Assignment - Lowlands

by Edward S. Aarons

  The phone clicked.

  “Yes? Yes?”

  It was the fat man’s impatient voice. Durell introduced himself quickly and was gratified that the engineer remembered him; he asked his questions about charts that might show where Groote Kerk Lighthouse had been once.

  “Eh? Eh? What’s this all about it, anyway? Why is it so popular suddenly, eh?” Moejiker shouted into the phone.

  “Has anyone else been inquiring about it?” Durell asked.

  “Hah! Naturally! Quite a charmer, too.”

  “The girl I was with yesterday? Miss Van Horn?”

  “No, no. I’m talking about the widow. Haven’t you heard? General von Uittal was killed last night, and she’s sailing around on his yacht like a queen. Looks like one, too.”

  Durell said thinly: “Then Frau von Uittal has been to see you about your old charts, too?”

  “Of course, of course. Only half an hour ago. A charming lady. Absolutely charming.” The Dutchman chuckled his fat man’s rumbling, belly-shaking chuckle. “She charmed me out of several of my old maps.”

  “Did any of them show the location of Groote Kerk Light?”

  “Some, yes. That’s what I said. Haven’t you been listening, man? Quite useless, you know. And I could see no reason not to oblige her, since she wants to cruise these waters safely, and has had several narrow squeaks, as she says, with the tidal channels. It doesn’t seem she plans to go in for lengthy mourning, eh? Hah! If at all. Women today are not quite respectful, I must say—”

  “Listen,” Durell interrupted anxiously. “Do you know where Groote Kerk Light used to be located?”

  “Certainly I do. What do you take me for? She didn’t ask about it specifically, you understand. Only for the area charts ten miles south-southeast of Scheersplaat, quadrant twelve.”

  “Well, where is that?”

  “Mynheer, I thought you knew. At low tide, you could have seen it yourself, yesterday. Due south of where we found Marius Wilde’s body at the end of the dike, eh? In three hours, you’ll see the ruins of the Groote Kerk Light when the tide ebbs just right. But look here, what is it all about? If you can help me to help the widow, I’d be eternally grateful, you know—”

  “You say she was there half an hour ago?”

  “Right here, yes, but—”

  “Thanks,” Durell said. “Goodbye.”

  He hung up.

  He took the Gunderhof Hotel station-wagon bus to Amschellig in order to conceal himself in the crowded traffic from Inspector Flaas’ men. In Amschellig he got off at the municipal pier and walked to where the Suzanne was berthed. Wherever she had been earlier, she was back again.

  Several anglers in shorts and knitted shirts were fishing from the end of the stone pier. An ice-cream vendor with a bicycle cart jingled by, followed by a troop of hungry children. It was hot in the afternoon sun. The Suzanne was now moored opposite the ferry shed, but the Scheersplaat ferry was gone, and there was no activity in the area. The scars on the sloop’s side had been painted over, her deck tidied, her sails neatly furled. There did not seem to be anyone aboard when Durell stepped over the rail.

  “Trinka?” he called.

  The busy harbor echoed with the rattle of an outboard motor, the hum of voices carried over the water, the pulse of traffic. But the sloop seemed to be wrapped in an isolated silence.

  “Jan?”

  There was no answer.

  He turned to the cabin door, let himself down the narrow ladder, and stood in the center cabin that served for dining purposes. The light from the small portholes was tinged with green from the reflections off the harbor waves. It made ripples on the curved overhead and the shining, polished mess table. He went forward through the tiny galley and saw that the door to the forward cabin, which was Trinka’s, was closed.

  “Trinka?” he called again.

  The silence persisted.

  He tried the brass door handle, pushed it down, shoved against the door, gained an inch, and felt it jam against something that yielded another inch and then stuck solidly. He stepped back. The boat rocked in the wake of a passing craft. He started to call Trinka again, then suddenly drove hard at the cabin door with his shoulder. It yielded a little more, but not much. Just enough to let him see the man’s hand on the deck between the doorjamb and the casing.

  He applied his weight in earnest, shoved hard, and heard a long-drawn groan as the door yielded enough space for him to slip inside. He almost stepped on Jan Gunther as he did so, and then recovered his balance with another quick stride and turned to consider Trinka’s cabin.

  She was not here. He looked at Jan Gunther’s enormous bulk that crowded the door passage, then moved through the greenish daylight that came through the tiny ports and opened the narrow door to the head. Empty. No one was in the shower stall, either.

  “Jan, can you hear me?” he asked gently.

  The big Hollander was badly hurt. His eyes were open but unfocused, and there was a deep gash on his forehead and another on the back of his head that still bled heavily. He groaned and tried to sit up, but failed. He wet his lips.

  “Do you know me, Jan?” Durell asked.

  “Yes, mynheer.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I don’t—know—”

  “Where is Trinka?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was she with you when you were attacked?”

  “Yes, mynheer. My head—feels so—strange—”

  “Don’t move,” Durell said. “You’ve been hurt.”

  “I am so ashamed—”

  “You were hit by an expert. Nothing to be ashamed about.”

  “But he took Trinka—”

  “Who took her? Julian Wilde?”

  “Yes. It was he. I remember now. Like a madman. I promised to protect her—it is my job, mynheer—and I failed. My head—my eyes—I cannot see clearly.”

  “Lie still. You need a doctor.”

  But Jan struggled to sit up. “No, I must find Trinka. He took her away.”

  “Do you know where they went?”

  “To the—bunker—”

  “And where is that?”

  There was silence. Jan sat with his mouth open, and the raw effort of his breathing filled the cabin with its unnatural sound. Blood ran down his neck and stained his singlet. He raised his big hand before his face and stared at it and then a strange sound came from him. His face convulsed, and it was a moment or two before Durell realized he was weeping with shame.

  “Can you walk, Jan?”

  “Forgive me. I—yes, I can.”

  “Let me help you to the deck.”

  It was an effort. Jan fell, crawled, hauled himself up the ladder and fell face down on the deck in the sunlight. Almost at once someone on the pier saw him and cried out in alarm. Durell called for a doctor and then helped Jan over the side to the stone pier. It was not easy. Jan still objected to leaving the Suzanne.

  “I must go after Trinka—he took her away—he will kill her—”

  “Why did he take her, Jan?” Durell asked.

  “I think—for a hostage—”

  “How did he leave?”

  “A boat. He—came alongside in a boat.”

  “A launch?”

  “Ja. Small, but very fast.”

  “Good enough for the open sea?”

  “Oh, ja. Today it would be—all right. Calm enough. No trouble.”

  “All right, Jan. I think I know where to find them. Here’s the doctor,” he said, seeing the elderly medical man from the Gunderhof Hotel pushing authoritatively through the small crowd. At the far end of the pier, fifty yards away, a uniformed policeman was walking quickly toward them. Durell said, “I’m going to leave you now. I need the Suzanne, Jan. Do you understand?”

  “Help her. Help Trinka—”

  “I’ll get her back, don’t worry.”

  Durell jumped back into the cockpit and thumbed the sloop’s motor. The engine responded instantly. He cast
off the lines, aware of the hostile, startled glances of the onlookers, and shoved off. The policeman was running, but Jan was talking to the doctor and waving the policeman away, and Durell did not look back. He heard a whistle skirl, and there was a shout sent after him, ordering him to return the boat to the dock. He threw the tiller over and the Suzanne swept out through devious passages among the moored craft in the harbor, and in a few moments it was clear of the breakwater and out on the open sea.

  The tide was ebbing. He used as a landmark the thin line of the Wadden Zee Dike on the north horizon of the calm sea. There was no wind, and he ignored the sails, pushing the small engine to the utmost as he steered among a maze of channels that appeared now where they had sailed in safety on an apparently open sea yesterday. The ebbing North Sea tide had transformed this area into a tangled labyrinth of sand bars, buoy-marked channels and canals, and reedy areas where land and sea merged in an unsure alliance.

  The run toward the Wadden Zee Dike took less than an hour, but it seemed endless. The ebb flow helped shove the Suzanne along at a dangerous pace through the channels, and when he could make out the end of the dike where he had found Marius Wilde’s body yesterday, he changed course to a more westerly direction.

  Now the tangle of channels, reed-grown islands and brackish salt-water pools made it difficult to pick out any distinctive landmark. From the deck of the sloop he could see little that was different in any direction. The tidal channels had fallen very low, almost at complete ebb. He consulted the tide table tacked to the cockpit near the wheel and saw he had about an hour before the tide turned. He wished he could have brought a lookout to stand up forward to spot the channel turns and openings, since from the wheel he could see very little above the tall reeds and low mounds of sandy dunes that obstructed his view of the twisting water routes.

  Here and there the ruined foundations of a house or farm were still recognizable as the Suzanne drummed past. The channel he followed suddenly forked northerly and easterly, and he did not know which to take. He chose the easterly entrance on impulse. But it was the wrong guess. In less than a minute he sensed a slackening of the tidal current, and then saw he had guided the sloop into a dead-end lagoon of brackish salt water draining outward against the course he had chosen. The depth of water was tricky. The keel grazed bottom slightly as he turned to retreat. The boat shuddered, the mast trembled, and the steel halyards sang like plucked guitar strings. A flock of wild ducks rose from the reeds with thunderously flapping wings and circled away to the west. He felt trapped, caught in a hot stale bowl of sand islands and marsh grasses, cut off from any chance to estimate his position. A feeling of frustration moved in him.

  Time was running out as surely as the tide was reaching its lowest ebb.

  There had to be a reason for Julian Wilde to risk the desperate chance of returning to his room at the Boerderij Inn and then snatching Trinka Van Horn as a hostage. Why did he need a hostage? What did he have in mind? It was plain that the Dutch Security people had taken a step that produced intense alarm in their quarry. Wilde was aware of the cordon of men and guns drawn around the Amschellig area. But what was he planning to do to escape? The Dutch government was prepared to grant amnesty, Flaas had said. But had any talks actually taken place? Durell doubted it. As far as Wilde knew, with his jungle cunning and fugitive temperament, the net around Amschellig was for only one purpose—to find him, seize him, and kill him. Surely the man had a plan to save himself, and it included using Trinka as a hostage. Would it be enough? Durell wondered. There was a feeling of pressure, of time ebbing with the tide, and when the tide changed and time ran out, it would all be too late.

  He had to find the Cassandra bunker now.

  He stood up, holding the wheel steady. A long row of tree stumps alongside the channel, growing out of the tormented shapes of the sand banks, marked an old prewar canal. He followed it, edging westward. The steady chug of the Suzanne’s engine was muffled in the infinity of sky and sea and the maze of islands. Now and then he glimpsed the loom of the reconstructed dike, miles to the north; but it was only a brief, chance glimpse, scarcely enough to keep himself oriented. He saw no other boats. He saw no other people. It was as if he had entered a world that had drowned two decades ago, and now lifted its dead, scarred face to the sky for this brief interlude between the North Sea tides, only to sink soon beneath the surface of the ocean again.

  It seemed hopeless. He took a channel to the north, then east, then to the south, and came back to a place he remembered, the old canal bed with the beach stumps bordering the channel. He was sure of the depth of water here, at any rate. And there had to be enough water for the fishing boat the Wildes had chartered to reach the ruins of Groote Kerk Light.

  He circled again, deliberately seeking out old canal beds now. The tide was almost fully out. Its urgent rush out to sea had grown less impetuous, and the Suzanne was easier to control. Durell stood with the wheel held by pressure against his thigh and scanned the afternoon landscape. A reedy island, less than two feet above the surface of the sea, sprawled to the south. A humped rise of sand about three hundred feet to the east indicated a ruined building. But it was rather an oblong shape, not that of a lighthouse. To the southeast the waterways were an impossible labyrinth of small channels, some of them mere trickles, with changing colors in the water to indicate submerged barriers to the Suzanne’s keel. Northward there was a stretch of open water, then more reedy barriers of sea bottom.

  He was lost. Finding the ruins of a lighthouse here without expert help was like hunting the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  He made the circuit once more. The canal bank on his left yielded to an island perhaps half a mile in length, lying like a whale’s back at a north-northwesterly angle. It was higher at one end than the other, and on a hunch he turned the Suzanne into a channel to port. In a moment, he swore softly, seeing the ripple of shallow water all the way across his chosen course. There was no passage here. Short of using a dinghy or wading in the warm, shallow sea, there was no way to reach the higher end of the island—

  Yes, he thought.

  Julian Wilde had brought the fishing boat to a place where he had used a dinghy to row and then had got out and waded out of sight.

  It could be this place, he thought.

  There were field glasses in the cockpit, and he used them to scan the far end of the island. Barren sand dunes, reeds, marsh grass—and then the shape of something that could only have been man-made, showing where the tide had scoured away the camouflage of sand and revealed barnacled red brick in a circular base—

  The Groote Kerk Light.

  He spent no more time in speculation. The Suzanne had probed as far into the channel as she could go without grounding, and he let go of the wheel to run forward and throw the anchor over. The ebbing tide had lost all strength, but it still ran out enough to keep the sloop’s bow head on toward the nearby island. He took the rifle Jan had shown him, a Remington .30-08, from the cabin; made certain it was loaded; and pocketed an extra clip from one of the cabinets before he lowered himself over the side with the gun held high and dry over his head. He could not touch bottom for a minute or two, and had to swim awkwardly toward shore. Then the bottom shelved up abruptly and he surged out of the water onto dry sand.

  In every quarter there was nothing to see except the glimmering wasteland of sun and ocean and marsh and sky. No one ventured here at ebb tide. Later, when evening came, the sea would have swept back and where he now stood would be under many feet of water, enough to float the yachts moored at Amschellig at this moment. But now it was as if he stood on the bottom of the sea—without another human soul in sight for miles.

  Certainly, there was no sign of Cassandra and the Valkyron.

  Turning, he trudged toward the far end of the island where he had glimpsed the round base of the ruined lighthouse. The whale-back shape of the long dune cut off his view of the other shore, and he scouted it twice, careful to keep out of sight in case Wilde
was anywhere about. But he could not see for any distance through the reeds and sea grasses on that side, and he dropped back to the shoreline again, trotting on the hard sand in response to an inner urgency that demanded he waste no more time in precautions.

  Looking back, he saw the Suzanne swinging slowly broadside as the tide ebbed at its lowest level at last. The sloop looked small and fragile from this distance.

  Then it was lost from sight as he turned a bend in the shore and dipped down and around the base of the ruin. He was sure now that this was the place where Julian Wilde had left the fishing boat and gone down into the Cassandra bunker.

  The ruins were undeniably those of an old lighthouse. Under the shapes of the sand dunes nearby, he could make out the vague outlines of the keeper’s quarters. Barnacles, mussels, and weeds covered the concrete and brick, except where the scouring action of the tidal current kept it clean.

  He saw no one.

  There was no other boat here.

  An air of desertion and desolation hung over the place, as if it were shunned even by the birds of the sea.

  He paused, the rifle at his side. The hot sun gave rise to brackish smells, to the odors of sea vegetation exposed to sunlight. From far, far away came the sound of a muffled explosion as work proceeded on the distant Wadden Zee Dike. That world seemed to belong to another age, separate from this one of bleached and twisted tree stumps taken from a surrealist painting, with the jagged tower base of the old lighthouse and its rounded doorway half buried in tidal silt. . . .

  Trinka’s footprints, and those of a man’s heavy shoes, were plainly evident in the smooth sand leading up to the lighthouse door.

  Durell paused, stood still.

  He had the feeling he was being watched.

  He turned slowly in every direction, but there was nothing to see.

  He noted that the tracks did not actually enter the lighthouse base. They turned left, to seaward, and vanished over the dune behind the ruin.

  He went that way.

  The footprints were lost on the crest of the rise, where wild sea grasses grew, bending to the wind. The part of the island that emerged at low tide behind the lighthouse was slightly higher than the rest, and a long straight ridge on the western shore looked too mathematically precise to be a natural creation. Turning, he walked along its flat top and then studied the sea. It fitted. He was on top of the old fortifications, bunkers and sea walls that had served the Nazi Occupation forces against the British Isles across the North Sea.