“Nothing to it,” David said, but in a voice every bit as shaky as mine. “I’m sorry if I panicked.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
He laughed nervously. “I did, Tim, I did. And I’m already terrified of going back out again.”
“That’ll be much easier,” I said dismissively, which it would, so long as no gale was blowing and so long as we shot the entrance at what passed in these seas for slack water. I throttled back the racing motor. The swells heaved down the channel, while behind us the breaking waves roared and growled and clawed at the fjord’s narrow entrance, but we had escaped their fury and were now running into the heart of an island where my daughter and all her secrets lay hidden.
Berenice became demonstrably more nervous as we sailed further up the fjord and closer to the limestone workings. I asked her if anyone from the Genesis community ever visited the fjord, and she shook her head, but then added that such a visit was not implausible. “They’ve got two cross-country motorbikes,” she explained. “the bikes don’t always work, and they’re usually short of gasoline, but sometimes they ride all over the island.”
I still doubted that the Genesis group would think it worth their while to patrol the seaward coast of their island. They had seen us flee northward, and would surely assume we had kept going toward Puerto Montt or Valparaíso. I did my best to reassure Berenice of her safety, but she was almost catatonic with fear as Stormchild nosed ever farther into the island’s heart.
We used the engine, for, though there was plenty of wind, the fjord’s steep sides either cheated us of the wind’s power or else made its direction so fickle that the sails would have been aback as often as they might have offered help. The soft beat of our engine echoed back from massive black cliffs that were slashed by high white plumes of narrow waterfalls. Sometimes the fjord opened unexpectedly into wide lakelike basins that were dotted with tree-covered islands, and more than once we had trouble deciding which waterway from such a lake was the main channel. The charts were no help. They merely confirmed that the Canal Almagro existed, but no one, it seemed, had ever surveyed its tortuous course. “It’s possible,” I told David, “that we’re the first boat ever to come here!”
“That’s a thought,” David said with pleasure. At my request he had broken out the second rifle from its hiding place in Stormchild’s bows, but now kept a nervous eye on the depth sounder. He also noted that the glass was dropping. “It’s not desperately worrying,” he said in a voice that belied his apparent confidence, “but neither is it entirely reassuring.” In any normal circumstance the fjord, with its bays and anchorages, would have offered the perfect shelter from a sudden gale, but any such gale would so heap the seas at the fjord’s narrow entrance that we ran the risk of marooning Stormchild inside. Then, if the Genesis community did discover our presence, our boat would be like a rat trapped in a barrel. We could not risk such a fate so we agreed that, should the weather threaten to lock Stormchild inside the fjord while I was making my reconnaissance of the limestone workings, David would take the boat back to sea and wait for a message from the handheld VHF radio that I would take ashore.
David, even though we had run the major risk of negotiating the fjord’s entrance, was still opposed to my reconnaissance. “You have no certainty that Nicole will be there,” he protested, “nor that you’ll find any news of her!”
“And you’ve got no certainty to the contrary,” I said. “For God’s sake, David, just let me alone for one day. I promise that if I find nothing, or if what I find is bad, then I’ll sail north with you and we’ll call in the cops.”
“But no heroics!” David warned me. “This is just a reconnaissance, and you are not going to take any risks, is that a promise?”
“Scout’s honor,” I said, and gave him the Sea Scouts salute.
“I know you, Tim!” David said in a slightly despairing voice. “You’re in a stupidly heroic mood. You think you can swan across the island, find Nicole, rescue her, then come back here and open a celebratory bottle of champagne. Well, it won’t work! No battle is won by irresponsibility.”
“Of course it isn’t,” I agreed, but without the fervor my brother demanded of me.
“Tim! Please!” David said in exasperation. “We agreed that at the first sign of violence we would withdraw, and yesterday we were fired on, but did we withdraw? Did we act upon our agreement? No we did not. You pulled captain’s rank and here we are taking yet another risk. So I want your promise that you will try no heroics. No stupidity! I want your promise.”
“You have it,” I said, and meant it, too.
It was almost dusk as Stormchild reached the fjord’s blind end where the water widened into a large rippled pool that was surrounded by gently sloping hills. The shingle beaches were edged by belts of woodland, where ferns, moss, and wild fuchsia grew in livid green tangles beneath wind-stunted beech trees. Streams tumbled white and cold from the hills. A kingfisher flashed bright across the gray water as Stormchild’s anchor rattled down to bite on the bed of a lagoon, where, I guessed, no ship had ever anchored before. The wide lake that terminated the fjord had no name printed on our chart, even the lake was not shown, so I inked in its rough outline and then added a name of my own devising: Lake Joanna.
The evening light was gray and wintry. All day the clouds had been gathering in the west, threatening wind and rain, but suddenly, as Stormchild tugged at her bedded anchor flukes, the setting sun emerged from a chasm of smoky vapor to cast a red-gold wash of fierce light across our anchorage. The sunlight made the small mountain streams look like rivulets of molten gold spilling toward a cauldron of liquid silver, above which uncountable seabirds flew on gilded wings toward their nests.
I waited until the glow faded and until the spilling streams of gold had turned back to cold white water again, then I went below. It was my turn to cook, then David would keep watch through the dark hours of the night before, in the first gray light of dawn, I would go to journey’s end.
I had been at sea too long. The backs of my legs felt as though they were sinewed with barbed wire, while the breath rasped in my throat and a stitch agonized at my waist. I had plenty of strength in my upper body from wrestling with Stormchild’s wheel and hauling on her lines, but my stamina and my leg muscles seemed to have atrophied from the long weeks of being penned up in a small boat.
It was dawn and I was climbing the steep slope above the trees that edged the fjord’s beach. I was carrying one of Stormchild’s rifles and a bag which held spare ammunition, my rigging knife, a torch, binoculars, the handheld radio, and a few rations. I also had forty feet of half-inch nylon line looped round my upper body, for Berenice had warned that there were places on the island that were inaccessible without a climber’s rope.
Behind and beneath me, below the trees and scrub which had soaked me with their dew as I struggled through their entanglement in the night’s last darkness, I could just see Stormchild in the battleship-gray mist that steamed off Lake Joanna’s sheltered surface. It was my first sight of my boat this day, for I had woken and eaten breakfast in the dark, then exchanged my sea boots for an old pair of walking boots, and had put on two sweaters and an old waxed-cotton shooting coat that offered some rudimentary camouflage, before, still in darkness, David had rowed me ashore. We had used a lantern to search the beach till we found a distinctive pale-colored rock which was the size and shape of a dinner plate, and we had agreed that, should David be forced to move Stormchild to sea or to a different anchorage, he would leave me a note hidden under the stone. Otherwise he expected to see me at dusk. If I came back after nightfall I was supposed to signal my whereabouts with the torch. David had stood on the beach offering me instruction after instruction, all very prudent and laborious, and afterward he had rather formally shaken my hand and wished me good luck. “But no heroics, Tim!”