Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  I sailed on. The radio had gone silent, and I guessed that I had passed the first test by following the first instructions. I cleared the Platte Fougere light at the northern end of the Little Russel and felt the western swell lifting Marianne’s frail hull. The wind was light but steady, the air was warm.

  “Thirty-six,” the voice said from the radio, and there was something oddly familiar and annoyingly complacent about that voice. I was feeling rebellious, so I didn’t obey, and a moment later the number was repeated, and this time I noticed that the intonation of the repeated message was exactly the same as when the number had first been transmitted. I also recognised the voice; it belonged to a girl who read out the marine forecasts on Radio Four. My opponents had taped her, chopped the numbers from her forecasts, and were now playing me those numbers over the air.

  Damn their cleverness.

  Waypoint thirty-six took me on a course fine into the southwesterly wind. Marianne was too light to head up into wind so I started the engine and let the sails hang while the propeller plugged me into the sea’s small chop. The new course would take me plumb through a score of boats which fished for bass off the island’s northern reefs. Any one of those boats could contain my enemies, yet I was helpless to determine which, if any, it might be. I deliberately steered close to some of the boats, yet all looked innocent. A woman waved to me from one boat, while a man on another called out that it was a fine day.

  “Twenty-five,” the voice said.

  I’d been given that waypoint before and knew it lay due north. I let Marianne’s head fall off the wind, hardened her into a reach, then stopped the engine. The waypoint number wasn’t repeated which meant they must have been watching me, for they only repeated the transmissions when I failed to obey. And that annoyed me. They were training me, programming me. I had become a rat in a maze of invisible electronic commands that spanned the sea, and their game was to spin me round the maze till I was tired, hungry and ready to be slaughtered.

  “Six,” said the voice, which took me northwest.

  “Eighteen.” Which took me a few points north of east.

  “Thirteen.” An unlucky number, but which merely took me west.

  “Eighty-four.” A brief curtsey to the southeast, then they gave me twenty-five again to send me reaching northwards once more.

  They played with me for two hours. At first I could divine no pattern in the commands. I sailed towards every point of the compass, but was never given enough time to reach the invisible waypoint which lay at the end of the required course. Always, and usually within a mile of the last command, I would be made to change my heading. Gradually, though, I was being pushed northwards, zigzagging away from the fading coast. I was being sent into the empty sea, far from any help. My mouth was dry, but at least the humid air was warm on my naked skin.

  “Forty-four.” The voice broke into my thoughts.

  Well practised now, I pressed the Decca buttons. Waypoint forty-four lay fifty miles off on a bearing of 100, virtually due east, which would place it somewhere on the Cherbourg Peninsula, so clearly waypoint forty-four was not my rendezvous. Yet, for the first time since I had cleared the Little Russel, my controllers let me sail on undisturbed. By now they must have been confident that I presented no danger to their careful plans. They had made me sail in a random pattern, and they must have watched till they were satisfied that no ships followed my intricate manoeuvres, so now the real business of the day could begin. They must, I thought, be unaware of my shepherding plane which was far off to the west.

  The radio stayed silent as Marianne held her eastwards course. To the north I could see the sails of two yachts running away from me towards the Alderney Race, while to the south the islands of Sark and Guernsey were a dark blur on a hazed horizon. Behind me, in the west, a plane droned aimlessly about the sky, while to the east was nothing but the game’s ending, death or revenge, and the waiting night.

  I lost track of time, except for a rough estimate gained from the sun’s decline. I was thirsty as hell.

  The tide was ebbing from the east. There had been a time when these waters had been a playground for Charlie and me, and, in those happy days, we’d learned the vagaries of the notorious Channel Island tides. Marianne and I were fighting a neap tide, the weakest, but it was still like trying to run up a down escalator. I knew I’d have a couple more hours of contrary tide before a period of slack, after which the set would come strong from the north.

  So we just plugged on. Marianne wasn’t quick, and she wasn’t elegant, but I was beginning to feel fond of her. She was, after all, my boat, if only for this one day. We received no more waypoints, but just stemmed the tide, always heading east. By low water, when the tidal force subsided, we were quite alone. We had crossed the passage line for boats coming from Cherbourg down to Guernsey. We were also well out of sight of land, which suggested there would be no more radio transmissions for a while.

  The wind was light, but the long western swell was carrying the spiteful remnants of an Atlantic storm. Sunflower would not have noticed such small waves, but Marianne was light and short enough to suffer. She slapped her way across the crests and plunged hard down into shallow troughs. I had lifted her centreboard to add a half-knot to her speed, but the higher centre of gravity also made her roll like a blue-water yacht running before the trade winds. After living on Sunflower so long it seemed odd to be in such a cramped and low cockpit. I’d never thought of Sunflower as a big yacht, but compared to Marianne she had been a leviathan.

  My aerial escort stayed in fitful touch. The pilot did not stay close to me, but rather he would fly a course which crossed mine, disappear, then come back a few minutes later. It wasn’t always the same plane. Sometimes it was a single-engined high-winged model, and at other times it was a sleek machine with an engine nacelle on each wing. I imagined Harry Abbott plotting my course in the police station, the map-pins creeping east towards the French coast.

  East and south, for the Decca betrayed the first twitch of the new tidal surge. From now until deep into the night the water would pour round the Cap de la Hague to fill the Channel Islands basin. I put our head to the north to compensate for the new drift, and knew that from now on I would be steering more and more northerly just to keep my easterly progress constant. Marianne’s speed over the sea bed slowed and, because we were now showing some beam to the ragged swell, we began to roll uncomfortably, so I sacrificed yet more speed by dropping the centreboard. The board damped the rolling a little, but Marianne was still tender, and every few minutes we would slam down into a trough and the water would come shattering back over the deck. If the game didn’t end soon, I thought, then I’d be in for a cold wet night.

  But it wasn’t my game, it belonged to someone else, and they’d planned it well. Sometime in the early evening I saw the southern and eastern horizons misting. At first I dared to hope it was just a distant bank of cloud, but I soon knew the truth; that it was a rolling wall of fog. My enemies must have chosen today because the weather forecast had warned against fog, and it was somewhere inside that thick, shrouding, sea-hugging cloud that the game’s ending would be played out. I knew that once I was inside the fog my shepherding aircraft would be useless, and even the Navy’s radar would be fortunate to find such a tiny boat as Marianne.

  Harry must have shared my fear for, when I was scarcely a mile from the fog bank, the twin-engined plane dropped out of the sky like a dive-bomber, levelled above the sea, and raced towards me. The pilot flashed bright landing lights as if I hadn’t already seen him. The machine roared so close above me that its backwash of air set Marianne’s sails aback. She was so light and tender that she threatened to heel right over, but somehow steadied herself.

  He came back again, but this time he flew slower and well to one side of me. I looked up to catch a glimpse of Harry’s ugly face. He was gesturing westwards, indicating that he wanted me to turn back. The plane roared on, banked and turned again towards me. Once more Harry pointed
westwards.

  I looked back. A tiny grey smear broke the horizon, and I guessed that the Royal Navy patrol boat was, after all, keeping me company. The Navy must have been shadowing me from below the horizon, kept in touch by the aircraft reports, but now the fast patrol boat was accelerating towards me to make sure I obeyed Harry’s orders. He feared for my safety in that clinging, hiding fog, or perhaps, and this struck me as a more likely explanation, Sir Leon feared I’d use the fog to sail away with four million pounds’ worth of unregistered bonds.

  I waved reassuringly to Harry, shoved Marianne’s tiller hard over, brought her into wind, and started the motor. The plane flew over me, waggled its wings in approval of my obedience in turning back, then climbed away. Marianne’s outboard pushed us west. The patrol boat seemed to come no closer. So far as Harry was concerned the day’s excitement was over and all we could do was lick our wounds and hope our enemies tried again.

  Only I wasn’t buying that safe course. I had a girl to revenge and a curiosity to assuage, so I waited till I could hardly see the plane, then I turned Marianne again. I let the sails out to catch the faltering wind, and throttled the motor hard up. Now it was a race between me and the patrol boat, but I’d gained some precious time by my pretended compliance, and it would be some minutes before the Naval boat was certain that I really had turned back to the east. I pulled the centreboard up to add that precious ounce of speed and raced for the fog which was much closer now, scarcely a half-mile away, and rolling fast towards me from the south. It looked white and pretty, but I knew what waited inside.

  I watched westwards rather than east. Sure enough, after a few minutes, I saw a bow wave flash beneath the distant grey dot. The race was on now: one crummy little French yacht made of plywood and glue against the turbines of a fast patrol boat. Except the crummy little yacht was already so close to the concealing fog.

  The first tendrils of the fog wisped past me and I felt the instant drop in temperature. The fog had been formed by warm air over cold sea, but the vapour stole all the day’s warmth and it felt as if I had gone from summer into instant winter. I kept the motor at full throttle, banging Marianne’s light bows across the choppy waves. I looked behind to see the fog wrapping about me. I kept on my course, but, after a minute or so, I looked up and saw my mast-tip hidden in the vapour so I turned hard to port so that I was travelling behind the moving face of the fog bank and into the tide. I was hoping that my pursuers would presume that I had turned downtide to add the water’s speed to my own. The outboard motor suddenly seemed very loud. I counted the seconds. One minute passed, two, then I turned off the engine and let Marianne drift.

  Silence.

  Already my sails, boom and sheets were beaded with moisture. It was a grandfather of fogs, this one, a thick grey horror that restricted visibility to less than thirty yards. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees.

  Marianne rocked in the waves. There was wind in the fog, enough to slap her wet sails about, so I sheeted her in and turned her bows northeast. I let most of the power slip from the sails so I could listen for the Naval vessel.

  Silence again.

  Then, apparently not far off my starboard bow, I heard the sound of engines idling. I knew the apparent closeness of the sound could be deceiving for noise does strange things in fog. The Naval crew might be a hundred yards to port or a mile to starboard. The only certainty was that they would be concentrating on their radar, but, without a reflector in Marianne’s rigging, my sails and wooden mast offered them lousy echoes that would be further confused by the water-soaked air. The wavetops were probably reflecting as much as Marianne.

  It was dark, cold and dank in the fog. If it had not been for the compass I would have been lost in minutes, but I crept onwards. I was steering northeast, but the tide’s effect was to drive me almost due east. I imagined the patrol boat would be idling along on scarce-turning engines, making a box-search in the whiteness. My hope was that I’d decoyed them into going too far south, then I dared to hope that I might have escaped them altogether by crossing the invisible line which separated British waters from French. That was a happy thought which I celebrated by rubbing my hand along the underside of the boom, then licking the condensation off my palm. I was parched, and the fresh water tasted good.

  The patrol boat’s engines suddenly roared, faded, roared again. I swivelled in alarm, but saw nothing. A moment later I thought I saw the patrol boat’s lean dark shape in the fog, but the dark shape was just a phantom of the fog which roiled and faded. A ship’s bell clanged, apparently from the port side. I heard a distant voice shouting and I wondered whether the game was over. Had they found Garrard and Peel? Was that it? Had Harry been cleverer than my opponents and already made his arrests? Was Elizabeth sitting in a police interview room, protesting her nobility? That thought almost tempted me to shout a reply, but there was only one way to be sure of this game’s ending, and that was to see it through, and so I kept silent and let my little boat sail on.

  After a half hour or so I hauled in the sheets to power the sails, and Marianne began to slam her hollow bows. This was a fog such as Charlie had described that morning; a fog that did not blanket a wind, but was carried by it. The fogs on this coast could come with gale force; ship-killing winds cloaked in invisibility, and this light southwesterly air would never clear such a fog, but merely stir it. I judged from our wake that we were making close to three knots and knew Marianne would go no faster without her engine.

  I heard nothing more of the patrol boat. Maybe an hour passed, maybe more. The only hint of time was the slow darkening of the fog as it went from pearl grey to dirty smoke. My evasive action had taken me too far to port and the Decca was telling me to steer a good fifteen points further south. I obeyed it. I still didn’t use the engine in case the patrol boat had not given up the chase. Another hour passed and the dirty grey turned into wet gloom. I didn’t see the patrol boat again, nor hear him. I was alone. There was neither radar nor human eye, neither boat nor aircraft to watch me, there was only the dumb instructions of the Decca beckoning me on into the darkening fog.

  It was a lonely place. Lonely and cold and frightening. The sea had lost all colour to become a dull grey and black broken by a few feeble whitecaps. Sometimes I would sail into a less dense patch of fog, but always the wraith-like clouds wrapped around us again, and sometimes so thickly that I completely lost sight of Marianne’s stemhead. Once night came it was as if we sailed in a thick, black and silent limbo. There was no light in the compass, no moon could penetrate this fog, and the stars were hidden. It was dark, but not quite silent; waves slapped against my thin hull, the frayed ropes rasped in their blocks and the mast creaked, but there was none of the sea’s great noise because the fog absorbed it all. It also dampened my matches, but I managed to light a pipeful of tobacco with the last useful match.

  I was cold, and beginning to think I was wasting my time. Perhaps Harry had won, and all I now did was sail blindly towards the treacherous coast north of Carteret. Surely by now, I reasoned, my enemies would have revealed themselves, but nothing untoward disturbed the thick, blank night. The pipe went out. I tried to light another match, but they were useless. For supper I scraped moisture off the boom, trickled it into my cupped palm, and lapped like a dog. I slapped my arms about my chest to keep warm, but still shivered.

  “Fifteen,” said a voice on the radio, and the sudden word made me cry aloud in scared astonishment. It had been so long since I had been disturbed by a command, now suddenly the radio had sounded and I twitched on the thwart then stared about the darkness as though I might see my enemy. Nothing stirred in the night. It was so dark that I could not even see the fog. I was in an absolute darkness, the blackness of the blind. I could feel the fog cold on my skin, but I could see nothing.

  “Fifteen,” the voice repeated again, only this command wasn’t being transmitted in the voice of the radio announcer, but was being given in a man’s voice. “Fifteen,” he said yet
again, as though he did not trust the electronic wizardry at his command, and this time I recognised the clipped, savage tones of Garrard.

  I slid into the cabin and pressed the Decca buttons. The small illuminated numerals instructed me to head southeast towards a waypoint that was just 6.4 miles distant. That was a mere two hours’ sailing away, less with the tide’s help, and I knew I was close to the game’s end, for my enemies had been forced to abandon their first radio, the one with the tape-cassette attached, and must be using a radio aboard a boat. My killers waited there, but they lacked the assurance of my first controller for they had repeated the number three times in quick succession. They didn’t trust their machinery, and that lack of trust told me they were nervous. Garrard was a confident and able man, but perhaps he was no seaman. And perhaps he was frightened by this utter blackness above a colourless sea, and that thought gave me a pulse of hope in the cold darkness.

  Marianne’s motion was easier after we turned. Now, instead of fighting the tide set, we travelled with the water. The wind had edged southerly, so we were tight hauled, but I could hear the purposeful slap and hiss of the water at her bows that betrayed a quicker progress.

  “Fifteen,” Garrard said again, and I felt a fierce joy. He was nervous. He’d been told what to do, and he didn’t really trust the instructions. He was making sure by repetition, and that repetition betrayed his uncertainty to me. He was not at home out here, but I had spent years of my life on the ocean. It was not much of an advantage, but it was all I had; that and two lengths of rope.

  He did not transmit again. I had stopped noticing the cold because I was thinking hard, and the results of that thinking were helping my confidence. Till now, they had played with me. They had sent me on a variety of courses, but they had never once let me sail so far that I reached the waypoint to which they pointed me. They had used the courses alone and, when I had travelled far enough along any particular line, they had turned me in a new direction.