Ragged rivets ripped the oilskin at my shoulder. Semittante rolled, towered above our stricken craft. I reversed my oar. It slipped helplessly and then lodged against a buckled plate. Peace knelt in the bows with another oar. I saw his muscles bulge. Simultaneously, I threw all my weight against the rough wood.
We were clear!
The wind snatched the cutter away like a feather. Water poured through her broken planking. I whipped off my sou'wester and baled. The others did the same. Andre snatched Peace's oar and used it to steer-the tiller was useless, she lay so far over on her beam ends. It was impossible to breathe facing the wind and speech was out of the question. We all baled frantically. Despite our efforts, the water rose.
Then suddenly the cutter slewed, stayed in mid-course, bumped, crashed-and we were thrown in a heap on to sand!
Peace picked himself up and gestured, ' Get her clear of the breakers!' His mouth formed the words, but I heard nothing in the gale. Adele raced forward and looped the bow painter over her shoulder. She, too, realized the danger of another sea hurling the boat on to the iron sand. Peace and MKG, Andre, Mac, Boz Blair's men, Trevor-Davis and I all threw our weight against the cutter. A long splinter ripped my torn hand, but I was unaware of the pain. MKG stumbled and fell, but he was up in a moment with Pete's help, hanging on to a rowlock.
The cutter slid forward. Andre shouted, pointing. Up a shallow gradient, I saw the stone structure I had spotted from the sea. Dragging, heaving, our backs breaking while the wind thundered and tore at our clothes and the sea at our feet, we inched the boat out of the breakers towards the hut. It seemed to be made of heavy squared coral blocks. We headed for a ruined doorway.
The cyclone's howl took on a new note, and I saw, outside the hut, a twisted metal grille, capped by two handcuffs like rowlocks. The lattice made the cyclone scream like the slaves who were lashed to death on it. This was the flogging-grating which gave the place its name, Vingt-Cinq Coups-Twentyfive Lashes. We manhandled the boat through the doorway, into shelter, away from the mad wind. As we up-ended the shattered hull and crept in under it, I pressed the crumpled Voice of America paper into Peace's hand. For four days the cyclone turned the sea to frenetic fermentation and the wind to a maniac which screamed its torment through the flogging-grating. Surf boiled like thunder against the reef. The high recurring note of the wind reminded me of the uninhibited keen which breaks into a shanty to cry the sailor's death-fear of the sea. It made speech impossible and sleep, exhausted though we all were, a nightmare. My dozing moments were punctuated by jerks into dazed wakefulness, as though I were goaded by the thought of the message I had given Peace. It seemed scarcely possible that the man who lay as if dead under the boat with us might by now be President of the greatest nation in the world.
And he did not know!
I salved my conscience by telling myself that it was impossible to communicate at all in the din of the cyclone and 190 that the whole question would have to be solved when it was over. Four days! What was happening constitutionally during those four critical days in the United States, where the highest office of the nation might by now be left unfilled? The searchers, like us, would be stormbound. I simply could not face up to it. Peace had taken up a position on one side of Adele and me, and Mac on the other. I sensed, though conversation was impossible, that we were under guard.
Our misery was made worse by the spray, salt and rain ' which percolated through the cutter's smashed planking over our heads. Boz carefully moved the DATICO gear, the vu firing radio and space-suits to the driest spots. Mac buried the jerrycans of petrol in the sand to deaden the smell of fumes. Since the tank of the cutter's auxiliary had been empty when we left Semittante-the reason why I had obtained the jerrycans from Mac-there was no need for us to worry about its standing upside down. We tried unavailingly to stanch the planking on the inside with our oilskins. Our mouths were raw with blown sand.
The hut, Adele had told me aboard Semittante, had been built by an eighteenth-century freebooter who had eloped with his mistress from Mauritius and been wrecked on LoveApple Crossing. They had waited fifteen years for a ship. It never came. She died. Her grave lay outside.
Previous cyclones had reduced the outlying parts to rubble, but the centre remained, made of substantial blocks of fourfoot coral. We could not stand up against the force of the wind; we could only crawl behind the shelter of the ruined walls. Whenever I did so, either Mac or Peace accompanied me, while the other watched Adele. We were evidently to be allowed no opportunity of telling what we knew. The rest of the island except the high-lying point where we were was completely submerged. On the second night, Adele lay in my arms in terror as the seas started to break into the shelter. MKG, his face caked with salt and stubble and his eyes red with sand, watched as the ocean reached out, sought our deaths, but could not quite touch us. A deep gloom fell over the launch team. We had eluded our pursuers, but the cost was plain: the stove-in cutter would never float again. I consoled myself with that thought in making bearable the secret inside the, which seemed to burn like fire whenever I looked across at the fine-drawn, tired features of the Vice-President. Radio reception was impossible with the storm and the blanketing effect of the walls and the boat. We could not have heard it, anyway.
Two days were left till the launch.
One afternoon, after I had lost count of time, something awoke me. Adele, her thin sweater stained with dried-out sea-water and her pants shrunk above her ankles, lay against my shoulder, the softness all gone from her fine, bleached hair. Andre's back was instinctively to the storm. Peace, his face gaunt, stubbled and dirty, sat propped up watching, the top of his black turtle-necked sweater caked with white salt. Mac lay sleeping on our other side. MKG, encased in an oilskin to try and keep out the file of the sand, slept under the decking aft with Boz, Trevor-Davis and the other scientists. The sand began its attrition the moment I opened my eyes on the grey, sleep-drugged, wet group-alive, but little more. We had eked out an existence on Andres sack of salted seabirds, although I wanted to gag every time I smelt one. Fire was out of the question; even the acetylene lamp would not stay alight, so we gave it up and lay in a twilight, uncaring state. Now, something touched my sailor's sense. Something, somewhere, was amiss.
The grating had stopped screaming.
I heard-heard-Adele's breathing against my neck. I lifted my head to speak to her, but the sand locked my tongue. Unceremoniously, I spat. The wind's dropped.'
My voice sounded like the crash of a shot in the confined space. Peace's eyes were alight. MKG and Boz started up, Boz letting out an oath as his head hit the planking above. By God!' exclaimed Peace. The salt caked the muscles of his face. Here-Mac MKG Andre!'
The others blinked unbelievingly and Adele pushed herself upright to a sitting position. Peace crawled across to MKG and clapped him on the shoulder. Let's get out of here we've still got today and tomorrow before the launch-'
MKG grinned back uncertainly. Let's get this damn' thing off our backs.'
Still acting like automatons, we threw our shoulders under the cutter and tipped her over. We got shakily to our. feet, staring over the low wall which had saved us.
Love-Apple Crossing had been sandpapered clean, except for a few snapped-off palm-tree trunks. Acres of white spume coated the lagoon and the shore. A sodden sea-bird lay snarled in the flogging-grating, pulped and smashed. The sun broke through as we stood in silent awe at the spectacle of devastation.