Six paddles for six canoeists? If I had understood von Rellsteb’s parting instructions, then he had taken one other person to help capture Stormchild. Which left four at the mine, one of whom was screaming with a bullet in his guts. Was Nicole here? No, I could not believe my daughter would conspire for my death, though now, still shivering from the gunfight, I did not really understand anything except that I had sailed ten thousand miles to discover nightmare.
Another bullet flicked overhead. I wondered if one gunman was trying to trap me on the small beach while the others came down the ramp to finish me off. I looked to my right and saw that I could stay in the shelter of the stone quay all the way to a jumble of dark rocks which lay at the base of a broken and torn cliff. The rocks extended far along the shore, and I guessed that once I was in their cover I would be safe. I limped to their shelter. It was low tide and the stones were slippery with rain and weed, but I found a deep cleft that offered me complete protection from any gunmen in the buildings, and, deep in the cleft’s protective shadow, I paused to catch my breath and to plan my next move. I was sobbing, not with pain, but with a kind of self-disgust. Then I forgot my misery for, far above me, and muffled by distance and half drowned by the rush of wind and rain, there was a sudden shot. The screaming of the man called Chris abruptly ended.
“Oh, my God,” I murmured in prayer. I had caused a man’s death. I had not meant it to be like this. Mingled sweat and rain were running down my face. I refilled the Lee-Enfield’s empty magazine. My fingers were cold and clumsy, or perhaps they were shaking because I had killed a man. I was shivering. They would be coming for me. These people were ruthless. Christ! They took no prisoners and left no wounded, not even their own. I knew I must do something. I had to think!
Von Rellsteb had been waiting for me, expecting me. That was the premise from which to start. I had to work out what they wanted, and therefore what they might do, and only then could I decide what I should do, except that whenever I tried to think logically the panic and adrenaline distracted and unnerved me, making me so jumpy that I twisted and almost fired when a kelp goose paddled into view at the seaward end of my hiding place. I tried to relax, but I was shivering uncontrollably.
They had been waiting for me. They knew I would come to the mine and not to the settlement. Why?
They had known I would come to the mine, but they had not foreseen everything. They had expected Stormchild to sail up the Desolate Straits, presumably passing the settlement in the darkness, and they had taken care to have their kayaks hidden so that on Stormchild’s arrival we would have assumed that the limestone workings were abandoned, and once we had gone ashore they would have attacked us because they wanted us silenced, and, doubtless, because they wanted our boat. That was obvious. They wanted Stormchild.
They wanted Stormchild, yet von Rellsteb’s plans to capture her had gone awry when I chose to use the Almagro Channel. But, once my presence in the limestone workings had been detected, von Rellsteb had quickly regrouped his forces and had then dealt brilliantly with me, which meant that by now, unless David had put up a stout fight or had already taken her to sea, Stormchild was probably captured, David and Berenice likely dead. But I could not think about those possible disasters, not while a different disaster still threatened to overwhelm me.
I was still not thinking straight. I was shaking and cold and blaming myself. I had been so certain the Genesis boats would sail north to pursue Stormchild, but von Rellsteb had known I would come for my daughter. I had done everything he had expected me to do, except for one thing. He had expected me to die, and I was alive.
Now it was time to defy von Rellsteb. It was time, God help me, to fight — for David, for myself, and for Nicole.
It took me about ten minutes to realize that I had trapped myself between a she-devil and a cold, flooding sea. I had thought myself entirely safe in the cleft, which hid me from every landward vantage point, but I had forgotten the tide. The straits, agitated by a strengthening wind, were rising fast, and the icy flooding water would very soon force me out of my hiding place and into the waiting sights of Lisl and her gunmen.
I knew they would be watching for me. They must have realized I was hidden somewhere in the bleak tangle of rocks on the foreshore, and that if I did not break cover soon I would drown or else die of hypothermia in the rising waters. The wind suddenly seemed bitterly cold. It was blowing ever more strongly, gusting close to gale force as it flecked the water behind me white. The deterioration of the weather gave me hope that David would have decided to take Stormchild out through the fjord’s gut into the wide, safe ocean, and would already be beating his way offshore and waiting for my radio signal.
The thought of the radio made me remember how something had broken during my panicked and bruising descent of the old lime chute. I opened the bag and fished out the small handheld radio, which, to my relief, proved to be intact. It had been the right-hand barrel of my binoculars that had broken. I shook the scraps of broken lens and the useless prism out of the barrel and pushed the now half-useful glasses back into the bag. Then, in desperate hope, I switched on the radio and tuned it to channel 37. “Stormchild, Stormchild! This is Tim. Do you read me? Over.”
I released the transmitter button and heard nothing but an empty hiss from the speaker. A small red light glowed to show me that the radio’s battery was still strong, but rather than waste its electricity in vain I switched the set off. I was shadowed by the cliffs and high hills, so only some freak meteorological condition might have bounced my signal to wherever Stormchild was; if indeed Stormchild still floated, or was in friendly hands that knew which channel to monitor.
I put the radio in the bag, then ate my last piece of hoarded fruitcake which I washed down with the dregs of the cold tea. The incoming tide was surging up to my feet and I knew I must move very soon. I peered over the rocks to stare at the limestone workings. I saw no movement there, but that did not mean my enemies were not scanning the shrinking shoreline for a sign of me. I ducked down again, slung the bag and rifle on my shoulder, then crawled under the cover of the seaweed-stinking rocks to the base of the cliff.
I had decided that Lisl and her companions would expect me to break cover along the shore, scrambling over the slippery rocks to put more distance between myself and their guns, but I had seen another route out of my predicament, and that route lay directly upward.
In my younger days I had been a halfway decent rock climber. I had never approached the finest standards, but I had been good. When we were schoolboys David and I had often hitchhiked on holiday weekends to the Lake District or Snowdonia and, equipped with a second-hand rope and some scavenged pitons, we would tackle some dangerously severe climbs. I had been the daring one; indeed one word of caution from David had usually been sufficient to send me up some dizzyingly fearful crag while he cringed below. Later, on an army climbing expedition to the Dolomites, I had suffered a crippling bout of vertigo that had persuaded me to abandon rocks in favor of seawater. These days not all the tea in China could have persuaded me onto some of the frightful rock faces I had so blithely climbed as a youth, yet the cliff above the rocky shoreline offered me the only sheltered and unguarded route out of my flooding hideout, so it was time to swallow my fears and start upward.