destruction or salvation.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Random House Inc
• Date d'édition: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375506063
• ISBN 13: 9780375506062
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 288