Sea Lord

by Bernard Cornwell

  Yet this new waypoint was close, suggesting that I was being guided to the rendezvous itself. My enemies, I reasoned, would not trust the conjunction of two courses to define the rendezvous, for the crossing of two invisible lines drawn across the sea left too much room for error. Either of the boats could overshoot the mark, and the Decca would never betray that overshoot. Instead the careful, clever mind that had prepared this meeting would have made the rendezvous the waypoint itself, for the silicon chips inside the Decca were designed to take a boat to that exact spot. If I passed the waypoint the Decca would tell me, if I went too far to port or starboard, the Decca would tell me. The Decca was taking the four million pounds home, but the Decca was also telling me exactly where my enemies waited. They had set an ambush, but, to make their ambush foolproof, they had been forced to tell the victim just where it was placed. I knew where they were, and they did not know where I was. All they knew was that by some electronic trickery I should sail docilely into their grip.

  So God damn their cleverness, because it might yet let me win.

  I watched the Decca like a hawk. The tide was quickening, helping me. My speed over the ground inched up. Three knots, 3.1, 3.5. The distance decreased fast. I went too far to port and the Decca told me, so I took Marianne back until the little box said I was aiming true. Three point eight knots, then four, and I began looking about Marianne for a weapon. There was the Decca aerial itself, a whiplike thing, but it would be clumsy to carry, and I needed to keep it in place till the very last minute. I wondered if I could wrench the drive shaft from the outboard motor, but knew it would be a hopeless task without tools. So I had nothing but the two mooring ropes.

  I also had cleverness, except that I wasn’t being very clever, for Garrard must have known roughly what time I should reach the waypoint. Thanks to the tide I had little choice but to approach from the north, but I could control the time of my arrival, yet now I was doing exactly what he had been told to expect. He was waiting for me, and I needed to stretch his nerves in this cold dark, so I turned Marianne on to a broad reach that took her eastwards. I knew Garrard wouldn’t give up; I was carrying four million good reasons why he wouldn’t give up.

  And why, I wondered, was Garrard trusted to collect the money? I could understand why Elizabeth would not get close to the transaction herself, but why trust a crook? I would not have trusted Garrard with four pence, let alone four million pounds in bonds. The only answer I could devise was that Elizabeth was relying on Garrard’s lack of seamanship. He had a boat and, doubtless, a Decca like mine. If he followed the Decca’s pre-programmed instructions, he would be safe, but if he struck out on his own he would be lost in some of the world’s most dangerous waters. To the east lay a lee shore, to the west and south were the rocks about the islands and the savage rocks of the Minkies, while to the north lay the fearsome tidal races of Alderney and the Swinge. That thought gave me a new confidence; I was the seaman out here, and that had to be worth something.

  “Fifteen,” Garrard said again, perhaps an hour after he transmitted the instruction. “Fifteen.”

  So he was nervous, and he was wondering why the lamb hadn’t turned up at the slaughterhouse on time. He’d be fidgeting at the waypoint, staring northwest into the black void, and wondering if everything had gone wrong. I sailed on eastwards. Let the bastard worry.

  The Decca continually updated the waypoint’s bearing. I went on sailing east long after the waypoint was due south from me. I sailed on for what I guessed was a further hour, and only then did I let Marianne run south and west. The Decca gave me the course, pointing an invisible line to my revenge.

  Now, once more, the distance to the waypoint began shortening. The tide was helping me, and Marianne was making 4.5 knots over the ground. Two miles to go, 1.9. The wind had picked up. It was blowing against the tide with just enough force to make small bad-tempered waves over which Marianne’s light hull bounced sickeningly.

  At one mile to go I dropped the mainsail. I let it fall roughly over the boom. My speed dropped. I let the jib sheet fly and waited till I was sure we were dead in the water, then, as the boat wallowed drunkenly, I crouched by the Decca. I wanted to know exactly how the tide was flowing. Marianne herself was not moving in relation to the water, but the sea itself was sweeping us south at half a knot. The drift was not exactly south. The Decca said our present course was 144, which was east of south. I needed to know that tidal direction if the half-plan in my head stood any chance of working. That half-plan also needed the luck of the devil.

  I hauled in the jib so that we ghosted onwards. The Decca told me Marianne had one mile to sail, then her job was done. I stared into the black fog seeking a hint of shadow, a sharper edge of darkness amid the night, a light; anything that would betray my enemies.

  I was looking, but I heard them first.

  Classical music. Vivaldi, I thought.

  I rammed the tiller hard to port so that Marianne came slowly round. I tied off the tiller. Marianne was sailing a point north of west now, and I crouched by the Decca again, waiting till the machine told me that the waypoint was bearing exactly 144 degrees from me. Once it did, I went topsides, unlashed the tiller, and let the jib fall on to the foredeck. I was a quarter-mile from my enemies, drifting towards their soft, betraying noise. Marianne rocked to the waves as the sweet sound came intermittently across the water. Now I was drifting to the ambush, carried there by the weakening tide. And still I stared southwards.

  And saw the light, and knew where I was.

  The light flashed fast, nothing but a pearled flicker in the fog.

  The flicker was so hazed by the vapour that the quick flashes were reduced to mere dissipated blinks, but I could see it was a white light flashing nine times in quick succession.

  A cardinal buoy. A buoy marking a hazard, and there was only one such buoy I could think of in this part of the sea. If I was right, we were four or five miles off the French coast, hard by the shoaling rocks called Les Trois Grunes which were marked by a single cardinal buoy which lay to the west of the dangerous bank. I was relying on my memory of the old days when Charlie and I had made these waters our hunting territory.

  That the buoy was the rendezvous made absolute sense. Garrard, I suspected, was no seaman. For him to jockey a boat against wind and tide to hold it motionless at an exact point in the sea would be an impossible job, even with the Decca’s help. Instead he had been guided to this lonely buoy to which, doubtless, he had made his boat fast.

  The light flickered again, and this time I saw the boat which was indeed moored illegally to the buoy. She was a low-sterned working boat with a wheelhouse behind a raised foredeck. She must have been close to thirty feet long; a substantial boat, well-engined, sturdy, and solid enough to give its unfamiliar crew a sense of safety. I blinked as another light showed, this one a searchlight that flickered out into the fog. So Garrard was risking his night vision as well as his hearing. Put not your trust in killers, I thought, unless they’re good seamen. I wouldn’t want to meet Garrard on land, but out here he was in my cold world, not his.

  I closed Marianne’s companionway, leaving the money below. I took the coiled rope from the cockpit sole and wrapped it round my waist. We were drifting towards the workboat and even the night-blinded Garrard must see us soon, so it was time to go. I took a breath, then lowered myself over Marianne’s port side.

  The water was very cold. It might have been late summer, but the Channel waters can still strike to the heart like an icepick. I shivered and shuddered, but I had to depend on unsettling my ambushers. I’d frayed their nerves by coming late, now I must fray them further by a vanishing act.

  I breaststroked away from Marianne. The tide was carrying us both southwards, but perhaps a little to the east of the buoy. I couldn’t see the light now, not from the water, but I breaststroked southwards and hoped to God that I hadn’t misjudged the tides. I was trying to keep pace with the drifting Marianne, but staying far enough away from her so tha
t I would not be seen when she was discovered. The rope about my waist was absorbing the water and threatening to drag me down.

  A bank of fog closed round me, hiding even Marianne from me. I trod water. The rope was getting heavy and I felt a moment of panic that I had already been swept past the cardinal buoy, but then I saw the nine flashes hazing in the fog and heard the small waves slapping at the hull of the big waiting boat. The searchlight stabbed out again, its beam swallowed and scattered by the fog, but this time Marianne’s red hull reflected dimly and I heard a shout. The music was abruptly switched off. “Get up front!” The voice was Garrard’s, clear as a bell. I could see two men on board the workboat; clearly the old firm of Garrard and Peel had come to finish their work.

  I swam southwards. I could hear Garrard shouting. He had assumed I was on board Marianne and now ordered me to steer for his boat. I was shivering. A drift of fog hid their boat from me, then I heard its motor choke into life and I feared being left in the cold water and turned desperately towards the noise and the now blinding flash of the cardinal buoy.

  Garrard must have cast off from the buoy and was now edging his big boat towards the wallowing Marianne. My estimate of the tidal drift had been good, but not so accurate that the small yacht would have drifted directly on to the buoy, and thus Garrard had been forced to go to her. He only needed to travel about fifteen yards. The two boats were east of me and I swam hard, going close by the tall yellow-and-black buoy that heaved up on the short choppy seas. Its intermittent light strobed on the workboat’s stern that was now just a few yards ahead of me. I heard a splintering thump as Garrard misjudged his approach and laid his boat’s bows into Marianne’s hull, then his engine subsided into a soft thumping growl. A man – from his size and weight I guessed him to be Peel – was on the workboat’s foredeck with a boathook. Then, when he brought it to his shoulder, I saw it wasn’t a boathook, but a shotgun or rifle.

  I swam a little closer. My teeth were chattering.

  “Can’t see the bugger.” That was Peel.

  “He’s inside.” Garrard was sheltering from the night’s cold in the workboat’s brightly lit wheelhouse. I saw him light a cigarette, then I swam under the workboat’s counter and lost sight of him. The cardinal buoy flashed behind and, in its quick light, I saw the workboat’s name painted above my head: Mist-Spinner of Poole.

  Christ, but it was cold. The cold was slowing me. My wounded ankles were numb. I’d planned to climb aboard their boat somehow when they were busy with Marianne, but I doubted I would have the strength to make that climb. It sounds easy, climbing aboard a boat, but in a choppy sea it can take an immense effort without a helping hand or a boarding ladder. The workboat’s platform was long and low, an easy enough gunwale to climb, but not when you’re cold and weak.

  “Get on board!” Garrard shouted. I guessed Peel was somehow clinging to Marianne’s shrouds, holding her alongside Mist-Spinner and fearful of making the jump between the unevenly moving hulls. “Tie her up first, for Christ’s sake!” Garrard’s temper was clearly at snapping point, but he must have turned on the searchlight to help his companion for I saw its reflection hazed in the fog all around me. “Drop the bloody gun, you fool! Tie her up, then get on board!”

  They couldn’t see me. They were blinded by their searchlight, and too intent on trying to lash the two bumping boats together. “Now jump!” I heard Garrard shout from his warm wheelhouse.

  I was under Mist-Spinner’s stern. She was bucking up and down and I feared that her transom might crush down on my head. A foot above her waterline was an empty outboard bracket which I tried to hold on to for support. I missed the first time and the hull grazed agonisingly down my left arm. I grabbed again, held it, and gasped for breath.

  I had to work fast, but it was hard. Mist-Spinner’s pitching threatened to pull my left arm out of its socket, but I held on while, with my right hand, I untwisted the rope from my waist. It was a heavy piece of old-fashioned manila; really nothing but a discarded piece of junk, but perfect for my purposes. Except my fingers were now so numb that I did not know if I could do what I had planned. I fumbled the rope, almost dropped it once, but finally managed to drape the rope over the outboard bracket. I took a deep breath, kept hold of the rope’s end with my left hand, then ducked under the heaving stern.

  I struggled forward, found nothing, took a numbing blew from the dropping hull on my left shoulder, and had to come back up for air. I took another deep breath, ducked again, and kicked my way forward under Mist-Spinner’s stern. The metal rudder scraped against my bruised and bleeding shoulder. It was black here, black and freezing and airless and frightening. Tons of thumping boat were rising and falling above me. I felt forward with my right hand and found what I wanted. A three-bladed propeller mounted amidships. Which meant just a single engine driving just this single prop. The engine was still in neutral and its throbbing seemed to fill the claustrophobic darkness with menace.

  I dragged the rope behind me. I was holding on to the propeller which was vibrating with the rhythm of the idling motor. If Garrard put the boat into gear now I’d lose my hand.

  I forced the rope into the narrow space between the propeller and the rudder. I was desperate for air, but I needed to fasten the rope first. I looped it over the upright blade, hitched it round once more, then dragged myself back and bobbed up to the surface where I gulped air into my lungs.

  “He’s not here.” That was Peel’s voice. I was gasping for breath, sure I would be heard, but they were too intent on their own concerns.

  “Of course he’s there!” Garrard snarled.

  “He’s bloody not.”

  “Then look for the damned money!”

  I ducked down again, went forward, and this time, because I knew where the propeller was, I had more time to work. I had time, but fear and cold were making me clumsy. I remembered some old rules for bad moments at sea; don’t hurry and do one thing at a time. I might be freezing and terrified, but all I had to do was work the thick rope round and round Mist-Spinner’s propeller blades. Barnacles on her hull scraped my back bloody as I stuffed handfuls of the heavy manila into the blade gaps. I finished the job by putting two turns of the rope about the rudder’s stock, then, my lungs bursting with pain, I pushed myself back and upwards. Christ, I thought as I broke water, I must give up smoking.

  “The money’s here, but he must have fallen off and drowned,” Peel shouted from Marianne.

  “I don’t give a damn where he is,” Garrard said. “Just get back here!”

  I was gripping the outboard bracket at Mist-Spinner’s stern. My lungs hurt, my back was stinging, and I was cold, but I knew I must push myself away from the hull before Garrard put his engine into gear. I knew he would probably use reverse gear to back away from Marianne and, if I had done a proper job, Mist-Spinner wouldn’t move, but I still didn’t want to risk the rope shredding, the propeller biting, and me being driven under her hull.

  “Put it down and shut up,” Garrard shouted from above me, “and untie that boat! Hurry!”

  I had already paddled three or four yards clear of Mist-Spinner’s stern. I heard Peel shout that the yacht was free and I saw Garrard glance behind, as if he was reversing a truck, then he pulled the gear lever back and I heard the motor roar.

  Then stop dead.

  It just stopped. The gearing had transferred the engine’s power to the shaft, but the propeller was held fast by the rope I had jammed about the blades, and the sudden resistance stopped the motor with a brutal abruptness. There was a second’s silence, then Garrard swore, put the gear lever into neutral, and turned the starting key. The engine backfired, then settled into life. A billow of black smoke drifted over me. Garrard pulled the lever back and again the motor was jarred dead.

  “Fucking thing’s broke!” Peel offered helpfully.

  Garrard cursed the engine and started it again. He left it in neutral while it settled into a steady rhythm. I had swum back to the stern and was once again ho
lding on to the outboard bracket. I could see Marianne drifting away as Garrard raced the Mist-Spinner’s engine, achieving nothing except a cloud of burnt oil that added to the fog. Then, when the engine was racing, he shoved it into gear.

  It stopped dead.

  “Christ Al-bloody-mighty,” Garrard swore viciously.

  I was praying he would not try to jar the motor into gear again, for, each time he did so, he put a killing strain on the engine. If he persisted, time and again, in forcing its brute power against the jammed propeller then he could shear the crankshaft. Then all of us would be stranded on this foggy lee shore. I glanced behind to see we had drifted a good two hundred yards from the cardinal buoy. Its light was again hazed by fog. I knew we could not be far from the rocks of Les Trois Grunes. I also knew the tide set was swinging and weakening, and, though the tide should take us south of the hazard, the wind was a counterforce that might just be driving us on to the danger. A seaman would have realised the danger, but Garrard and Peel were no seamen.

  I heard the engine cover being lifted.

  “All right, Mr Garrard!” Peel shouted.

  The engine started. In neutral, without the obstructed propeller, it ran sweetly.

  “Sounds all right,” Peel said hopefully.

  Garrard rammed it into gear.

  The engine stopped dead.

  Garrard let loose a string of curses. They were amateurs, their engine was broken, and they didn’t know what to do. A seaman would have realised there was an outboard bracket on Mist-Spinner’s stern for just such emergencies and swum to retrieve Marianne so that her engine could be utilised, but Garrard and Peel didn’t think of that. They were already in the spiral of self-feeding panic that causes most disasters at sea: one apparently small thing goes wrong, then another, and slowly, inexorably, the tragedies mount up. On land neither man would have been so prey to fear, but out here the unfamiliar cold and dark and sea-danger had unbalanced their susceptibilities.