The other members of the community had given up the fight. Some had weakened and died, to be buried at the foot of the escarpment, while a very few had tried to escape, only to discover that their paradise was too remote and too far from other human traffic to make such escape possible.
I listened to the hopeless tale and, when Jackie was finished and Stephen had no more answers to give, I cut a strip of cloth from his jerkin and gagged him once again.
Then we lay in silence and stared down at the world von Rellsteb had made. This was his green dream. This was the harbinger of the new, pure, unindustrialized, unpolluted, clean, and lovely world, where man would live in loving tune with primal nature. Except nature had other ideas, and so Jackie and I were staring down at a rain-pounded, shit-stinking failure of flooded vegetable plots and broken hopes. This, then, was the eco-paradise — a place of misery and filth with my daughter at its evil heart. This was Caspar von Rellsteb’s fiefdom, his achievement, and tonight, under the cloak of darkness, I would destroy it.
The rain smashed down, flooding every hollow in the uplands and spilling a myriad of rivulets across the escarpment’s edge. This was an earth-drowning rain, a cataclysm of water, a planet-drenching misery. We waited as the wan, wet light faded. Jackie, huddling close beside me for warmth, told me about her vain attempt to find a newspaper that would send her south to explore the Genesis story. Three major papers had been interested, but each had insisted that a more experienced reporter be assigned to the story. So, she and Molly Tetterman had decided to go south themselves. They had flown to Santiago, then, already worried that their money would run out, they had bought second-class rail tickets to Puerto Montt. “The train tickets only cost nine eighty-five U.S.,” Jackie explained, “and the airfare would have been seventy-two dollars each! So we went by train, and then we went to the steamship company and they agreed to bring us here and collect us on their way back from Puerto Natales. They were really great. I thought they were going to charge us a fortune, because the San Rafael had to steam miles out of its way to get us here, but they really seemed to want to help us. They’re kind of curious about what goes on here.”
I asked when the San Rafael was arriving to collect them, and Jackie said in ten or eleven days, depending on the weather, and then I thought to ask if, by any chance, she was carrying a watch, and she was, and she was sure it was accurate, and it showed us that the time was just three minutes short of the hour.
I climbed to the very top of the rock where, under the guyed mast and in the wind-whipping lash of the rain, I took out my handheld radio. I knew that the higher I was the more chance David had of hearing me. I switched the radio on and tried to ignore the ominous message of its blinking battery light. I tuned the set to channel 37 then pressed the transmit button. “Stormchild, Stormchild,” I said, “this is Tim, this is Tim. Over.”
I waited. The red light seemed to be blinking more feebly and I assumed that each wretched blink was draining yet more power from the already weak battery. Rain was seeping inside my collar. “For fuck’s sake, David”—I let my tension show—“talk to me!”
A very offended voice suddenly answered. “This is Stormchild, this is Stormchild. There’s no need to use offensive language, Tim. We’ve been keeping a radio watch for you, but we’ve had to stand well offshore because of the weather, and there’s a bit of westerly in the wind, as you must have noticed, so I didn’t dare come too close to the coast.” David wittered on, giving me his news, telling me how risky it had been leaving Almagro Channel, and I could not interrupt him, because, so long as he had his transmit button pressed he could not hear my transmissions, so all I could do was wait until he shut up. The small red light on my radio winked tiredly, and still David explained why it had taken him so long to hear my transmissions, but at last he handed the airwave back to me.
“David! I need you at the settlement. David, I say again, I need you at the Genesis settlement. Not at the mine, but at the settlement. Come here now. This radio is on the blink, I can’t transmit much longer. Just come here! Do you read me? Over.”
All I heard in reply was a hiss and a broken jumble of David’s voice, and when the jumble ended I pressed my transmit button. “David! Just come here, just come here, just come here! To the settlement!” The red light was flickering, then disappeared altogether, and, when I released the transmit button, I could hear nothing at all from the set’s small speaker. The red light’s disappearance showed the radio was dead and I could only pray that with its last weary gasp it had sent the precious message and that David would obey my summons.
I went back to my hiding place where, as the light faded and the rain drummed on, I opened a tin of baked beans for Jackie, a can of corned beef for myself, and nothing at all for Stephen. Our enemies were ever more worried about their missing gunmen and sent two new and bedraggled search parties up into the rocks, but the new searchers still did not look right under their own noses and so discovered nothing. By now, I thought, Lisl would be getting close to panic. Stormchild was still on the loose, an unwanted visitor was prowling the island, and she had lost a man and his rifle. I hoped her nerves were shredding.
Before the light faded altogether, and after the last searcher had gone back down the escarpment, I took Jackie to the sheltered lee of the rock, smiled at her, then told her it was time she learned to fire a rifle.
Her eyes widened. “Tim,” she began in a very determined voice.
“Shut up,” I said in an even more determined voice, then I showed her how to cock the M16, where its safety catch was, and how to fire it in single shots and how to select automatic fire. “I’m surprised they didn’t teach you how to do this in Sunday School,” I said facetiously. “Doesn’t every little American girl learn how to shoot? Now,” I went on before she could answer, “the gun isn’t loaded, so pick it up and show me how you fire it.”
“I couldn’t even touch it!” She stared with revulsion at the gun which now lay on the rock between us.
“But you can touch it,” I said, “and fire it, and that’s exactly what you’re going to do tonight.”
“No! I can’t!” She shuddered. Anyone would have thought I had asked her to eat a steak.
“Listen!” I said, “I need some help tonight. I’m going down to the settlement and I want them to be looking in the wrong direction. In other words, I want you to distract them. So, show me how you select single-shot fire instead of automatic.”