Wildtrack - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Bernard Cornwell (ч. 4)

“I don’t know if our American satellite equipment is working,” he chuckled. “Wait. Over.”

I smiled at his answer and felt the salt crack on my face. A minute later he gave me a position and a countdown to an exact second. He wished me luck, then the three grey warships slithered southwards through the fretting sea.

We’d done well. We’d cleared the tail of the Rockall Plateau, though I was further north than I’d wanted. If Bannister was doing half as well in his faster boat, then he’d take the St Pierre, so long as he lived to do it. My chronometer had stayed accurate to within a second, which was comforting.

“Who were you talking to?” Angela rolled over in her bunk.

“A Russian destroyer. He gave us our position.”

“The Russians help you?” she sounded incredulous.

“Why on earth shouldn’t they?” I gently pushed the cat off the Rockall Plateau and made a pencil cross on the chart. “Would you like some coffee?”

“Please.”

Resurrection had definitely started. I made the coffee, then scrambled some eggs. Angela said she could not possibly eat any eggs, but five minutes later she tentatively tried a spoonful of mine, then stole the mug from me and wolfed the whole lot down.

“More?”

“Please.” I made more. Resurrection was on course. She found her cigarettes and lit one. In the afternoon that we’d spent provision-ing Sycorax, Angela had hidden twenty cartons of cigarettes in the forepeak, just as she’d stowed a second sleeping bag and a set of foul-weather gear on board. “Just in case I decided to come,” she’d explained. Now she smoked her cigarette in the cockpit where she blinked at the misty grey light. She reached behind her ear and tore off the small patch. “So much for modern science.” She tossed it overboard. She looked dreadful; pale as ash, stringy haired and red-eyed.

“Good morning, beautiful,” I said.

“I hope you haven’t got a mirror on this damned boat.” She stared disconsolately around the horizon, seeing nothing but the long grey swells. Behind us the clouds were dark as sin, while ahead the sky was a sodden grey. She frowned at me. “Do you really like this life, Nick?”

“I love it.”

The cat did its business on the windward scuppers where it had somehow learned that the sea cleaned up after it, then it stepped delicately down on to Angela’s lap where it began its morning session of self-satisfied preening. “You can’t call her Angel,” Angela said.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t like it. Call her Pixie.”

“I am not going to have a bloody cat called Pixie.”

“All right.” She scratched the cat’s chin. “Vicky.”

“Why Vicky?”

“After the Victoria Cross, of course.”

“That’s immodest.”

“Who’s to know if you don’t tell them?”

“I’ll know.”

Angela growled at my intransigence. “She’s called Vicky, and that’s the end of it. Do I look really awful?”

“Absolutely hideous. Loathsome, in fact.”

“Thank you, Nick.”

“What you do now,” I said, “is go below, undress, wash all over, dry all over, put on clean clothes, comb your hair, then come out singing.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Then open the forehatch to air the boat. Then sit here and steer 289 while I sleep.”

“On my own?” She sounded alarmed.

“You can have Cat for company.”

“Vicky.”

“You can have Vicky for company,” I said.

She’s been Vicky ever since.

That night the sky clouded again and I was woken in the short darkness to hear the water seething past the hull and I knew we were getting the spinning backlash of yet another gale.

Angela was sick again, but not so badly. She was becoming accustomed to the boat, even to its chemical loo. I’d assured her that constipation could not last clean across the Atlantic, and had been rewarded with a sour look.

But the next couple of days brought colour to her cheeks. She began to eat properly. I did all the cooking, for there is something about cooking on a boat that prompts seasickness.

We ran fast in those days. We saw no other sails, only a trawler steaming west and another warship heading north. The contrails of aircraft laced the sky; jumbo jets carrying their huddled masses between the world’s great cities. The passengers, if they looked down at all, would have seen the wrinkles of a featureless sea, while we, leaning to the wind, watched a whale blow its vents. Angela stared like a child. “I never thought I’d see that,” she said in wonder.

But most of the time she talked of her husband and I detected how desperately she needed to justify her presence on Sycorax. “He’s more likely to believe the warning if he hears my voice on the radio,” she would say. “He’ll know it’s serious if I go to these lengths to reach him, won’t he?”

“Sure,” I would say. I was treating her like porcelain. My own belief was that Bannister would be mad as hell when he discovered his new wife had sailed the Atlantic with another man, but Angela did not need that kind of truth.

“I can’t believe he’s really in danger,” she said that evening.

“Danger’s like that,” I said. “It didn’t seem real in the Falklands, either. War didn’t seem real. We’d trained for it, but I don’t think any of us really thought we’d end up fighting. I remember thinking how bloody daft it was. I shouldn’t have been thinking at all. I was supposed to be counting the rounds I’d fired, but I clean forgot to do it. That’s what we were trained to do. Count the bloody rounds so you knew when to change magazines, you see, but I was just laughing! It wasn’t real. I kept pulling the trigger and suddenly there were no more bullets up my spout and this bloody great bloke with a submachine-gun appeared in a bunker to my left and all I had…” I shrugged. “Sorry. Talking too much.”

Angela was sitting next to me in the cockpit. “And all you had was what?”

“Did we bring any pickled onions?”

“Was that when you were wounded?” she insisted.

“Yes.”

“So what happened?”

I mimed a bayonet stroke. “Mucky.”

She frowned. “You were shot then?”

“Not for another minute. I was like a wet hen. I couldn’t go back, because it would have looked as if I’d bottled out, so I kept on going.

I remember shouting like a bloody maniac, though for the life of me I can’t remember what I was shouting. It’s stupid, really, but I’d like to remember that.”

Angela frowned at me. “Why wouldn’t you talk like that on the film?”

“I don’t know…” I paused. “Because I’d made a balls of everything, if you really want the truth. I’d gone to the wrong place, I was frightened as hell, and I thought we were about to be worked over by a bunch of bloody Argies. I just panicked, nothing more.”

“That’s not what the citation says.”

“It was dark. No one could see what was happening.” She mistook my tone, which was dismissive. “Do you regret the fighting now?”

“Christ, no!”

“No?”

“Queen and Country, my love.”

She stared incredulously at me. “You really do mean that, don’t you?”

Of course I meant it, but there wasn’t time to say any more, for the sun had dropped and conditions were perfect for taking a sight. I fetched Bannister’s expensive sextant with its built-in electronic stopwatch and brought a star sweetly down to the twilit horizon.

The wind dropped the next day. There was still a modicum of warmth in the mid-day sun, but by early afternoon we were both swathed in sweaters, scarves and oilskins. That night, after I’d plotted our position, I called Angela on deck to see the aurora borealis that was filling the northern sky with its great scrims of curving and shifting colours. She stared in enchantment. “I thought the Northern Lights only showed in winter?”

“All year round. You can see them from London sometimes.”

“No!”

“Two or three nights a year,” I said. “But you city-dwellers never look. Or else you’ve got so many neon lights on that you drown it out.”

A great coral-coloured lightfall shimmered and faded in the twilight as Sycorax’s booms slatted across in an involuntary but slow gybe. If I had been racing in the St Pierre I would have been fretting because of this calm. The sea was flattening to a sheen of gun metal while Angela and I sat in the cockpit and watched the magic lights drape the northern sky.

“Do you know what I forgot?” Angela broke our silence.

“Tell me.”

“A passport.”

I smiled. “I shall tell the Canadians that I kidnapped you.” She turned on the thwart so that she could lean against me. It was the first intimate gesture that either of us had made since she had first stepped aboard. She gazed at a vast ripple of star-dusted blue light. “Do you know why I came, Nick?”

“Tell me.”

“I wanted to be with you. It wasn’t because of your leg, and I’m not really sure that Tony’s in danger. I know I should believe it, but I don’t.” She lit herself a cigarette. “I was angry.”

“Angry?”

“When he said I had newly-wed nerves. Because he didn’t believe me.” She had brought a bottle of Irish from the cabin and she poured us each a glass. “Is this what’s called running away to sea?”

“Yes,” I said. “So why don’t you use the opportunity to give up smoking?”

“Why don’t you shut up?” So I shut up and we sat in silence for a while. The surge and fade of the great lights shimmered their reflection on the sea. “I married Tony on the rebound,” Angela said suddenly.

“Did you?”

“From you.” She twisted her head to look at me. “I shouldn’t be here, should I?”

“I wanted you to be here.” I ducked her question.

She smiled. “Shall I light the cabin fire?”

“You want to be inside when God puts on this light show?”

“You want to make love in the cold?” she asked. I hesitated, and she scowled. “Nick?”

“You’re married,” I said awkwardly, not wanting to say it, and knowing that I wanted her to batter down my feeble moral stance.

She closed her eyes in exasperation. “I’m cold, I’m lonely, I’m frightened, and I’m on a bloody boat miles from bloody anywhere because I wanted to be with you, and you play the bloody Boy Scout.” She twisted on the thwart and looked angrily at me. “Do you know when I last needed to ask a man to take me to bed?”

“I’m sorry,” I said miserably.

She wrenched the rings off her left hand and thrust them into a pocket. “Does that help?”

Principles are fine things, but are soluble in lust, too. We lit the cabin stove.

“Do you really believe in God?” she asked me the next day.

“I don’t know anyone who sails deep waters in small boats who doesn’t,” I said.

“I don’t believe.” Her voice came down from the coachroof where she was catching the sun’s small ration of mid-day warmth. I was in the cabin with bits of the engine spread around me. If we were to reach the place of Nadeznha Bannister’s death and intercept Wildtrack’s return, then I would need the bloody engine.

Because in the night a flat calm had quietened the sea and by dawn the smoke from our chimney was drifting with the boat. The sails hung like washing. The glass was steady and the sky was palely and innocently veined with high wispy cloud.

“I can’t believe in God.” Angela had evidently been thinking about it.

“Stay on a boat long enough, and you’ll believe.” I wondered if prayer would help the engine.

“Ouch,” Angela said.

“What?”

“Vicky’s claws.”

“Throw her overboard.” The damned cat had spent the whole night in the sleeping bag with us. Every time I turfed it out it would come back, purring like a two-stroke and burrowing down for warmth.

“If you think sailing encourages belief in God,” Angela said pedantically, “then do you think Fanny Mulder believes?”

“Deep in his dim soul,” I said, “I expect he does. I agree that Fanny’s not a very good advertisement for God’s workmanship, but there you are; I have my theological problems just like you.” I decided I also had a problem with the engine’s wiring system. I began spraying silicon everywhere.

“What are you doing?” Angela heard the aerosol’s hiss.

“Debugging the electrics.”

“Do you want to debug me of this cat?”

“Why can’t you do it yourself?”

“Because I want you to do it.”

I pulled myself up to the cockpit and laughed. I’d been invited topsides, not because of the cat, but because Angela was lying naked on the port coaming. I threw the cat up on to the slack mainsail where she did her spider performance, then I leaned over and kissed Angela. “Do you feel like a debauched man?” she asked.

“I feel happy.”

“Poor Nick.” She stared out at the glassy sea. “Was Melissa unfaithful to you?”

“All the time.”

She turned her face back to mine. We were upside down to each other. “Did it hurt?”

“Of course.”

She stroked my face. “This won’t hurt anyone, Nick.”

“No.”

“You are an ugly sod, Nick, but I love you.” It was the first time she had said it, and I kissed her. “I love you.”

“But…” she began.

“No buts,” I said quickly, “not yet.”

We floated on an empty sea. The glass stayed steady. The North Atlantic had calmed.

More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. The motor started.

We went west under the engine, leaving a trace as straight as a plough-furrow in the sea behind. So long as the engine was charging the batteries I left the VHF switched on to Channel 16. Its range was no more than fifty or sixty miles, but if any boats were talking within that circle I would hear them, and then I could ask if they had news of Wildtrack. I heard nothing. I took the short-wave to pieces and discovered that water had somehow penetrated the case.

The intricate circuits were now a mess of rust and mould. I gave up on the wretched thing. I lost my trailing log when it snagged on a piece of flotsam and tore itself free and, though I turned the boat upside down, I could not find either of the spares which I was certain I had stored on board.

The sea was no longer smooth. A tiny wind rippled it and a long swell stirred beneath the hull. I tapped the glass again and saw the needle sink a trifle. The clouds thickened. I took running sights of the sun and, logless now, measured our progress between the sights with chips of wood. Angela timed the chips with a stopwatch as they floated past the twenty-five measured feet I’d marked on Sycorax’s starboard gunwale. The chips averaged three and a half seconds which, multiplied by a hundred, then divided into the twenty-five feet times sixty, meant that the motor was pushing us along at just over 4.2 knots. We were running against a half-knot current, so our progress was slow.

“Why, great mariner,” Angela asked icily, “do you not have a speedometer?”

“You mean an electronic log?”

“I mean a speedometer, you jerk.”

“Because it’s a nasty modern thing that can go wrong.”

“Stopwatches can go wrong.”

“Put it back in its bag,” I said, “while I think of an answer.” It was in those middle days of the voyage that Angela learned to sail Sycorax. She stood her own watches while I slept below. Life eased for me. And for her. The seasickness was gone and she seemed like a new woman. The strains of London and ambition were washed out by a healthier life. She looked good, she laughed, and her sinewy body grew stronger. The winds also strengthened until we were under sail alone, beating stiffly westwards, close-hauled all the way, but I knew we must soon turn south to run down on the place where a girl had died. Day by day we could see the pencil line closing on the cross, yet it still did not seem real that we sailed to a place of revenge.

What seemed real was the two of us. It was a child’s game that we played, only we called it love and, like all lovers, we thought it could never end. We had run away together for an adventure, but the adventure now had little to do with Kassouli or Bannister; Angela’s naked finger on her left hand showed the truth of that. We were happy, but I suppose neither of us forgot the cloud that waited beyond the western horizon. We just stopped talking of it.

We were busy too. A small boat made of wood and powered by cotton generates work. I repaired the broken cleat, sewed sails, and touched up worn varnish. Our lives depended on the boat, and there was a simple, life-saving rule that no job should ever be deferred.

The smallest gap in a sail seam had to be repaired before it ripped into useless shreds. It was a life that imposed its own discipline, and thus enjoyment. “But for ever?” Angela asked.

I was caulking the bridge deck where the mizzen had strained a timber. “For as long as it takes.”

“For as long as what takes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nick!”

I leaned back on the thwart. “I remember waking up in the helicopter after I was wounded. I knew I was hurt bad. The morphine was wearing off and I was suddenly very frightened of dying. But I promised myself that if I lived I’d give myself to the sea. Just like this.” I nodded towards the monotony of the grey-green waves.

“That stuff,” I said, “is the most dangerous thing in the world. If you’re lazy with it, or dishonest with it, or try to cheat it, it will kill you. Is that an answer?”

Angela stared at the sea. We were under full sail, close-hauled and making good progress. Sycorax felt good; tight and disciplined and purposeful. “What about your children?” she asked suddenly.

“Are you abandoning them?”

She touched a nerve, and knew it. I bent again to the caulking.

“They don’t need me.”

“Nick!” she chided.

“They need me as I am. Hell, they’ve got Hon-John, and Mumsy, and the bloody Brigadier, and the floppy great nanny, and their ponies, and Melissa. I’m just the poor relation now.”

“You’re running away from them,” Angela accused me.

“I’ll fly back and see them.” The words were inadequate, and I knew it, but I did not have a proper answer. Some things just have to wait on time.

We turned south the next day and our mood changed with the new course. We were thinking of Bannister now, and I saw that very same night how the two rings appeared again on Angela’s hand.

She shrugged when she saw that I’d noticed.

We spoke of Bannister again. Now, though, Angela spoke of his innocence, telling me again and again how she had insisted on hearing the truth before they married. Nadeznha, she said, had been killed when a wave swamped Wildtrack’s aft cockpit. The grounds of her belief, I thought, were as shifting as those of Yassir Kassouli’s, but I said nothing.

“If we don’t find him,” she said, “and he’s all right, then I can fly home from Canada before he reaches Cherbourg?”

“Yes,” I promised her. She was planning her departure from me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My immediate worry was the glass. It had begun to fall fast, and I knew we were in for a bad blow and that, by sailing south, we sailed towards the depression’s vortex.

We won that race by hours. We reached our destination before the gale reached us. We reached the blank and featureless place where, a year before, a girl had died. The clouds were low, dark and hurrying. The sea was ragged and flecked. I hove to at mid-day as a kind of tribute, but neither of us spoke. There was no ship in sight, nor any crackle on the radio. I wished I had a flower to throw into the sea, then decided such a tribute would have been maudlin.

“Are you in the right place?” Angela asked.

“As near as I can make it, yes.” I knew we could be miles away, but I had done my best.

“We don’t even know that Kassouli planned to meet him here,” Angela said. “We only guessed it.”

“Here, or nowhere,” I said. But the truth was that we did not know. We had sailed into nothing because that had seemed better than doing nothing, but now that we had arrived there was still nothing we could do.

Angela, her face hardened by the sea and her hair made wild by the wind, pointed Sycorax’s bows to the west. I let her choose the course, and watched as she sheeted home the foresails and pegged the tiller. The cat sharpened its claws on a sailbag.

“Perhaps,” Angela said after a few minutes, “they haven’t reached here yet?”

“Perhaps.” On my Atlantic chart I had marked Wildtrack’s presumed progress, and if my guesses were right then our meeting would have been a close-run thing, but the growing seas made any chance of a sighting unlikely.

Angela stared around the empty sea. “Perhaps they didn’t even come this way?”

“Perhaps.”

The seas were growing and the visibility was obscured by a spume that was being whipped off the wavetops. Angela, without asking me, but with the new confidence born of the days we had shared, reefed the mainsail and stowed the staysail.

The waves were running towards us; some of them smashed white on our stem and under their pounding Angela’s confidence began to shred like the wavecrests. “Are we in for a storm, Nick?”

“Only a gale. That isn’t so bad. I don’t like storms.” By twilight we were under the heavy canvas of storm jib and mizzen staysail alone. Both sails were tiny, yet they kept the heavy hull moving in the churning water. Angela and I were both oil-skinned and harnessed, while the cat was imprisoned below as Sycorax staggered in troughs of green-black waves that were scribbled with white foam. The sky was smeared with low quick clouds and the wind was loud in the rigging. Angela was shivering beside me. “Where are the lifebelts?” she shouted.

“I don’t have any. If you go over in this, you’re dead anyway.

Why don’t you join Vicky?”

She was tempted, but shook her head. “I want to see a gale.” She would have her gale, and was lucky she was not in a full-blooded storm. Yet even so that night was like an echo of creation’s chaos.

The noise is numbing. The wind’s noise is everything from a knife-sharp keening to a hollow roar like an explosion which lasts forever.

The sea is the percussion to that mad music, hammering through the boat so that the timbers judder and it seems a miracle that anything made by man can live.

The noise is bad, but the sight of a gale-ripped sea is worse. It’s a confusion of air and water, with foam stinging like whips in the sky, and through that chaos of white and black and grey the great seas have to be spotted and the boat must be steered by or through them.

After dark the wind veered to set up cross-seas. The main swell still roared from the west in big seas, but now the crests were saw-edged by the crossing waves, yet still Sycorax rode the waters like the witch that she is. We staggered up the sides of ocean mountains and spilt at heart-stopping speed down to their foam-scummed pits. I felt the tug of the tons of cold water on her keel, and once I heard Angela scream like the wind’s own eldritch shriek as Sycorax laid over on her side and the mainmast threatened to bury itself in a skirl of grey-white water.

Sycorax was upright, hauled there by the metal in her keel, the same metal that would take her like a stone to the ocean’s bed if the sea won this night’s battle. Except it was no battle. The sea had no enmity, it was blind to us and deaf to us, and there comes a moment when the fear goes because there seems no hope any more, just submission.

Water boiled over the decks, ran down the scuppers, and swamped the cockpit drains. I made Angela pump; forcing her to do it when she wanted to stop, for the exercise made her warm. The cold would kill us before the sea did. The sea might flog, claw and tear at us, but the cold would lull us to death. I made her go down to the cabin to get warm and to fetch the Thermos and sandwiches we’d made ready. She brought me the food, then went below and stayed there, and I imagined her huddled in her bunk with the cat clutched in her arms. I pumped as Sycorax climbed the crests and I steered as we careened madly down the wind-crazed slopes. The wind was making my eyes sore. It was a wind born somewhere in the heartland of North America, brewed in the heat of the wheat fields and twisted into a depression that would race round the ocean’s rim to take rain to the barley fields in England. Yet, despite the steepness of the seas, I sensed that this was not one of the great ship-breaking storms that could rack the Atlantic for days, but merely a snarling wildcat of a low that would skir across the water and be gone. On a weather chart this gale would look no bigger than the one in which Nadeznha Bannister had died.

Even before the night was out the wind was lessening. It still seethed in the rigging and flicked the water off the crests, but I could feel the boat’s motion easing. The gale was passing, though there was still a sickening wind and a cross-sea confusing the threatening swell. I opened the cabin hatch once and saw that Angela slept.

I hardened the boat into the wind, took down the aft staysail and hoisted reefed mizzen and main. The wavetops slashed across Sycorax and rattled on her sails. Angela still slept, but I stayed awake, searching for a yacht running fast towards Europe.

My search was merely dutiful, for I believed we had missed Wildtrack. The odds of finding Bannister’s boat had always been as-tronomical, and so I expected to see nothing, and when, in the shredding dawn, I did see something, I did not at first believe my salt-stung eyes.

I was tired and cold, and I thought I’d seen a lightning flash. Then I thought it was a mirage, and then I saw the reflected glow of the flare on the clouds above and I knew I’d seen that pale sheen before.

It was a red distress flare that cried for help in the middle of nowhere.

It flickered out, then another seared to burst against a dirty sky made ragged by the gale’s wake and I knew that, either by ill-luck or by God’s loving mercy, we had come to the killing place.

I pushed back the hatch and switched on the radio, but there was only the crackling hiss of the heavens. Sycorax was juddering to the short steep waves that ran across the grain of the surging swell.

Angela was still curled in a corner of the bunk. “I’ve just seen flares,” I said.

It took her a sleepy moment to understand. “Wildtrack? ”

“I don’t know.” I tried not to sound hopeful, but the look on Angela’s face told me I’d failed.

She struggled into her oilskins and came up to the cockpit. She closed the hatch to keep the seas from swamping the cabin, then hooked her lifeline to a jackstay and I saw her shudder at the height of the great green swell that was running down on us. Sycorax soared her way up the slopes and slalomed down again. At each crest I stared ahead, but saw no more flares.

I began to think I had hallucinated. I stood in the scuppers, holding on to the port mizzen shrouds, and searched the broken sea. Nothing.

The wind was slowing and veering. I was tempted to let go a reef in the mainsail, but, just as I was plucking up the energy to make the effort, Angela shouted.

“Nick!” Her voice was snatched by a wind gust. “Nick!” I looked where she was pointing. For a second I saw nothing but the jumbles of foam on the waves’ glassy flanks, then, a half-mile off, I saw the yacht.

A yacht. It had to be Wildtrack.

But not the Wildtrack we both remembered; not the great and gleaming rich man’s toy, so sleek and proud and towering. Instead we saw a dismasted yacht, half-swamped, with warps cascading from decks awash with water. She rolled to each sea like a waterlogged cask. We had arrived, and we had failed, for she was nothing but an abandoned hulk. For a second I dared to hope that this wreck was of some other dismasted yacht, but then a heave of swell mo-mentarily bared the hull’s flank and I saw the distinctive bold blue flash. It was Wildtrack. We had sailed over seventeen hundred nautical miles and by a miracle we had found her, and by a cruel fate we had found her too late.

I stepped down into Sycorax’s cockpit and unpegged the tiller.

“Nick! Nick!” Angela’s voice held a new urgency and I saw, in Wildtrack’s aft cockpit, a moving splash of orange. At first I thought it was a seat cushion, or some other flotsam, then I saw it was a man in oilskins. Alive. It had to be Bannister, and he was alive, unless the sea just stirred a corpse.

I scrambled down to the cabin sole. I threatened the engine with death if it did not start and cursed that I had no self-starter. I staggered as the boat pitched, swung the handle, and to my amazement the cold engine banged straight into life. I bolted the companionway steps back over the motor compartment and climbed to the cockpit. Wildtrack had vanished in a wave valley, but as I kicked the motor into gear I saw her bows sluggishly rise on a wind-fretted ridge.

I turned head to wind, arrowing into the seas, and let the engine push us. Our sails banged like guns. Angela was staring, her mouth open. I did not want to know what she was thinking, or what hopes, hers or mine, might be on the verge of tragedy.

The wind slewed viciously, heeling and thrusting us. We pitched on a crest and the motor raced like a banshee before the stern sank underwater again. But as we were on the wavecrest I saw that the orange figure in Wildtrack’s stern was alive, for he waved, then fell back. He was either hurt or so tired that he could hardly shift himself.

“It’s going to be bloody hard to fetch him off!” I shouted at Angela.

She hardly needed me to explain the difficulties. Going alongside a flooded boat in a high sea and in a shifting wind would be a piece of seamanship that needed a Jimmy Nicholls or a lifeboat’s coxswain.

Worse, if Anthony Bannister was injured, he would not be able to help himself which meant that one of us would have to board Wildtrack to give him aid. It would have to be me, and I did not want to do it, but it was one of those moments when it was really best not to think too deeply about the advantages of prudence over Goddamned bloody stupidity. “You’re going to have to steer the boat!” I called to Angela. “You’ll have to lay us alongside, then sheer off once I’m aboard Wildtrack, understand? I don’t want that hulk stoving us in!”

She nodded. She was staring at the figure in the hull-down Wildtrack. His hood was up and his collar buttoned across his mouth.

“When I’ve got him,” I went on, “you’re going to have to come alongside again!” Christ alone knew how. She’d become a good sailor, but this manoeuvre was like asking a passenger to land a jumbo.

I left her on the tiller while I tied all the fenders I’d taken from Bannister’s boathouse on to Sycorax’s guardrail stanchions. I hung the fenders more in hope than with any expectation that they would save my boat. Wildtrack and Sycorax would be pitching as they met and I feared I would crash my bows down on her deck or, worse, rip off my rudder and propellor with the force of the collision. I was scared of Wildtrack. She was a floating battering ram that could disable us or even crush in our bilges.

I let the mainsail fall and roughly lashed gaff and sail to the boom which I then secured to the gallows. I did not want Angela distracted by hammering sails as she tried to manoeuvre the boat. I stowed the staysail and mizzen, but left the storm jib sheeted taut to stiffen Sycorax and to give some leverage to the bows at the moment when Angela needed to sheer away. I took the tiller. “Are you hooked on?”

She showed me her lifeline. I accelerated. We were close enough to Wildtrack now to share the same valleys of sea. I wanted to circle the crippled boat and approach from the lee so that the wind would be pushing Sycorax away from that treacherous hull once I was aboard her. In choosing that course I risked Wildtrack’s trailing ropes tangling in Sycorax’s propellor, and I told a worried Angela that, once I was aboard, she was to put the motor in neutral and let the storm jib carry her clear of the warps. “Let the sheet run a bit, OK?” It was clearly not OK. “Should I go across to him?” Angela shouted.

I’d thought of that, but I knew she did not have the physical strength to lift a helpless man. And Bannister was helpless. He was hardly moving except to follow our progress with his orange-hooded face. There was also another reason for me to go; if anything went wrong then Angela would be left on the safer of the two boats. I explained that I would clear the trailing ropes once I was aboard Wildtrack so that she need not worry about fouling the propellor on her second approach. “But if you can’t get us off,” I shouted, “then stay close if you can! If you can’t, good luck! Go west! You’ll find trawlers on the Grand Banks. And don’t forget to feed Vicky!”

She gave me a frightened look. I grinned, trying to reassure her, then gunned the engine to spin Sycorax up into Wildtrack’s lee. I noticed that Wildtrack’s flooded hull gave us some small shelter. “Take the tiller! Remember, tiller hard over and motor into neutral as soon as I’m on her!”

Angela took the tiller and I staggered forward to Sycorax’s starboard shrouds. I unclipped my lifeline from the jackstay and coiled it into a pocket. I put my good left foot over the guardrail and held on for grim life as we rolled our gunwale under. We were six feet from the swamped boat, five feet, closing to three, two, and I put my right foot over the rail and was about to leap across the churning gap into Wildtrack’s flooded central cockpit when the sea heaved between the boats and Sycorax slewed away. I clung to the shroud with my left hand as the green water churned up my boots. “Closer!” I shouted, though I doubt if Angela heard me. She turned the tiller too far and we came surging back towards the other boat. The lurching movement had driven us far up Wildtrack’s hull; almost to her bows. In another second it would be too late to jump.

Then the sea heaved the hulls together and I heard the crashing grind of wood on fibreglass. I jumped.

I pushed off with my left leg, which meant I landed on my right, and, for the first time in weeks, my knee buckled. I must have cried aloud, though I could hear nothing but the turmoil of water and wind. The leg was numb, it crumpled, and I sprawled heavily on Wildtrack’s slippery foredeck. Pain speared out from my back. I heard Sycorax’s engine falter as Angela rammed the lever into neutral and I had a terrifying glimpse of Sycorax’s bowsprit arcing above my head, then a new terror swamped me as a sea broke over Wildtrack’s foredeck and swept me towards the side. I grabbed a guardrail stanchion with my right hand and held on as the water shattered about me. The rush of cold sea slewed me around, but my left boot found a purchase on Wildtrack’s forehatch and somehow I held fast in the bubbling and seething thunder of the sea. I couldn’t think, except, over and over again, to repeat a refrain in my head: “You must be fucking mad, you must be fucking mad”, and I suddenly remembered those were the very words I’d screamed aloud as I’d charged uphill with an SLR in my hands. I’d been scared witless then, and I was scared now. The sea began to stream off Wildtrack’s deck and I lifted my head to see blood spewing into the flooded scuppers. It seemed to come from my left hand, but I could not see how bad the cut was. I tried to move my right leg, but there was no feeling there. I watched Sycorax sheering off, plunging her bowsprit into the wavecrests.

Wildtrack’s hulk lurched up, freeing me from the water and letting me pull myself down the scuppers. I saw that I had slashed my left hand on a stub of metal shroud that had been sheared clean and astonishingly bright with bolt-cutters. The cut was across the fleshy base of my thumb and, though it was pulsing blood, there was nothing I could do about it now. I was cursing my leg as I pulled myself forward. My oilskins snagged on an empty jib-sheet track and, in my fear and rage, I ripped the jacket savagely to free myself before the next wave hammered over the rolling hulk.

I slithered over the coaming into the flooded central cockpit. I was soaked through, but adrenalin was warming me. The wind was lashing spray across the boat, but there was some small shelter in the cockpit, though it was frightening to be so low and unprotected in the water. The great swells loomed steep above me, their sides like crinkling slopes of bottle glass up which the swamped boat rose sluggishly but never quite made the tops so that the waves would break over her and, for an instant, she would be awash. The truth was that Wildtrack was sinking, and I was suddenly gripped with a terrible fear that she would go down before Angela could bring Sycorax back. I looked around for a lifebelt or raft, but when the crew had abandoned Wildtrack they had taken all such equipment. Yet, even if she did succeed in coming back, I did not know how I would transfer myself, let alone Bannister. My leg was useless. I sat half underwater and clawed fingers into my thigh and knee in an attempt to feel something.

I tried to stand, fell again, and pulled myself to the cockpit’s edge.

The leg would have to look after itself while I dragged trailing ropes from the water and jammed them into cave lockers. As I pulled the last line aboard, a swell rolled the boat’s stern up and the water in the cockpit surged forward. I saw the horror then.

I wasn’t ready for it, and I puked.

The door to the rear cabin was open and the body floated forward with the ship’s sluggish motion. It floated out of the door until its shoulders stuck. When I first saw the corpse I was stowing the last treacherous rope and summoning the courage to cross the rear coachroof to where Bannister sheltered, but suddenly I knew it was not Bannister who waited for me in Wildtrack’s stern.

It was not Bannister, because I was looking at Bannister now, and he at me. Or rather his dead eyes were gaping at me from the companionway that spilt yet more water into the cockpit. He was wearing a lifejacket that should have kept his head above water, but his throat had been cut almost to the spine so that his head lolled back and his fish-white eyes were alternately above and under the rush of seawater. There was no blood. All the blood had been pumped and washed out of him. He must have been dead for hours for he was nothing but a bleached and bloodless thing that floated in the mass of cabin flotsam. The throat had been cut clean by a blade, then washed cleaner by the salt water. The sight of that wound made me vomit.

Wildtrack’s bows rose and the body mercifully washed back out of sight. I scrambled aft and, using my arms, dragged myself onto the coachroof and hung on to the handrails as another sea bubbled and spilt around me. It was then that the man in the stern cockpit turned his hooded gaze on me.

It was Mulder.

Wildtrack shuddered under me as the sea poured off her topsides.

I scrabbled towards Mulder and fell into the small after cockpit.

“Can you stand?”

He shook his head, then pointed to his left leg that was bent unnaturally. He shouted something, and I had to cup my hand to my ear to show him I could not hear his words. He pulled open the flap that had covered his mouth. “Fucking fell.” He shouted it bitterly, as though fate had been peculiarly unkind to him. “My leg’s broken!” That made two one-legged men in a doomed boat. “Where’s the rest of the crew?” I was trying to stand, holding on to the rail beside the aft cabin door. I was searching for Sycorax and saw her, hull down, two hundred yards off, and still going away from me. I saw the storm jib’s sheet had come loose and the sail was flogging itself into shreds, then a heave of green water hid her from me. I tried to put my weight on my right leg and felt it shivering with the strain.

“Where’s your crew?” I shouted.

“Taken off!” Mulder shouted back. “They’re safe.” So another boat had stood by and rescued the crew? Mulder had clearly stayed on board to try and salvage the damaged ship and had then been marooned when the gale blew up. I wondered where the rescuing boat was, and why it had not steered for the flares. “Is that who you were signalling?” I asked. “The rescue ship?”

“Get me the fuck off here, Sandman! She’s sinking!”

“I should bloody leave you, Fanny.” I ducked as we reared up the side of a green cliff and as the tons of water smashed across us. “Why did you cut his throat?” I shouted the question again as we heaved up from the cold waves.

“Accident.” He shouted the word vehemently.

He looked so damned smug in his expensive foul-weather gear and lifejacket. I hated him then, and tried to kick him, but my damned leg folded so that I fell awkwardly in the cockpit. I fell over his broken leg and I heard Mulder’s odd falsetto scream. I rolled off him and pulled myself into a sitting position. “Why did you cut his throat?” I shouted again.

He just stared his hatred at me, so I lifted my left leg to kick his broken bone and the threat made him babble in a desperate attempt to avoid the pain. “Because I couldn’t push him overboard!”

“Did you kill his wife?”

He stared at me as if I was mad. “Get me off here! The boat’s sinking!”

“Did you kill his wife?”

“No!”

“You are a bastard, Fanny.” I managed to kneel upright and un-shackle his lifeline from a D-ring. He watched me, not sure whether I intended to push him overboard or save his life. I grabbed a braidline rope out of the tangle of wreckage in the cockpit and pulled forty or fifty feet free before the line jammed. “Knife!” I shouted over the sound of wind and sea. “Give me your knife!” He handed me a sheath knife which I supposed had been the murder weapon. I used the heavy blade to slash off the length of braidline, then clung to the handrail as another sea hissed about us.

I tied a small bowline, then shackled the line of Mulder’s safety harness to the bowline’s loop. The other end of the rope went round my waist. Once Angela returned I would scramble on board Sycorax, then haul Mulder to safety. I explained that to him. “It’s going to hurt you,” I added, “but if you want to drown, then cut yourself loose.” I tossed the knife back to him, then pulled myself to the lee rail.

I stood there, clinging for dear life to the guardrail stanchion, and willed my right leg to take my weight. I searched the broken sea for a glimpse of Sycorax. Wildtrack rolled slow as we were washed by a wavecrest, then we dropped again and I thought, just as I lurched with the downwards roll, that I saw a mast’s tip beyond a saw-edged crest. I waited, I prayed, and a moment later, as once more we heaved slowly upwards, I saw Sycorax’s stern with its bright flash of the frayed Red Ensign. I knew Angela must be struggling to turn the old boat. She was already a quarter-mile off and I hoped to God she did not lose sight of us. I looked for a boathook, or oar, or anything that I could jam upright as a signal for her, but anything of use had long been swept overboard.

I crouched back into the small shelter of the aft cockpit. “You’re going to have to wait, Fanny.”

“Who’s sailing your boat?”

“A friend,” I said.

Mulder shrugged. He looked worn down to his last reserves; grey-faced, red-rimmed eyes, and with pain creasing his cheeks. “They lost us in the night,” he said.

“Who lost you?”

“Kassouli. Who do you think?”

Who else? I should have known that Yassir Kassouli would be here at the kill. I clung to the handrail as a sea thundered and crashed over the coaming. I thought for a second that the waterlogged hull was sinking, dragged down by the weight of her engine and ballast, but somehow the sleek hull came up again. I found a length of rope that I wrapped as a crude bandage around my cut hand.

“If Kassouli finds you here,” Mulder said, “he’ll bloody sink you, Sandman.”

“He’s deserted you, Fanny. He’s left you here to die.” Down in the wave troughs the wind’s noise was lessened, though I still had to shout if Mulder was to hear my words. “He’s left you, Fanny, but I’m going to save your miserable life. I’m taking you to where I can stand up in a courtroom and tell them about Bannister and his cut throat.”

The South African stared at me with loathing, then shook his head.

“Kassouli won’t desert me.”

“He already has.” I flinched from another tumble of water, then pulled myself upright to search the southern horizon. Sycorax had turned, but she was still far off and I prayed that Angela was not having trouble with the engine. There were no other boats in sight.

A gasp of pain made me turn. Mulder, the knife in his hand, had tried to lunge towards me, but a combination of his broken leg and the obstruction of his inflated lifejacket had stopped the murderous thrust. It seemed he really did believe that Kassouli would return for him, and that it was better to risk waiting for that salvation than to be turned over to justice. In that hope he had lunged at me, and now I kicked at the knife in his hand to stop him trying again.

My kick missed, and once again the effort toppled me. My bandaged left hand slipped off the handrail so that I fell forward towards Mulder. I tried to regain my balance, but only managed to drop my right knee on to the thigh of Mulder’s broken leg.

He screamed, and the sound was whipped away by the wind and searing foam. Wildtrack heaved up as I collapsed. Mulder was still moaning with the pain, but the strength of the man was extraordinary. He wrapped his left arm round my neck, and I knew he was reversing the knife in his right hand and that any second the blade would be in my ribs. Water sloshed up about us.

I rammed my head forward, smashing the bridge of his nose with my forehead, then I screamed myself from the pain that clawed at my back as I twisted away from him. I glimpsed the knife against a background of water and I reached for it with both hands and my right caught his wrist as my left was slashed by the blade. I jerked his knife hand towards me, then sank my teeth into the ball of his thumb and bit down until I could taste his blood in the back of my throat.

His hand tried to jerk away, but I clung to him. He hit me with his free hand, then tried to loop his lifeline about my neck. I was kicking with my left foot; not in any attempt to hurt him, but rather to gain a purchase in the flooded cockpit. The lifeline rope was around my eyes and he hauled it back, making me let go with my teeth. Then my left foot rammed against the coaming and I used all my strength to force myself up, dripping and bleeding. I let go of his knife hand and drove my bunched fists down, falling with all my weight on them, down on to the broken bone in his shin.

I hit him like a pile-driver, and the force of my blow was made worse by an upward lurch of the boat. I fancied I felt the broken bone grate as I hit him.

He screamed and twitched, the knife forgotten. I plucked it from his nerveless fingers. I could never have disarmed him if he had not been so weakened, but now, because of his leg, and because he was half dead with exposure and thirst, he could not fight properly. I saw blood on his face, then the sea washed it away and I was scrambling desperately backwards, the knife in my hand, and I jammed myself in the corner of the cockpit by the wheel and held my breath to let the pain ebb away.

Mulder had given up. He lay exhausted and hopeless. I struggled upright, still holding the knife, and saw the spray bursting apart from Sycorax’s bows. Angela was fighting towards us, still four hundred yards off, and still struggling against wind and sea. The storm jib was now nothing but tattered streamers.

I put my left foot against Mulder’s broken leg. “Now,” I said,

“you’re going to tell me what happened.”

“Piss off.” He would be defiant to the end, stubborn as a cornered and wounded boar.

I felt no remorse for the pain I would give him. He’d tried to kill me, now I would take the truth from him and one day give it back in a court of law. I slammed my heel forward.

When he stopped screaming I asked him again, and this time, because I still threatened and had proved that I would use pain, he told me of Kassouli’s revenge. The story came slowly, and I had to tease it out of him between the slashing assaults of the breaking waves.

Mulder, obedient to his paymaster, had brought Wildtrack to this waste place in the ocean where, two nights before and under the cover of the night watch, Mulder had sheared a port shroud. He had sabotaged a shroud before, trying to cast suspicion on me, and he had known that as soon as he put weight on the shroud the mast would bend and break. He had gone aft, tacked ship, and let the chaos overtake the long hull. The crew had tumbled up from their bunks to find disaster and salvation.

The salvation was Kerak, the supertanker. A Kassouli ship that had loomed with blazing lights from the darkness, and I imagined the terror Bannister must have felt when he heard, on the radio, the identity of the ship that had so fortuitously appeared.

The crew had been taken off, Mulder said, leaving only himself and Bannister on Wildtrack. “Bannister wouldn’t leave.” That was a clever touch, I thought sourly. Bannister would have chosen to stay with the one man he could trust; his own assassin.

Bannister and Mulder had cleared the mast’s wreckage then ran westwards under the engine. That was when the gale had blown up. Mulder steered to the tanker’s lights, but some time in the darkness Wildtrack had broached, or else had been struck by a cross-sea, and an open hatch had swamped the boat. Wildtrack’s electrics had died, and the motor had coughed into silence. Mulder had clambered forward to start the engine by hand, but had slipped on the companionway and broken his leg.

They had drifted in the darkness then, the tanker lost, and some time in that next long day Mulder had ripped his blade across Bannister’s throat and thus fulfilled his contract. Then he had waited for Kassouli, but the swamped hull would not have shown on the tanker’s radar and Mulder had waited in vain. He had slept for a time, waking to the darkness into which, at long intervals, he had sent his few flares. I had seen the last three fired.

Now, huddled and cold, battered and shivering, I listened to Mulder’s tale. I massaged my leg, feeling the slow return of life to the cold flesh. At times, struggling up in the streaming cockpit, I would see Angela’s painfully slow progress towards us. I waved once, and saw her wave back. All I could do now was pray that Wildtrack did not sink before Sycorax reached us. I wondered if I should go into the after cabin and strip the lifejacket from the dead man, but I could not face those empty eyes and flayed throat.

“What happened,” I shouted at Mulder, “to Nadeznha?” He had thought my interrogation was over, and I had to raise my left foot to encourage him. “I don’t know!” he shouted.

“You do bloody know!” I put my heel against his broken leg.

“I wasn’t on deck.” Mulder seemed hypnotized by my threat.

“Bannister relieved me.”

“You didn’t say that at the inquest.”

“Bannister didn’t want me to! He paid me to say that I was on watch!”

“Why?” I shouted. The wind was shrieking at us, snatching our voices, and tumbling cold water about our two hunched figures.

“Why?” I shouted again.

“He didn’t want anyone to know he wasn’t a watch captain. Me and Nadeznha, we sailed the boat, not him! But if anyone had known his wife was skippering and he was just crewing, he’d have lost face.”

I stared at the shivering man. Good God, I thought, but it made such sense. Bannister had not been half the sailor his wife had been, nor that Mulder was, yet his vanity would have insisted that he was seen as the expert.

Mulder mistook my silence for disbelief. “As God is my witness”—he was shaking with fright and cold—“that’s all I lied about.

I swear it! I don’t know what happened. I wouldn’t have killed her, I loved her!” I still said nothing, and Mulder still construed my silence as a threat. “I loved her, man! We were lovers! She and I!”

“Lovers?” I was incredulous; gaping at him. It made sense, if I had bothered to think about it, yet the conjunction of Nadeznha Bannister’s beauty and Mulder’s bestiality seemed so very astonishing. “Did Bannister ever find out?”

“He never found out.” There was a curious sort of pride in Mulder’s voice; the boast of a man who had made a notable sexual conquest. Poor Bannister, I thought, cuckolded by so many sailors.

But if Bannister had known about Mulder and Nadeznha, I thought, then his pride might have made him kill both. “Did Bannister kill his wife?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Mulder’s voice was a whimper that barely carried over the hiss of sea and air. “In God’s name, Mr Sandman, I don’t know.”

“But you told Kassouli that he killed her.”

“I told him I’d lied for Bannister at the inquest.” Mulder was desperate to be believed. “It was Mr Kassouli’s idea that Bannister killed Nadeznha, not mine!”

“But you encouraged the idea?”

“I told him the truth. I told him Bannister hated Nadeznha. Behind her back he called her a spoilt wog bitch.” Mulder babbled at me.

“He was terrified of her!”

“But you don’t know that he murdered her, do you?”

“Who else?”

“You bastard,” I said. This whole God-damned, star-crossed, bloody mess was because Kassouli had misinterpreted Mulder’s lie at the inquest. And all along the bloody Boer had known nothing, but his venality had led to this killing place. He had taken money for one lie, then seen that he could make more money by betraying Bannister to Kassouli. Now he lay shivering and broken in a sinking boat and, if I could save him, it would only be for a courtroom and a prison.

That fate suddenly seemed closer as Sycorax thrust her bows through the crest of the neighbouring swell. I hurled the knife overboard and struggled to the lee rail. Sycorax surged down the wave slope, then a rolling crest came between us and all I could see was her topmast above the frantic water. I held on to the guardrail for grim life as another crest slammed over Wildtrack, and when the water seethed away I saw that Sycorax was foully close, too close.

She was rearing above us, her chain bobstay dripping weed and water that was whipped horizontally by the wind. Wildtrack’s hulk was falling down the wave, but Sycorax was coming faster and higher on the churning slope. I could see the copper sheathing at her stem. “Sheer off! Sheer off!” I shouted it vainly as I felt Wildtrack rising beneath me, heaving slowly up, then Sycorax seemed to dip towards me as Angela saw the danger. She was too late. I flinched away from Wildtrack’s gunwale as Sycorax’s bows crashed into the hulk. I seemed to be drowning in the savage churn of water and I heard, rather than saw, the slamming of the two boats. I forced myself upright to see Sycorax’s timber scraping and gouging away from me. I’d put the fenders too far aft.

“Nick!” I heard Angela scream and I knew she would never manage to make the run a second time. I took a breath, willed my legs to push me up, then lunged to seize Sycorax’s pulpit rails. My left leg thrust me upwards as the two boats banged and thumped each other. If I fell between the hulls now my legs would be crushed to mincemeat. I hooked an arm over the rail, swung my left leg up to the toerail, and suddenly I was clinging to the outside of Sycorax’s bows. I was choking with water, and being deafened by the bellow of wind and the grating of wood and the seething anger of the sea.

Angela thrust the tiller over to sheer off as I’d told her, and suddenly I knew she would accelerate the boat and she would not know that I was tied to Mulder. When the braidline jerked taut it would be me who was plucked into the sea, not Mulder. He was a great weight in a waterlogged cockpit, while I was just clinging by weakened arms to Sycorax’s gunwales. I screamed for Angela to slow down, but the wind snatched my voice into nothing. I had thrown the knife away, and all I could do was grab the trailing braidline with my right hand and reach under Sycorax’s guardrails to loop it round a berthing cleat. I looped it once, twice, then it snatched taut and I heard the shout of pain as Mulder was plucked out of Wildtrack’s cockpit. The loops on the cleat had held, but were slipping now and I let them slip so that the rope’s tension helped to pull me inboard.

I dragged myself to safety. I was sobbing with pain and cold, dripping with blood, but there was no time to catch breath. Sycorax dipped in a trough and water smashed me back towards the mainmast where I was stopped short by the braidline’s tension. I kept that tension hard as I undid the bowline about my waist, then knelt up to lash the braidline to a belaying pin on the fiferail. Angela was staring at me, her eyes wide in terror, but she had done all I had asked her to do, and done it well. The pain was all over me. Blood was dripping from my left hand from which the crude rope bandage had washed free.

I crawled down the scuppers. “Hard to starboard! Engine out of gear!”

Angela had turned to stare at the figure who was being towed in the water behind us. “Is that Tony?”

“Starboard the tiller now! Out of gear!” The foam was breaking and boiling around Mulder.

Angela pushed the tiller over, kicked the throttle lever into neutral, and the strain vanished from Mulder’s taut rope. I had to go forward again, this time taking a coil of rope from a locker in Sycorax’s cockpit. My right leg was shaking, but holding me. I harnessed myself, then leaned over the guardrails and tied my new rope to Mulder’s with a rolling hitch. The knot was stained with blood by the time it was fast. I released the braidline from the fiferail and berthing cleat, then went back to the cockpit. The wind was screaming, or perhaps I screamed, for the pain was making me sob.

I was moving like a horror-film monster and muttering instructions to myself. Sycorax was broaching, rolling and pitching, snatching like a tethered wild colt.

I pulled the braidline inboard, undid the rolling hitch, and fed Mulder’s line through a block that hung from the boom gallows.

Then I began to haul him alongside.

“Is that Tony?” Angela helped me pull.

“It’s Mulder!”

“Where’s Tony?”

“He’s dead.” I could not soften the blow. I spoke too curtly, but I was at the end of my strength and I did not know how, in this welter of sea and wind, to break the news gently.

Mulder was too heavy for us. We brought him to the gunwale, and there he stuck. I thought at first it was the clumsiness of his inflated lifejacket that was blocking our efforts and I told Angela to fetch a knife and slash the jacket. Mulder, who must have recognized Angela with astonishment, then fear, flinched from the blade, then subsided as he saw that she posed no threat. She stabbed and stabbed through the tough material until the jacket went limp.

“Pull!” I said to her, and we pulled, but Mulder’s weight and the weight of his soaked clothing was too great and we still could not hoist him over the guardrails. Sycorax rolled her gunwale under and Mulder tried to pull himself up, but he was as weak as we were.

“Hold on!” I shouted at him. He nodded and gripped a guardrail stanchion. I cleated the braidline, then fetched my bolt-cutters from a locker. If I cut the guardrails away then a surge of sea would probably roll the South African on to our scuppers.

I cut the wires and was just loosening the braidline from the cleat when Angela screamed.

I thought it was because Mulder had died, but it was for quite another reason.

“Nick! Nick!” Her voice held pure terror. I turned and saw, coming out of the grey-white murk, the bows of a giant ship.

It was a supertanker. A great black, dripping, slab-sided, bulbous-bowed monster of the sea, and I saw she had the yellow kestrel-painted funnel of the Kassouli Line. The tanker slammed through the ocean like a great sea-beast; like a Leviathan come for its revenge.

It was the Kerak. She was in ballast, showing her red paint, while the great bulb at her stem seemed like a ramming prow that was heading straight for Sycorax. I remembered Mulder’s threat—that Kassouli would sink us—and it seemed only too real as the vast bows splintered the seas aside.

“Nick!” Angela screamed again.

“Hold fast!” I shouted at Mulder, then I banged the tiller across and throttled up. It was all a sudden panic in cold horror. The great ship was closing at what seemed her full speed and I could do nothing but shout in impotent rage at her streaked bows.

Kerak must have seen us as I shouted, for she seemed to turn, or else Sycorax found a twist of speed I’d never known in her. Whatever, we would not be rammed, but we still risked being swamped and I instinctively wrenched my tiller to port so that our bows would meet the great tanker’s wash head on.

I turned and, by doing it, I killed Mulder.

I had not meant to, I did not know I was doing it, but I killed him.

Or perhaps, mercifully, he was already dead before I pulled the tiller across.

I had released the two locking turns on the cleated braidline after I’d cut the guardrails away. I’d done it so I could pull Mulder inboard, but my alarm at the Kerak’s threat had made me abandon the cleat. It still had three turns on it, but the braidline was made of a slick synthetic fibre that, without the locking turns, slipped on the cleat’s horns. The surge of our acceleration must have loosened Mulder’s grip on the stanchion, he had let go, and his weight had dragged the braidline’s loops inch by deadly inch, and with each lurch he had fallen further from safety. As I turned to port a wave had lifted our stern and he must have been thrust under the boat.

The first I knew of it was a chopping judder in Sycorax’s timbers, a quivering in the hull, and then I snatched the engine out of gear, but the blood was already spreading in our wake. Blood and horror surfaced, churned up by the spinning blades, and then Mulder’s tethered body bobbed up on the surface, a mess of red, and I jerked the rest of the braidline loose and throttled hard forward so we would leave him astern and Angela would not see the butcher’s mess on the sea behind. Mulder’s skull had taken the propellor’s blows. He was dead.

Then the Kerak’s streaked and cliff-like hull smashed past to block out the eastern sky. Faces, made tiny by height and distance, stared from behind the bridge windows. A single figure, standing on the jutting wing of the bridge, hurled what I thought was a lifebuoy towards Sycorax. The thing twisted in the air, was snatched by the wind, and red flowers shredded from the wreath as it dropped to the sea. Flowers for a dead girl.

The wake of the tanker was like a storm wave, breaking and running white. I pushed Sycorax hard round, under full throttle again, then snatched the lever back to slow as we met the first wave head on. We pounded into the sea, rearing and plunging, and water exploded from our hull as we crashed down from its peak. The second wave tossed us up again and the boom shook and I thought the topping lift would snap. I hurled useless curses at the receding tanker.

“What happened?” Angela was staring at the cut guardrails where Mulder had been.

“He died,” I said. “My fault.” Our bows pitched into what seemed like a black hole in the sea. We crashed into the next wave, Angela staggered, then Sycorax clawed her way back up.

“Who died?” Angela asked, and I realized that she was in shock.

“Mulder died!”

Her eyes were vacant. “And Tony?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, except that I was sorry. I was sorry for her, for her husband, even for the man who had died because I had undone the locking turns of his safety line. I would dream about those turns. A life had gone because I’d pulled a rope free. It was a foul dream to add to the one about the man who’d cried “Mama! ” as my bayonet twisted in his gut.

Kerak had disappeared in the spume, leaving Sycorax in lesser waves. I turned her to face the swells when the squawk of the radio startled me. I forced Angela to take the tiller, then pushed open the cabin hatch and leaned down to the set. Vicky mewed at me from the chart table and I muttered something soothing as I pulled the microphone towards me. The call sounded again from the speaker.

“This is merchant vessel Kerak to yacht Sycorax, over.”

“Sycorax,” I responded. A sea shattered on our bows and slashed down to sting my face.

“Is that Captain Sandman? Over.” It was Yassir Kassouli’s voice.

“Who else?” I snapped back.

There was a pause. “I could not see anyone on board Wildtrack.

Did you get close enough to see anyone aboard? Over.”

“I got on board Wildtrack,” I said. I was too tired, too hurt, and too cold to be bothered with radio courtesies.

The radio hissed. Angela was watching me, but so dully that I did not think she could hear what I was saying. “You were on board?

Over,” Kassouli asked, and I could hear the incredulity in his voice.

“Why don’t you just piss off?” Except I hadn’t pressed the microphone button so he did not hear me. Now I did press it. “I was on board,” I confirmed, “and there was no one there alive. No one.

Bannister’s dead. So is Mulder.”

Kassouli’s metallic voice sounded after another pause. “Who was the body being towed behind your yacht, Captain? Over.”

“That was Mulder. I tried to save him. I couldn’t.”

“What happened? Over,” Kassouli persisted.

“Mulder died,” I said. “He just died.” I raised my head to look for Kerak, but the tanker was still lost in the whirl of windborne spray. She’d be watching me on her radar, though, and I feared that she would turn and come back. “It was an accident,” I said into the microphone.

“And Bannister’s death? Over.”

I hesitated. I wanted to vent my anger at Kassouli over the air, I wanted to accuse him of murder, I wanted to tell him that I did not think his daughter had been murdered, I wanted to tell him that his perfect American Princess had chosen a Boer brute for her lover, but somehow, in this stinging ocean, the truth seemed out of place. There had been too much killing, too much anger, and it was time for it all to end. Revenge breeds revenge, and I had the chance to end it now. So I hesitated.

“Are you receiving me, Sycorax? Over.”

“Bannister’s death was an accident,” I lied, and only after I’d told the lie did I wonder whether my motive was simply to stay alive for, if I’d accused Kassouli of murder, then the great Leviathan might have returned from the north and crushed me like matchwood. I pressed the button again. “All three deaths were accidents, Kassouli, all three.”

Kassouli ignored my protestation that his daughter’s death had been an accident. He was silent. There was nothing but the wind and the sea and the hollow emptiness of the gale’s dying throes.

Kerak had vanished and the radio only hissed. I watched for a few minutes, but nothing appeared in the north. Kassouli, I thought, had succeeded and his daughter’s soul could fly free. It was over.

I killed the engine, took down the shredded storm jib, stowed the gallows, and set the reefed mainsail while Angela hoisted the mizzen.

She pegged the tiller, then helped me down to the cabin where, before I could put butterfly sutures on my cut hand, I first peeled off my wet, stiff, torn oilskins. I was shaking with cold and fatigue.

Angela found the strength to make oxtail soup, to wrap me in a blanket, and then to hold me tight as though she could pour her own body warmth into me.

“Tony was dead?” she asked at last.

“He was dead.”

“And it was an accident?” she asked, and I realized she must have heard my words on the radio.

“It was an accident.” I shivered suddenly, remembering the slit throat, then the image of the blood boiling up from Sycorax’s stern drove the memory of Bannister’s body from my mind. I closed my eyes for a second.

“Tell me the truth, Nick, please.” Angela was staring very gravely into my eyes. But I did not know what cause the truth would serve now. If I told Angela the truth there was no saying where her intense nature might take her. It was over and she would live better in ignorance. I tried to move off the bunk, but Angela pressed me back.

“Nick!”

“I need to set a course for St John’s,” I said.

“What happened to Tony, Nick?” Angela asked. The seas were hammering our hull, shaking us.

“The boat was knocked down.” I made the story up as I went along. “Mulder broke his leg. Tony was struck on the head. I don’t think Mulder tried very hard to save his life, but it was an accident.

He was unconscious. I think he died of exposure in the end. It’s the cold that does it. It can be so bloody cold.” I was shivering as I spoke.

“Mulder told you that?” Angela asked suspiciously.

“I saw the body.” I closed my eyes. “It was an accident.” I think Angela believed me. It was better that way. If I’d told her the truth about her husband then I do not think she could have resisted using it. She would have mocked Kassouli for his daughter’s choice of lover, she might even have tried to take Kassouli to court.

Wherever her life went now, I thought, she did not need Yassir Kassouli’s enmity to haunt her. Thus, at least, I justified my untruths to myself.

Angela sat back on the other bunk and dragged a thin hand through her lank hair. “I need a bath. God, I need a bath.” The metallic squawk of the VHF startled us both. “Yacht Sycorax.

This is merchant vessel Kerak, over.” I did not recognize the man’s voice that had an American accent.

Angela picked up the microphone. “Kerak. This is Sycorax, over.” The voice betrayed no surprise that a woman had answered his call. “Our determination is that Wildtrack’s hull is a danger to shipping. Can you confirm that there’s no one aboard? Over.” Angela looked at me, I nodded, and she pressed the microphone button. “There’s no one alive,” she said curtly.

“Thank you, Sycorax. Over and out.” I could feel Kassouli’s brooding presence like a threat. I slid back the coachroof and climbed to the bridge deck. Angela joined me.

Neither of us spoke, but we both wondered whether the great tanker would come back to crush us for being inconvenient witnesses to a rich man’s anger. We waited two minutes, then the vast shape appeared from the grey north. Kerak had turned and come back to us.

She had come back to finish her rotten task. I saw the swollen bow wave pushing ahead of her, evidence that the engines drove the tanker at full speed. She was not coming towards Sycorax. I looked for Wildtrack, but could not see her among the broken waters. The tanker could see her, though, and was aiming all her weight at the half-sunk yacht. Angela’s face was expressionless. “Is Tony’s body still on board?”

I took her hand. “Yes.”

Then the Kerak struck the floating hulk. I doubt if a shudder went through the hundred thousand tons. She hit the floating hull and I saw Wildtrack ride up the bulb at the Kerak’s prow and she seemed to be caught there like a piece of driftwood trapped by the steel bows.

The Kerak ploughed on. The spinning windscreens on the bridge looked like the malevolent eyes of a machine. There were lights behind the windows, and figures moving there in the soft comfort of the huge boat.

Angela cried then. She had loved Bannister enough to marry him.

She had put flowers in her hair for a handsome man, and now she watched his dream being sunk into two thousand fathoms of water.

Wildtrack freed itself of the tanker’s bows. For a second the yacht’s handsome, blue-streaked hull reared up, a toy boat against the steel wall that broke it, then, sliding and crumpled, Wildtrack was sinking down to where Nadeznha Bannister’s bones lay, down to where there are no storms, and no light, and only silence.

“Oh, Jesus,” Angela said, and it sounded like a prayer. I said nothing, but just watched the tanker recede into the grey nothingness of the ocean. Only when it had at last disappeared did either of us speak again. “Is there an airport at St John’s?” Angela asked in a small voice.

I nodded.

“Nick?”

“It’s all right,” I said, “I understand.” I’d always known that she was no girl for a small boat in a great sea, but I had dared to hope.

Now I knew she would go home and so I set Sycorax’s bows towards the west. West towards Canada, west towards parting, and west away from the unmarked place where the dead would lie in silence while the corroding salt dissipated their bones so they would drift as a nebulous part of the very sea itself until the dying sun would one day boil the oceans dry.

Sycorax dipped her bows to the sea and sluiced green water down her scuppers. She at least had come home, while we sailed on, in silence.

EPILOGUE

It was a hard winter. Frosts, fog and a cold to pierce the very soul.

Yet it was a hard winter in a good place. I liked Newfoundland; it had the virtues of a place where honest folk did decent work.

Sycorax’s stem had been undamaged by the collision with Wildtrack. One copper sheet had ripped loose, but it took just a few minutes’ work at low tide to nail it back into place. I re-rigged the guardrails and had a new storm jib made from heavy cotton. The sail took the last of my savings, but Vicky and I did not starve. I found work, illegally, in a boatyard.

Vicky grew. A rat came aboard and lived just long enough to regret the transgression. Vicky, blooded at last, disdained my congratula-tions and instead stalked along the frost-rimed scuppers with her tail aloft in victory. She was my company now; she and the photograph of Angela that I’d screwed to the bulkhead above the portside bunk.

I stripped the engine down and rebuilt it. I welded a radar-reflector from scrap metal and fastened it below the spreaders. I made my boat ready.

In the early spring I took Sycorax north; not on a voyage, but to test the engine and new jib. We sailed till the sky was brilliant with the reflected sun from the ice-fields. There was a stiff cold breeze coming from the north-west and, well short of the treacherous ice, and beneath a sky rinsed of colour and cloud, I backed the staysails and eased the main so that Sycorax, tractable and steady, lay hove-to.

I had read Angela’s letter a dozen times, now read it one last time.

The inquest had blamed the deaths of Bannister and Mulder on the pressures of modern ocean-racing. Neither Kassouli’s name, nor his presence at Wildtrack’s end, had been mentioned, and my notarized and sanitized affidavit had been given scarcely a glance. The verdict was that the deaths were accidental. Angela thought the film about me could be cut into a fifty-minute programme and would I consider taking Sycorax to England so she could shoot an end sequence? But she did not want me to go home just for that sequence. She had taken over Bannister’s production company and she knew I could help her. Please, Nick, she wrote, come home.

I sat there getting cold, and staring into the shimmer above the brilliant ice. There was a temptation to go home; to trade a medal for comfort and friendship and safety; but it was a temptation to avoid. I was one of life’s plodders; no match for the glittering people who made television and money. Back home I would have to compete with bright, sharp minds. Back home was a world that Kassouli and his likes ruled.

But I had said I would sail to New Zealand. There was no reason for New Zealand; it might have been Utopia or La-la land for all that it mattered, it was just a goal to keep me in the cockpit of my boat and beholden to no one. I’d gazed, one year ago, out of a hospital window and found a star to snare in a sextant’s mirror, and now I was where the star had fetched me. I was lonely, alone with a sea cat, and happy. I competed with no one, felt no jealousy, and wished no man ill. Here, at sea, I could be honest, for to be anything less was to risk the sea’s power. Here there were no bad dreams, no nights riven with tracer or seared by phosphorus, and my leg, like my rebuilt engine, worked most of the time.

So here I would stay. I released the foresail sheets and Sycorax dipped her bows as we turned and as Vicky pounced on the flutter-ing sheets of Angela’s letter. I picked her up and scratched under her chin as Sycorax caught the wind and drove forward.

“So now that we’ve arrived,” I said to Vicky, “where shall we go?”

About the Author

BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Saxon Tales, which include The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of the North, and Sword Song, as well as the Richard Sharpe novels, the Grail Quest series, the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles, the Warlord Chronicles, and many other novels, including Stonehenge and Gallows Thief. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

BOOKS BY BERNARD CORNWELL

The Saxon Tales

THE LAST KINGDOM*

THE PALE HORSEMAN*

LORDS OF THE NORTH*

SWORD SONG*

The Sharpe Novels (in chronological order) SHARPE’S TIGER*

Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Seringapatam, 1799

SHARPE’S TRIUMPH*

Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803

SHARPE’S FORTRESS*

Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803

SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR*

Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805

SHARPE’S PREY*

Richard Sharpe and the Expedition to Copenhagen, 1807

SHARPE’S RIFLES*

Richard Sharpe and the French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809

SHARPE’S HAVOC*

Richard Sharpe and the Campaign in Northern Portugal, Spring 1809

SHARPE’S EAGLE

Richard Sharpe and the Talavera Campaign, July 1809

SHARPE’S GOLD

Richard Sharpe and the Destruction of Almeida, August 1810

SHARPE’S ESCAPE*

Richard Sharpe and the Bussaco Campaign, 1810

SHARPE’S FURY*

Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Barrosa, March 1811

SHARPE’S BATTLE*

Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Fuentes de Onoro, May 1811

SHARPE’S COMPANY

Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Badajoz, January to April 1812

SHARPE’S SWORD

Richard Sharpe and the Salamanca Campaign, June and July 1812

SHARPE’S ENEMY

Richard Sharpe and the Defense of Portugal, Christmas 1812

SHARPE’S HONOUR

Richard Sharpe and the Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813

SHARPE’S REGIMENT

Richard Sharpe and the Invasion of France, June to November 1813

SHARPE’S SIEGE

Richard Sharpe and the Winter Campaign, 1814

SHARPE’S REVENGE

Richard Sharpe and the Peace of 1814

SHARPE’S WATERLOO

Richard Sharpe and the Waterloo Campaign, 15 June to 18 June 1815

SHARPE’S DEVIL*

Richard Sharpe and the Emperor, 1820–21

The Grail Quest Series

THE ARCHER’S TALE*

VAGABOND*

HERETIC*

The Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles

REBEL*

COPPERHEAD*

BATTLE FLAG*

THE BLOODY GROUND*

The Warlord Chronicles

THE WINTER KING

ENEMY OF GOD

EXCALIBUR

The Sailing Trillers

STORMCHILD*

SCOUNDREL*

WILDTRACK*

CREAKDOWN*

Other Novels

STONEHENGE, 2000 B.C.: A NOVEL*

GALLOWS THIEF*

A CROWNING MERCY*

THE FALLEN ANGELS*

REDCOAT*

* Published by HarperCollins Publishers.

Copyright

WILDTRACK. Copyright © 1988 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ISBN 978-0-06-165082-6

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1