Chapter 77 - The Run to the White City
We didn't take a lifeboat. That would have triggered the ship's automated distress beacon and brought every Spanish and Moroccan patrol boat down on our heads within twenty minutes.
Instead, the mate took three thousand euros in crisp Swiss franc notes from Lind’s emergency roll and led us down to the ship’s waste disposal ramp at the water level near the engine exhaust. Tethered to the staging platform was a heavy-duty service skiff—an aluminum workboat with a thirty-horsepower pull-start motor used for painting the waterline.
We dropped into the skiff just as the freighter's general alarm began to wail across the upper decks. The second engineer had made his call.
Lind yanked the starter cord. The small motor sputtered, coughed, and caught with a rattle that sounded deafening against the ship’s hull. We peeled away from the *Navegador*, heading directly toward the white, sun-bleached terraces of Tangier climbing the hills three miles away.
The morning sun broke through the coastal haze, turning the Mediterranean into blinding silver. Behind us, the bulk carrier continued its slow crawl toward the strait, but from the European shore, two fast-moving white hulls were already angling out from Tarifa, cutting across the blue toward our trajectory.
"Moroccan waters start at the three-mile buoy," Lind shouted, crouching low behind the skiff's tiny steering console. "If we hit the harbor before they intercept, Spanish jurisdiction ends!"
The skiff bounced violently over the wake of an outbound ferry. My back screamed with pain, my clothes were stiff with dried salt, and my hands were blistered. But looking ahead at the ancient stone ramparts of the old port, an electric clarity took hold of me.
For thirty years, I had worried about school lunches, PTA meetings, lawn care, Caleb's dental work, and Tori’s passive-aggressive insults at Thanksgiving. I had made myself small so that other people could feel comfortable.
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Now, running an open boat between two continents with a multi-million-dollar bounty on my head, I had never felt more awake.
"Hold on!" Lind yelled as the skiff cleared the harbor breakwater, shooting past colorful wooden fishing boats and slamming into the sandy shallows near the ancient stone steps of the Bab el-Bahr gate.
