Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Damn it,” Harry said softly. Till that moment I don’t think any of us had imagined that the money might be handed over at sea, yet the insistence on me, because I was a sailor, and the choice of Guernsey, a yachtsmen’s paradise, should have told us that the handover might be made afloat.

  “Right!” Harry was trying to regain the initiative. “Marianne! There must be a record of her. I want her photographed, and I want the registers searched. Who owns her? Who sold her? Where’s she normally berthed? Talk to the Frogs, the name sounds French. Go on! Move!”

  “I’m coming with you,” Charlie said to me.

  “No!” Sir Leon snapped.

  Charlie leaned on the table so that his big shaggy head was very close to Sir Leon’s face. “He’s my friend, and if he’s going to risk his life, I’m going with him.”

  Sir Leon was quite unmoved by Charlie’s physical proximity. “We are going to follow the instructions very precisely. I assume” – he turned to one of the Guernsey policemen – “that this boat can be followed with an aircraft?”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  “Then be so good as to arrange it, but tell your people not to make the coverage obvious.” He looked down at the notes he had made. “Are there any naval forces on the island?”

  One of the local policemen thought that a fisheries protection vessel was in the outer harbour. Sir Leon looked up at Harry. “I imagine a telephone call to London will secure their co-operation, but tell them they’re to stay out of sight of the yacht. They will have to follow directions from the covering aircraft.”

  Harry pushed buttons on his mobile phone, while Sir Leon glanced down at his notebook. Sir Leon had taken over. He was showing an impressive, natural authority, but expressing it so calmly that he radiated an air of confidence. He ticked two items off his list of notes, then offered me a cold look. “I trust, my lord, that these precautions will convince you that I am not attempting your murder?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but just glanced at his notes again. “I imagine their insistence on your wearing nothing but shorts is to make certain that you carry no weapons on board.”

  “Or a radio,” I said.

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” He sounded surprised that I might have had a notion denied to him, and even made a small note to that effect. “Quite. Well, my lord, are you willing to follow these instructions?”

  I supposed I was. I certainly hadn’t come this far to back down. The only immediate difficulty I could see was that we had four million pounds in funny money but not a single pair of shorts between us. “Give us your knife, Charlie.”

  He gave me his pen-knife and I slashed at the legs of my jeans. Once the denim was cut, they tore easily. I ripped the legs off, stepped out of them, then pulled off my shirt and deck shoes. I saw Sir Leon look at the fresh scars on my legs and give a small grimace of distaste.

  “I’m coming with you,” Charlie said stubbornly.

  He couldn’t win that argument. Both Sir Leon and Harry Abbott were against it. If we broke the rules, both men insisted, then all might be lost, so our best hope was to follow the instructions exactly. “But remember” – Harry was trying to demonstrate his own authority in the face of Sir Leon’s formidable competition – “I’ll pull you out if it looks dangerous, Johnny.”

  “I’m going to be OK, Harry.” I sounded a great deal more confident than I felt. All around me men were talking urgently into police radios, but I was the one who had to walk almost naked down the pontoon, which, I was sure, would lead me to two killers.

  “I want everyone watching!” Harry said loudly. “They’ve got a lookout here, and I want him spotted!” He turned back to me, shrugged, and pushed the attaché case towards me. “We might as well do it, Johnny.”

  I pushed my pipe, my pouch of tobacco and some matches into the seat of my sawn-off jeans, then picked up the attaché case of money. It was feather-light. “See you, Harry.”

  “One minute!” Sir Leon frowned. “These people were particular that you carried nothing but the case. Leave your pipe here, my lord.”

  I smiled very sweetly at him. “I might risk my life for your painting, Sir Leon, but I’m damned if I’ll do it without a smoke.”

  He looked into my eyes, saw he would lose, so gave a cold nod of reluctant acceptance. Harry and his men wished me luck, then Charlie walked with me across the car park to the head of the pontoon. “Are you sure about this, Johnny?”

  “Of course I’m not sure, Charlie, but what the hell else can I do?”

  “Bugger off. Leave them. It’s only a rich man and his painting. It isn’t life or death!”

  “But it is, Charlie. They tried to kill me and they damn nearly killed Jennifer. So it’s personal.”

  “You’re a fool.” His solemnity surprised me, but then he shrugged away his unnatural gloom and forced a grin on to his broad face. “We could make a run with the money?”

  “Why not?” I’d been waiting for him to make that suggestion. We both laughed, but there was suddenly nothing else to say, so I punched him on the shoulder. “Have a pint waiting for me, OK?”

  “How about one of those French birds as well?” He slapped my bare arm in friendly farewell, then stepped back.

  I knew he was watching me all the way down the pontoon, and I was touched by the worry I’d detected in him, but it was too late to turn back now. So I went on. Alone.

  Part Five

  I think I’d known from the very start that I wouldn’t follow Harry’s advice. Once I had committed myself I would not pull back at the end. I wanted to go through with it. Just like that day when I’d plunged into the heart of a gale-broken sea above the bar at Salcombe, I would risk death because, if I did not, I would prove myself a coward. I didn’t want to do this thing, but once committed, I would go as far as I could. And not just to prove that I was brave, but because of a girl who lay in foul pain on a hospital bed. I wanted to find the bastards who had done that to her, and I wanted them to regret what they had done.

  An ignoble motive, I know. These days a man is supposed to be above such stupidity. Today we’re supposed to exemplify the virtues of sympathetic understanding. We’re supposed to feel sorry for the criminal because it’s clearly his education, or his broken home, or just society itself that has driven him to crime. In short we’re supposed to eat lettuce instead of raw meat, but I’m a throwback. I’m the twenty-eighth Earl of nothing very much, but there’s still enough pride left in the nothingness to want to see my enemies wishing they hadn’t been born, and enough pride to want to tell my woman that I’d revenged her, and enough pride to go to the bitter end of a nasty little game in which I was naked and my enemies held all the cards.

  I felt truly naked as I walked barefoot down that pontoon. I knew I was being watched, not just by the police, but by one of Elizabeth’s people. That person could have been any one of the loungers on the big moored yachts, or any of the idling holiday-makers who leaned on the railings to stare down into the marina’s pool. Who were these people whom Elizabeth had found? I’d met two of them, Garrard and Peel, but who else?

  Then I saw Marianne.

  She was a filthy little boat; a home-made French job glued together out of marine ply then painted ox-blood red. You see hundreds of boats like her throughout Europe; I’d even seen a couple in the Pacific, sailed there by French youngsters who couldn’t afford anything sturdier. This boat was about eighteen feet long with a small cabin, a single mast, and an outboard motor mounted in a stern well. There was a compass mounted on her cabin roof, a grubby mainsail was roughly lashed to her boom, and a single jib was hanked to her forestay. I looked at her masthead and saw neither a radar reflector nor a VHF aerial, but, oddly, a Decca aerial was bolted just behind the outboard well. Except for the Decca, the villains had clearly found the cheapest boat they could.

  I stepped down into her cockpit. She might have been a scabby little boat, hardly fit to cross a park pond, but she was still a yacht and it felt good to be afloat agai
n. I tried the companionway and found it unlocked. The interior of the boat had been stripped bare; there were no bunks, no galley, not even a cockpit sole. The bilges were exposed and, I noted, dry. They had been swept bare and clean; evidence that whoever had provided this boat had been intent on leaving no traces.

  Yet, strangely out of place in such a bare boat, some high-tech aids had been put aboard. A Decca set was screwed to the after bulkhead and, to power it, a twelve-volt car battery rested on the ribs beside the centreboard case. There was also a hand-held VHF radio, and the existence of that radio cheered me up for it seemed to be the first mistake my enemies had made. Doubtless they had provided the radio so they could communicate with me, but it also meant that I could talk to Harry.

  I crouched inside the empty cabin and stowed the thin case of bearer bonds beside the battery, then lowered the centreboard. I noticed the Decca was already switched on, registering the latitude and longitude of St Peter Port. I left it on and picked up the radio. It was the size of a telephone handset with a short rubber-sheathed aerial and powered by internal batteries. I carried the radio up to the cockpit and ostentatiously waved it so Harry could see it. I turned it on, tuned it to Channel 16, and laid it on the back cockpit thwart.

  I opened the petrol tank of the outboard and saw I had a full tank. It was only a three-and-a-half horsepower engine, so it wouldn’t drive me more than six knots, but I guessed it would run for a long time on a full tank. The engine started on the first pull of the rope. I left it in neutral while I went forward to cast off the bow line. Marianne had not been given any springs, nor any fenders, just two warps. I cast off aft. We drifted backwards till I put the engine into gear.

  Marianne and I puttered out of the marina into the harbour. I followed the buoys round the outer perimeter, past the fuel stage, and out to the lighthouse which marks the harbour entrance. A fast patrol boat of the Navy’s Fisheries Protection Squadron was moored close to the harbour entrance. An officer stared down from the grey-painted bridge with more than usual interest as Marianne passed, and I wondered whether Harry had succeeded in co-opting the patrol boat. It had huge speed, a splendid radar and a wicked-looking gun. It would be nice to have such a vessel on my side, but its presence would clearly upset the careful ransom arrangements, so I didn’t expect to see it again.

  I gave the officer a wave, then Marianne was out of the harbour and in the Little Russel. We had no choice of which way to turn. The tide goes through the Little Russel with the force of a steam train so Marianne and I would go north, for we didn’t have the power to fight our way southwards.

  I turned north, slowed the engine, and went forward to hoist the jib. It was a rough piece of sailcloth, but I guessed it had some life left in it. I pulled up the main. Even Sunflower, after crossing the Pacific and rounding the Horn, had not had a sail so dirty, but this one drew well enough, so I went back aft and switched off the motor to save fuel. I tilted the motor up so the propeller wouldn’t drag, then sat at the tiller. The wind was a light southwesterly. It wouldn’t have moved Sunflower very far, but the small light Marianne seemed to like it. She didn’t sail badly. She chopped a bit, and she could fall off the wind very fast, but her helm eased when I trimmed her sails. I opened the cockpit lockers to find them empty. There was nothing on board except the Decca, its battery, me, a compass, a radio and four million pounds. And, I remembered, the two mooring warps. I used one to lash the tiller and coiled the other on the cockpit sole. My enemies had taken care to leave me without weapons, but I had the two ropes and perhaps they would be useful.

  A small plane was flying above St Peter Port towards Herm. It banked halfway across the Little Russel and swooped down low. The sun flashed harsh off its windscreen, then the plane was past me and climbing away. It seemed I had friends. I glanced at the radio, half expecting Harry to make contact, but it was silent. A fishing boat thumped past me. There were at least a dozen yachts in sight, one of the big hydroplane ferries was coming up from the south and a small coaster was moored off St Sampson’s. The coaster had just fired her boilers and I saw how the smoke from her funnel drooped in a sagging plume to drift low above the water. I wondered who watched me. I wondered what they had in store for me.

  Then the radio startled me. It hissed suddenly, then a woman’s stilted voice sounded loud. “Fourteen,” the voice said.

  I didn’t respond. I was tuned to Channel 16, the emergency and contact channel, so I could expect to hear a lot of stray traffic. The single word I’d heard seemed to have been broken from a longer transmission and I wondered if the radio was working properly. Then, perhaps a minute later, the voice sounded again. “Fourteen.”

  Still I didn’t react. Another minute or so passed, then the single word was patiently transmitted again. “Fourteen.” The intonation was bland, not at all insistent, almost robotic.

  It occurred to me that I’d heard no other traffic, and clearly the word meant something, so I picked up the radio and pressed the transmit button. “Station calling Marianne, station calling Marianne, identify yourself and say again. Over.” I suspected Harry would already have arranged for direction-finding gear to track down the source of any mysterious transmissions, and I wanted to make the caller speak longer to give that gear a chance. At least, I thought, the woman had used Channel 16, the emergency and calling channel, and the obvious wavelength for Harry to monitor, so all I had to do now was persuade the woman to speak for the two or three seconds it would need for the DF to spot her. “Station calling Marianne,” I transmitted again, “identify yourself and say again your message, over.”

  The radio was silent, and I began to suspect that my enemies were not so foolish as I’d thought. I tested that assumption by pressing the transmitter button again. “St Peter Port Radio, St Peter Port Radio, this is yacht Marianne, yacht Marianne. Radio check please. Over.”

  There was no answer. I switched to Channel 62, St Peter Port Radio’s working channel, and asked for a radio check again.

  Nothing. Which meant the radio wasn’t transmitting. It could receive, but it wouldn’t transmit. The clever bastards, I thought, the clever, clever bastards, and I began to turn the dial back to Channel 16 when the radio, ignoring the fact that I was flicking the tuner across the channels, sounded once more. “Fourteen,” said the toneless voice.

  So not only had the enemy made sure that I couldn’t transmit, but they had by-passed the tuner so that the radio was permanently fixed on an unidentifiable channel. It could have been any one of the fifty-five public channels, or one of a dozen private channels, or they might even have installed an American channel into the radio. Doubtless Harry was combing the VHF bands to find any transmissions that sounded suspect, but I was beginning to have a great respect for the people who had designed this voyage and I did not see Harry succeeding quickly.

  “Fourteen,” the woman’s voice said a moment later.

  So what the hell did that mean? It clearly wasn’t a course. A buoy perhaps? I looked around to see if there were any numbered buoys in sight, and then the solution struck me. Marianne had been stripped to functional bareness, yet someone had thought fit to install a very expensive Decca set. That wasn’t there for decoration. Whoever was transmitting to me was providing me with a waypoint. These people were not just clever; they were very clever. They had doubtless programmed the Decca with ninety-nine waypoints scattered randomly throughout the Channel Islands and they could use the waypoints to send me skittering about the sea while they made sure I was not being followed. Finally, when they were certain that I was alone, they would use the Decca to point me towards the rendezvous. Instead of public telephones, they were using invisible points in a vast sea.

  I crouched in the low cabin. The instruction book for the Decca was jammed behind the power-lead, but it was the same brand of set as the one I’d possessed for such a brief time on Sunflower, and that made me remember Jennifer’s childish delight in the machine. I said a brief prayer that I would one day share that childi
sh delight with her again, then punched the buttons for waypoint fourteen. The machine blinked, then ordered a course of 089 to reach a point 12.4 nautical miles away.

  I went back to the cockpit. If I went more than a half-mile on a heading of 089 I’d pile Marianne on to the rocks of Herm, but I turned nevertheless. I let out the main sheet and Marianne picked up her dowdy skirts and fairly flew in front of the wind. I watched the shore approach.

  “Twenty-five,” the girl’s voice said a few minutes before I would have struck rock.

  I rammed the tiller hard over to bring Marianne swivelling round into the wind. I left her hove-to while I went down to the cabin and asked the Decca where to go. Waypoint twenty-five was ten miles due north. I wondered whether to compensate for magnetic north. The Decca could have been giving me a true course, pointing me at the North Pole, or perhaps it had the magnetic correction programmed in so that its instructions would match my compass. I decided my enemies had thought of everything else, so why should I guess the compass correction for them. I’d trust their machinery and see where it took me.

  I eased Marianne’s head round, and settled back on a reach. The tide was with me, sweeping us north towards the open sea. I looked up and saw my attendant plane circling high above. And where, I wondered, was the girl who was transmitting the waypoint numbers? She had to be within my view, for a VHF will only work within line of sight, but it was hopeless to look, for she could have been on any of the score of boats within view, or on Guernsey, or on the smaller islands of Herm and Sark that lie to the east of the Little Russel.