Skeletons On The Zahara by Dean King

sea. Nothing but his own escape filled his brain, but his legs were slow and dumb on the sand. The padding feet of his pursuers closed on him. He dived headfirst into the surf. The jackal followed him in.
    Riley swam underwater, holding his breath until he could no longer resist the urge to surface. As he breached, he swiveled to see where the Sahrawis were. No more than ten feet behind him bobbed the head of the jackal. Riley felt the spear plunge near his body. Just then a breaker caught the jackal and knocked him backward. Riley swam as hard as he could. He fought through the cresting waves until he felt the hands of his men grabbing his shirt. They pulled him over the stern of the Commerce.
    He collapsed on the deck.

Chapter 5
    Misery in an Open Boat
    As wind and water swept the Commerce's deck, stinging the sailors' hands and faces, they watched the Sahrawis beat and stab Michel. Finally they loaded his back with their plunder and forced him over the dunes. It was terrible to observe and cast a pall over the men. Not only were they unable to help their brutalized shipmate, but their own helplessness was driven home in the most graphic manner.
    Nevertheless, there was no time to dwell on it. Each wave hammered the longboat against the brig's hull, racking the smaller craft and jarring the tenuous deck on which they crouched. They now had to pick from their own dismal options. They could return to the shore and try to negotiate their surrender to the Sahrawis; at best they would be beaten and enslaved, like Michel, and quite possibly murdered if they gave offense. Or they could try their luck at sea in the longboat, gambling that it could weather the twenty-foot waves and stay afloat long enough for them to flag down a passing ship.
    According to Robbins, there was “long deliberation” on the question, but this certainly did not amount to more than a matter of minutes. They saw no hope in surrendering to the Sahrawis, whom they bitterly called “barbarians,” “savages,” and “merciless ruffians.” Instead, most of the talk concerned the feasibility of putting to sea in the rudderless, hastily repaired longboat. In Robbins's opinion, it was “shattered.” Riley called its condition “crazy,” a technical term in his day meaning “in bad shape,” and said it “writhed like an old basket.” Crammed with eleven men, the sixteen-foot craft would ride dangerously low in the water. They took heart in the one factor that had turned in their favor: The wind had grown more easterly, which would help them get clear of the dangerous coast. While the odds were stacked against an escape at sea, the crew opted for the element they knew best, the natural force they had wrestled with all their lives as opposed to the strange and malevolent human one on shore. They would try their luck in the longboat.
    The captain set two hands, probably the ordinary seamen Hogan and Barrett, to bailing out the longboat with buckets. He sent Porter, a strong swimmer, to the momentarily deserted beach to retrieve the two broken oars, which they needed to get through the surf.1
    Riley instructed the rest of the crew, under the two mates, to lash together some spars and rig them out over the stern of the Commerce in its lee. They were to guide the boat there and secure its bow and stern lines to the ends of the spars so that the boat was held clear from the brig. When it came time to cast off, Riley hoped, this would give them headway and prevent them from being smashed by a wave on the hull of the brig.
    Riley had much to orchestrate before they left the wreck, but he personally attended to the most important thing: securing fresh water. At the brig's hatchway, he stripped off his shirt and lowered himself into the dark abyss. Guided by touch, he moved through the trapped seawater down through the hold, now on its side, until he surfaced in a pocket of air. As he took in the strange sensations, the odd, muted shifting of the cold water,