Storm Island
Page 22
"Good luck!"
Faber got out and closed the door, and the car pulled away. He had
nothing to fear from Porter, he thought; the man would go home and
sleep all day, and by the time he realized he had helped a fugitive, it
would be too late to do anything about it.
He watched the Vauxhall out of sight, then crossed the road and entered
the promisingly named Market Street. Shortly he found himself in the
docks and, following his nose, arrived at the fish market. He felt
safely anonymous in the bustling, noisy, smelly market, where everyone
was dressed in working clothes as he was. Wet fish and cheerful
profanities flew through the air. Faber found it hard to understand
the clipped, guttural accents. At a stall he bought hot, strong tea in
a chipped half-pint mug and a large bread roll with a doorstep of white
cheese.
He sat on a barrel to eat and think. This evening would be the time to
steal a boat. It was galling, to have to wait all day; and it left him
with the problem of concealing himself for the next twelve hours; but
he was too close now to take risks, and stealing a boat in broad
daylight was much more risky than at the twilit end of the day.
He finished his breakfast and stood up. It would be a couple of hours
before the rest of the city came to life. He would use the time to
pick out a good hiding-place.
He made a circuit of the docks and the tidal harbour. The security was
perfunctory, and he spotted several places where he could slip past the
checkpoints. He worked his way around to the sandy beach, and set off
along the two-mile esplanade. At its far end, a couple of pleasure
yachts were moored at the mouth of the River Don. They would have
suited Faber's purpose very well, but they would have no fuel.
A thick ceiling of cloud hid the sunrise. The air became very warm and
thundery again. A few determined holiday-makers emerged from the se
afront hotels and sat stubbornly on the beach, waiting for sunshine.
Faber doubted they would get it today.
The beach might be the place to hide. The police would check the
railway station and the bus depot, but they would not mount a
full-scale search of the city. They might check a few hotels and
guest-houses. It was unlikely they would approach everyone on the
beach. He decided to spend the day in a deck-chair.
He bought a newspaper from a stall and hired a chair. He removed his
shirt and put it back on over his overalls. He left his jacket off.
He would see a policeman, if one came, well before he reached the spot
where Faber sat. There would be plenty of time to leave the beach and
vanish into the streets.
He began to read the paper. There was a new Allied offensive in Italy,
the newspaper rejoiced. Faber was sceptical. Anzio had been a
shambles. The paper was badly printed and there were no photographs.
He read that the police were searching for one Henry Faber, who had
murdered two people in London with a stiletto... A woman in a bathing
suit walked by, looking hard at Faber. His heart missed a beat Then he
realized she was being flirtatious. For an instant he was tempted to
speak to her. It had been so long ... He shook himself mentally.
Patience, patience. Tomorrow he would be home.
She was a small fishing boat, fifty or sixty feet long and broad in
the beam, with an inboard motor. The aerial told of a powerful radio.
Most of the deck was taken up with hatches to the small hold below. The
cabin was aft, and only large enough to hold two men, standing, plus
the dashboard and controls. The hull was clinker-built and newly
caulked, and the paintwork looked fresh.
Two other boats in the harbour would have done as well, but Faber had
stood on the quay and watched the crew of this one tie her up and
refuel before they left for their homes.
He gave them a few minutes to get well away, then walked around the
edge of the harbour and jumped onto the boat. She was called Marie
11.
He found the wheel chained up. He sat on the floor of the little
cabin, out of sight, and spent ten minutes picking the lock. Darkness
was coming early because of the cloud layer which still blanketed the
sky.
When he had freed the wheel he raised the small anchor, then sprang
back on to the quay and untied the ropes. He returned to the cabin,
primed the diesel engine, and pulled the starter. The motor coughed
and died. He tried again. This time it roared to life. He began to
manoeuvre out of the mooring.
He got clear of the other craft at the quay side and found the main
channel out of the harbour, marked by buoys. He guessed that only
boats of much deeper draught really needed to stick to the channel, but
he saw no harm in being overcautious.
Once outside the harbour, he felt a stiff breeze, and hoped it was not
a sign that the weather was about to break. The sea was surprisingly
rough, and the stout little boat lifted high on the waves. Faber
opened the throttle wide, consulted the dashboard compass, and set a
course. He found some charts in a locker below the wheel. They looked
old and little-used : no doubt the boat's skipper knew the local waters
too well to need charts. Faber checked the map reference he had
memorized that night in Stockwell, set a more exact course, and engaged
the wheel-clamp.
The cabin windows were obscured by water. Faber could not tell
whether it was rain or spray. The wind was slicing off the tops of the
waves now. He poked his head out of the cabin door for a moment, and
got his face thoroughly wet.
He switched on the radio. It hummed for a moment, then crackled. He
moved the frequency control, wandering the airwaves, and picked up a
few garbled messages. The set was working perfectly. He tuned to the
U-boat's frequency, then switched off it was too soon to make
contact.
The waves increased in size as he progressed into deeper waters. Now
the boat reared up like a bucking horse with each wave, then teetered
momentarily at the top before plunging sickeningly down into the next
trough. Faber stared blindly out of the cabin windows. Night had
fallen, and he could see nothing at all. He felt faintly seasick.
Each time he convinced himself that the waves could not possibly get
bigger, a new monster taller than the rest lifted the vessel toward the
sky. They started to come closer together, so that the boat was always
lying with its stern pointed either up at the sky or down at the sea
bed. In a particularly deep trough the little boat was suddenly
illuminated, as clearly as if it were day, by a flash of lightning.
Faber saw a grey-green mountain of water descend on the prow and wash
over the deck and the cabin where he stood. He could not tell whether
the terrible crack which sounded a second afterwards was the
thunderclap or the noise of the timbers of the boat breaking up.
Frantically he searched the little cabin for a life jacket. There was
none.
The lightning came repeatedly then. Faber held the locked wheel and
braced his back against the cabin wall to stay upright. There was no
point in operating the controls now the boat would go where the sea
threw it.
He kept telling himself that the boat must be built to withstand such
sudden summer gales. He could not convince himself. Experienced
fishermen probably would have seen the signs of such a storm, and
refrained from leaving shore, knowing their vessel could not survive
such weather.
He had no idea where he was, now. He might be almost back in Aberdeen,
or he might be at his rendezvous. He sat on the cabin floor and
switched on the radio. The wild rocking and shuddering made it
difficult to operate the set. When it warmed up he experimented with
the dials, and could pick up nothing. He turned the volume to maximum:
still no sound.
The aerial must have been broken off its fixing on the cabin roof.
He switched to Transmit and repeated the simple message "Come in,
please," several times; then left the set on Receive. He had little
hope of his signal getting through.
He killed the engine to conserve fuel. He was going to have to ride
out the storm if he could then find a way to repair or replace the
aerial. He might need his fuel.
The boat slid terrifyingly sideways down the next big wave, and Faber
realized he needed the engine power to ensure the vessel met waves
head-on. He pulled the starter, but nothing happened. He tried
several times, then gave up, cursing his foolishness for switching
off.
The boat rolled so far on to its side that Faber fell and cracked his
head on the wheel. He lay dazed on the cabin floor, expecting the
vessel to turn turtle at any minute. Another wave crashed on the
cabin, and this time the glass in the windows shattered. Suddenly
Faber was under water. Certain the boat was sinking, he struggled to
his feet, and broke surface. All the windows were out, but the vessel
was still floating. He kicked open the cabin door, and the water
gushed out. He clutched the wheel to prevent himself being washed into
the sea.
Incredibly, the storm continued to get worse. One of Faber's last
coherent thoughts was that these waters probably did not see such a
storm more than once in a century. Then all his concentration and will
were focussed on the problem of keeping hold of the wheel. He should
have tied himself to it, but now he did not dare to let go long enough
to find a piece of rope. He lost all sense of up and down as the boat
pitched and rolled on waves like cliffs. Gale force winds and
thousands of gallons of water strained to pull him from his place. His
feet slipped continually on the wet floor and walls, and the muscles of
his arms burned with pain. He sucked air when he found his head above
water, but otherwise held his breath. Many times he came close to
blacking out. He vaguely realized that the flat roof of the cabin had
disappeared.
He got brief, nightmarish glimpses of the sea whenever the lightning
flashed. He was always surprised to see where the wave was: ahead,
below, rearing up beside him, or completely out of sight. He
discovered with a shock that he could not feel his hands, and looked
down to see that they were still locked to the wheel, frozen in a grip
like rigor mortis. There was a continuous roar in his ears, the wind
indistinguishable from the thunder and the sea.
The power of intelligent thought slipped slowly away from him. In
something that was less than a hallucination but more than a daydream,
he saw the girl who had stared at him on the beach. She walked
endlessly toward him over the bucking deck of the fishing boat, her
swimsuit clinging to her body, always getting closer but never reaching
him. He knew that, when she came within touching distance, he would
take his dead hands from the wheel and reach for her, but he kept
saying "Not yet, not yet," as she walked and smiled and swayed her
hips. He was tempted to leave the wheel and close the gap himself, but
something at the back of his mind told him that if he moved he would
never reach her, so he waited and watched and smiled back at her from
time to time, and even when he closed his eyes he could see her
still.
He was slipping in and out of consciousness now. His mind would drift
away, the sea and the boat disappearing first, then the girl fading,
until he would jerk awake to find that, incredibly, he was still
standing, still holding the wheel, still alive; men for a while he
would will himself to stay conscious, but eventually exhaustion would
take over again.
In one of his last clear moments he noticed that the waves were moving
in one direction, carrying the boat with them. Lightning flashed
again, and he saw to one side a huge dark mass, an impossibly high wave
no, it was not a wave, it was a cliff ... The realization that he was
close to land was swamped by the fear of being hurled against the cliff
and smashed. Stupidly, he pulled the starter, then hastily returned
his hand to the wheel; but it would no longer grip.
A new wave lifted the boat and threw it down like a discarded toy. As
he fell through the air, still clutching the wheel with one hand,
Faber saw a pointed rock like a stiletto sticking up out of the trough
of the wave. It seemed certain to impale the boat. But the hull of
the little craft scraped the edge of the rock and was carried past.
The mountainous waves were breaking now. The next one was too much for
the vessel's timbers. The boat hit the trough with a solid impact, and
the sound of the hull splitting cracked the night like an explosion.
Faber knew the boat was finished.
The water retreated, and Faber realized that the hull had broken
because it had hit land. He stared in dumb astonishment as a new flash
of lightning revealed a beach. The sea lifted the ruined boat off the
sand as water crashed over the deck again, knocking Faber to the floor.
But he had seen everything with daylight clarity in that moment. The
beach was narrow, and the waves were breaking right up to the cliff.
But there was a jetty, over to his right, and a bridge of some kind
leading from the jetty to the cliff top. He knew that if he left the
boat for the beach, the next wave would kill him with tons of water or
break his head like an egg against the cliff. But if he could reach
the jetty in between waves, he might scramble far enough up the bridge
to be out of reach of the water.
He might survive yet.
The next wave split the deck open as if the seasoned wood were no
stronger than a banana skin. The boat collapsed under Faber, and he
found himself sucked backward by the receding surf. He scrambled
upright, his legs like jelly beneath him, and broke into a run,
splashing through the shallows toward the jetty. Running those few
yards was the hardest thing he had ever done. He wanted to stumble, so
that he could rest in the water and die; but he stayed upright, just as
he had when he won the 5,000 metres race, until he crashed i
nto one of
the pillars of the jetty. He reached up and grabbed the boards with
his hands, willing them to come back to life for a few seconds; and
lifted himself until his chin was over the edge; then he swung his legs
up and rolled over.
The wave came as he got to his knees. He threw himself forward. The
wave carried him a few yards then flung him brutally against the
wooden planking. He swallowed water and saw stars. When the weight
lifted from his back he summoned the will to move. It would not come.
He felt himself being dragged inexorably back. A sudden rage possessed
him. He would not be beaten, not now! He screamed his hatred of the
storm and the sea and the British and Percival Godliman, and suddenly
he was on his feet and running, running, away from the sea and up the
ramp, running with his eyes shut and his mouth open and madness in his
heart, daring his lungs to burst and his bones to break; remembering,
dimly, that he had called on this madness once before and almost died;
running with no sense of a destination, but knowing he would not stop
until he lost his mind.
The ramp was long and steep. A strong man might have run all the way
to the top, if he were in training and rested. An Olympic athlete, if
he were tired, might have got half way. The average forty-year-old man
would have managed a yard or two.
Faber made it to the top.
A yard from the end of the ramp he had a slight heart attack and lost
consciousness, but his legs pumped twice more before he hit the sodden
turf.
He never knew how long he lay there. When he opened his eyes the storm
still raged, but day had broken, and he could see, a few yards away