Evolution of Fear

by Paul E. Hardisty

  Together they fought. She tough and responsive to his commands, he fighting to protect her from the full fury of the waves as best he could, urging her on, the storm sails powering her through the maelstrom even as conditions worsened.

  As he tired, his mind wandered. Crowbar had said the hit had been on for a week. That’s the way he’d said it, as if they already knew the target. The doctor said Eben had been killed four days ago – five now. By examining the clinic’s files, the assassins had deduced that Eben’s benefactor, Declan Greene, was in fact his friend and brother parabat, lately of 1 Parachute Battalion, South African Defence Force, Claymore Straker. His cover was blown. Regina Medved had known this for five days. But only Crowbar knew that Clay was her brother’s killer – he’d been there with him, watched him pull the trigger. All the other witnesses were dead. And only Crowbar knew he had been hiding in the cottage. Only Crowbar had all the pieces, and those had surely been his guys come for the hit. So why the attack on the clinic, the cryptic message in blood? Crowbar hadn’t needed that information, could have provided Regina Medved with everything she needed without ever mentioning Eben. It only made sense if Crowbar had betrayed him for more than just money. The whole thing in the clinic reeked of spite, revenge. Koevoet was a lot of things – arrogant, contemptuous of weakness, hard-headed, autocratic – but until a day ago he had been Clay’s definition of honour. Money was one thing, but revenge?

  Before Medved’s killing, Clay had decided to go back to South Africa and testify to Mandela’s soon to be established post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He’d told this to Koevoet, who’d accused him of disloyalty, threatened to terminate their friendship. Clay had sworn, along with the others, never to reveal what had happened that day in Angola, the day Kingfisher was killed. Even during the inquest he’d kept quiet, stuck to the story they’d all agreed. Could Crowbar really have decided to betray Clay to prevent him from testifying? Eben had been there too, that fateful day in Angola, had been one of the actors in that unspeakable tragedy that still haunted Clay’s days and turned his nights into ultramarathons of regret. Was that why Eben had been killed? Eben had been in a coma for ten years, more. He could no more talk about what had happened that day than he could walk out of the clinic.

  And so, why the delay? It had been at least four days between Eben’s murder and the appearance of Koevoet’s mercs at the cottage that night. Maybe it wasn’t Koevoet at all. Maybe it was the PSO, the Yemeni Secret Service. The CIA. Maybe the two events – the attempted hit at the cottage and Eben’s murder – were unconnected. Clay shook his head, opened his eyes wide to the wind. Jesus, he was losing it, wasting his energy on an insoluble problem. A problem with too many variables and not enough equations.

  Fatigue swept through him, pushing his mind over false peaks, into blind troughs. And as he hurtled through the night, the fears and possibilities merged into a single density, churned by the storm, components irretrievable.

  A dull dawn came, revealing towering seas whipped with wands of foam, evil spells of grey cloud. Clay shivered in Punk’s ill-fitting jumper and jacket. He was weak from hunger. Sleep beckoned, whispered to him, tugged at his eyes, luring him to the warmth of her bed. He scorned her, pushed on through the storm. Mid-afternoon the rain relented. Shortly after, the wind dropped a little. It was barely perceptible, perhaps only a knot or two, but he could feel it on his face, hear the change in the rigging. A lull. Clay took the opportunity. He brought Flame head to wind, backed the storm jib, lashed the wheel and with Flame hove to, went below. The little boat tracked into the wind and then fell off, lashed rudder and backed jib nudging her back and forth in a slow, nodding dance that kept her bow into weather but slowed her to no more than a knot. The cabin pitched like a rollercoaster. Bracing himself against the aft bulkhead, Clay ate a tin of cold beans, thought about trying to heat water for coffee but abandoned the idea. He plotted a dead-reckoning position, a best guess, assuming a relatively constant course of SSW at about ten knots for the best part of twelve hours. It put Flame about fifty nautical miles north and west of Ushant, a place of deadly reefs and fickle weather. Beyond, the Bay of Biscay, notorious for its winter storms and big seas. The barometer had continued to fall, sat now at 987. The full power of the storm was still a few hours away.

  Clay crabbed his way forward, lay on the main berth and pulled the blanket around his shoulders. He hadn’t slept for two days. He closed his eyes. To the furious cry of the sea, he let sleep come. He’d learned that in the war. Sleep whenever and wherever you can. Days of this to go. It could make the difference between living and dying. That’s what Koevoet had always told them, the young guys just out of school, eighteen and nineteen, wide-eyed, hyped on adrenaline and fear and blood. Sleep, boys. Tomorrow you might not. The ‘short sleep’ he called it. The other sleep was the one you never woke from.

  Time strobed as he shuddered between unconsciousness and waking dream. The flow of moments seemed to lurch between crest and trough, and it was as if the sea and time and the ragings of his subconscious had become one, a comingled fluid racing laminar and clear and then suddenly rupturing, dimensions blurring, friends long dead laughing now in the eddies, their teeth smashed, skulls opened up in the sun, then the concussion of an RPG, the hammering of steel on steel, the sucking of an open wound, the last breath of a dying man, oh shit I don’t fucking believe it, and then looking away, anywhere, up into the too-blue sky and the emptiness of it and that hollow, sewer-pipe feeling inside like there never was anything in there anyway.

  After a while the dreams stabilised, and he could hear the screaming of the wind in the rigging and the choking gurgle of the water over the hull. He recognised it as such and yet he was there, on that patrol, and it was that day, and it was real, and he knew what was to come but could not escape it. Kingfisher is there walking ahead of him, five metres, no more, just like he’d been taught. Sweat stains Kingfisher’s back. His browns are torn and ragged after ten days in the bush. The strap of his R4 cuts into the back of his sunburned neck. Clay can see the skin chafed raw, Kingfisher’s bush hat pushed back on his head the way he always wore it, and the sun so fierce now, and him so goddamned thirsty because they’d missed the resupply that morning due to some foul-up with the Pumas, and one second he’s staring at Kingfisher and the next second, no, less, a blink, Kingfisher’s head disappears, just vanishes in a mist, and a piece of something hard rips into his cheek and sticks through so he can feel it sharp and jagged and strangely porous with his tongue as the world around him explodes, and he is hurled through the air.

  Clay landed with a dull thud as his shoulder and hip hit the ground. He looked up, startled, reaching for the thing in his cheek, but it was gone and he wasn’t in Angola but on the floor of Flame’s little cabin, and the noise wasn’t the screaming of rockets but the wail of tearing fabric.

  Clay jumped to his feet, staggered to the hatch and pulled it open. He was met by a blast of cold rain. He stuck his head out, looked up at the rigging. The storm jib was in shreds, the heavy canvas torn from tack to head. Without the stabilising push of the jib counteracting the guide of the lashed rudder, Flame now lay ahull, drifting in the storm. Clay climbed into the cockpit, closed the hatch, centred the rudder, let go the foresail halyard and staggered forward. Blinded by the sheeting rain, clutching at the boom and the shrouds with his hand, he crabbed his way across the pitching foredeck. The storm jib was gone, useless. Bracing himself in the pulpit, he gathered in what was left of the sail, detached the sheets and the halyard, and let it go over the side. It flew away like some deranged octopus, tentacles tiptoeing across the surface of the water, and then was gone, swallowed by the sea. In the polarised half-light the waves towered over the little ship so that it seemed impossible that it would not drown, be smashed into splinters. The air was thick with spume, the tops of the waves shorn off by the wind, atomised. Gone now were the smaller patterns on the surface, ripples and undulations. The whole heaving surface was morni
ng-smooth, like moulded plastic, hammered clean of any texture by the wind.

  Clay started to crawl back to the cockpit. He was halfway across the coach roof, his left arm cradled around the boom, when he saw it. It wasn’t a wave. That’s not what he saw. What confronted him then, surging towards them from astern, was a cliff face, a wall of dark-grey water that filled the horizon. He glanced down at the deck of Punk’s little ketch. A pang of sorrow flooded through him. She wouldn’t survive. It was almost upon them now. There was no way to make it back to the cockpit. He found the vang line and grabbed it in his hand, hugged the boom. And then he was standing on the mast and the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the boat’s stern high above him.

  10

  Just a Deep Breath Away

  When the spin broke, finally, after a breathless eternity, the first thing he noticed was the light. Not some distant beacon; he was inside it, a cold womb every shade of green, from algae to gemstone, churning like the rapids of an African river. And then the sound came. Even here, so far down, protected from the surface fury, the concussion of pounding water thrummed inside his head, his chest, his bones. And as the oxygen in his bloodstream burned away and the sealight began to dim, thoughts came to him, fractured pictures, voices, things indeterminate and without substance. And he was so deep now, his head ready to implode with the weight of it, the cold inside him, numbing the pain, the paintings in his brain fading, the end just a deep breath away.

  Then he smiled. He could not feel his face but his eyes were open and he knew he was smiling, and it was just like the dreams that came most nights since he had put a bullet into Medved’s skull, an imminent end blown to pieces by a flash of realisation: Rania was out there somewhere, smiling with those unforgettable eyes, gracing whatever part of the world she was in. And that was enough. He closed his throat and opened his lips, bared his teeth at the implacable deep, electricity arcing through him. Like waking from a coma of years. If he could have he would have laughed. He started swimming towards the light.

  When he burst to the surface, the world had not changed. The sea towered over him, waves upon waves, crests truncated by the wind’s scythe, bleeding white spume so that the air was wild with it. The sky was as it had been, noon dark, screaming violence, everything as it was except that Flame was gone. And without Punk’s lost little dream, he was dead.

  Clay scanned the chaos, peered through the driving spray, raised the stump of his forearm as a visor, tread water, finned with his right hand. Numb with cold, he struggled in the heavy oilskin, turning circles as the waves raised him up, resting in the deep troughs. Up he went, the boiling surface opening out as he rose, spray whipping across the crests, but there was only water, and the whole world was liquid, every colour of black and white. Down again, prison walls closing in, and he knew he was tiring, could feel it in every part of himself. He slipped off Punk’s oilskin, too numb with cold now to feel his hands or feet, hypothermia setting in. He had a couple of minutes left, no more. A whole life condensed into this, perhaps two hundred seconds to come to terms with it all, to come to some kind of resolution, find some sort of truce. Carried up again, he knew that those things were unreachable, lost to him forever, drowned in the hate of war, in his own regret, and that if he searched for two hundred years he would not find them.

  At the crest of the next wave he took a deep breath, looked out across the grey desert one last time and summoned his courage.

  And there she was.

  Two wavelengths away. Perhaps fifty metres. Dismasted, low in the water, her deck a tangle of splintered spars and cable, but upright and still afloat.

  A wave of adrenaline surged through him, a last burst from some unknown reservoir. He tried to swim, willed his legs to move, but they were dead, lifeless, and it was that same feeling after he had lost his hand, his brain’s signals ignored, ridiculed. Spluttering and coughing, he pounded his legs with his stump, beat them into action, forced them to kick. He pushed himself through the water, timing the next wave, spotting Flame again, adjusting course. Breathing hard, he clawed his way over the next wave, slid down the back side of it. Flame was close now. He could see the extent of the damage. Both the main and mizzen masts were shorn stumps. The bowsprit was gone, torn from the deck. The wheel had been swept away. The main boom trailed in the water, hung over the side in a tangle of steel cable. It was acting like a drogue, slowing Flame’s progress through the water, stabilising her.

  Clay reached out and touched her wooden hull with his fingertips, the reassuring solidity of her, an island of hope in a liquid nightmare. But she was sinking. He grabbed one of the stay cables that hung over the side and pulled himself aft, inspecting the hull. Cold as he was, he knew he would have to find and seal the breach to keep her afloat. He took a deep breath, went under, the cable still firm in his right hand and scanned the hull for any sign of rupture. Slowly, he worked his way forward, riding the swell with the boat, timing his rise and fall with the boat’s own cycles. When he reached the bow he could see the open wound where the sprit had been torn away, the splintered planking, the water pouring into the hull with each downward pitch. He worked his way aft along the starboard side. The rest of the hull looked intact. By the time he reached the stern he knew he was on the edge of hypothermia, if not already there. He needed to get aboard. He forced himself under one last time to confirm that the rudder was still intact. It was. Thank Allah. He emerged spluttering as the boat rolled, snapping the cablework hard through his hand. He felt a sting in his palm and then nothing, just the cold as he followed the boat crashing down the side of a huge wave. The boat hit the trough hard, shuddering to a stop as the wave crashed over her, ten tons of green water hammering into her superstructure. Clay only had time to brace his legs against the hull before the water hit.

  Later he would calculate that he must have been flung through a tethered arc, picked up and somersaulted onto Flame’s coachroof, saved from the anvil face of the teak decking only by the give of tangled rigging cable strung above the deck like a spider’s web. He could just as easily have been impaled on the shorn stump of the main mast, broken his back on one of the spreaders.

  For a moment he lay staring at the sky pitching above him, assessing what was working and what was not. There was a ringing in his head. The knife wound in his arm was seeping blood. His limbs were numb, wood. But otherwise, he was okay, functioning. He looked down. The coachroof was intact, incredibly, but the cockpit was full of water, and the main hatch was stove in, a gaping black hole. Flame was taking on water steadily. She now lay with decks almost awash. In a few minutes, the situation would be unsalvageable. He had to plug the holes and start pumping soon, or she would be under.

  Clay got to his feet, scrambled back to the cockpit and jumped down into the cabin. The water was chest-high, covered in a slick of diesel fuel. He sloshed forward through a layer of floating cushions, pulped paper, splinters of teak planking, the boat rolling beneath his feet. He found the forward starboard locker, reached down through the murky water and dredged up the tool box. He found a cordless drill packed in a watertight plastic container. Punk’s store of repair planking was down there somewhere, too. What foresight the guy had. So much preparation, a lifetime getting ready to go, and never going. Clay reached into the locker, feeling around with numb fingers, bumping around like a blind man, his mouth below the water line, breathing through his nose. Nothing. He pushed his head under, reached down to the base of the locker, felt a hull spar, a planking joint, and then the stub ends of a bundle of planks. He pulled them free, broke the surface just in time to see a deluge of white spray pour in through the gaping hatchway.

  Clay waded aft to the nav table, which was still above water. He set the toolbox and the drill and the planking bundle on the table. Then he stepped back to the galley, reached below the water, opened the main storage cupboard door, held its edge in his hand and kicked hard with his heel. First one hinge then the other gave way. He pulled up the door and put it
on the table, ripped out another. Then he carefully opened up the drill case. The drill was still dry. He touched the trigger. That wonderful whirr, like music. In a few minutes he had fashioned the cupboard doors into a sturdy hatch cover and fitted it in place. Using spare rope to make a hinge so that it could be opened and closed, he pulled the new hatch shut. Although he stood chest deep in water, the storm was now on the outside. Inside, it seemed almost quiet. It wasn’t perfect, there were gaps, but most of the water was staying out. He turned and half waded, half swam forward and crawled up into the forward berth. The hole in the deck was about the size of his outstretched hand, almost at the point of the bow, just aft of the anchor locker, difficult to get at. Planking was not going to fit, not without cutting and fitting. He didn’t have time. Clay grabbed one of the floating cushions and jammed it into the hole. It took a few seconds to force the foam into the opening, then he wedged it into place with the boathook. He couldn’t count on it for long, but it fit well enough and for now it was keeping most of the water out. With the hull sealed, the next priority was bailing. He tried the electric pumps, knowing that they wouldn’t work. They didn’t. The electrics were shot. So no radio either, no chance for rescue. Not that he would have taken it anyway. Crowbar’s men would be out there, listening. Some rescue: a bullet through the head.