“And maybe she won’t want anything you offer,” David said, then he shook his head in a sudden horror. “You mustn’t go, Tim! It’s too dangerous.”
I smiled. “I don’t want you to take risks, David. I want you to stay here. I’ve always thought you should stay here.”
Relief showed on his tired face. “Truly?”
“We don’t want to risk the bishopric, do we?” I teased him, then turned wearily toward Stormchild. “The reason I wanted you to stay here, David,” I told him, “is because there’s still one other Genesis boat at sea, and just in case it does get here before the authorities, it might be a good idea if you were here to hold the fort. Molly Tetterman seems a very competent lady, but I have a suspicion you’d be a more convincing threat with a gun.”
“I think you should stay with me,” David said trenchantly.
“I know you do, but I won’t.” I grinned at him, then stepped down onto Stormchild’s deck. We both went down to the saloon where I helped David collect and pack his belongings. He would deal with the Chilean Navy, then go to Santiago and tell the Australian Embassy about the pirating of the Naiad. I gave him Maureen Delaney’s passport, then warned him that he would have to field the attentions of some very curious reporters. “If you play it canny,” I told him, “you can probably persuade one of the newspapers to pay your fare home in return for some exclusive information.”
“Is that how it works?” he asked, though very distractedly. David was not worried about the newspapers, but about me. He thought I was sailing to my death, and he did not know how to stop me.
“Jackie will help you deal with the press,” I told him. “This is rather going to be her moment. All those self-important papers who turned her down are now going to be begging for her story.”
“Only if they can find me,” Jackie said. She had boarded Stormchild and now crouched at the head of the companionway. “I’m going with you, Tim.”
“No!” I insisted.
Jackie half smiled, then produced one of the guns I had left in the cockpit. It was an M-16 and, with a new-found confidence, she switched it to automatic fire and aimed it at the array of instruments that was mounted above the chart table. One squeeze of the trigger and Stormchild would be without radios, log, depth sounder, Satnav, and chronometer. “I’m coming with you, Tim,” Jackie said, “or you’re not going at all.”
“Put the gun down,” I said, “please?”
“Well?”
I sighed, then said what I had been wanting to say all day. “Dear Jackie,” I said, “please sail with me.”
We sailed just after midday, sliding away from the settlement and past the burned-out trawler and out into the swirling eddies of the Desolate Straits. No Armada patrol ship had yet arrived. We left David with all our guns except one Lee-Enfield that I stored in a cockpit locker, then, after Molly had embraced Jackie and enjoined me to look after her, we cast off our lines.
We used the big engine, pushing it to the limit in my hurry to escape to the open sea before the Armada arrived in the Desolate Straits. By mid-afternoon I had found a narrow channel that, according to the chart, led to the ocean and I plunged into its shadows. I doubted any patrol ship would find us now, and the clouds were too low for any helicopter to be useful. We had escaped unseen, and now hurried between dank, dark cliffs that funneled the gusting wet wind and echoed back the rhythmic pounding of our big engine.
I gave Jackie the helm while I went below and, at last, took off the walking boots and peeled away the blood-encrusted socks. I hobbled into Stormchild’s tiny head, showered, then used an old cut-throat razor to hack off my stubble. I bandaged my feet, pulled on some reasonably clean and dry clothes, then heated myself a tinned steak and kidney pie and made Jackie a vegetable omelette. I carried the meal to the cockpit where I scoffed down the pie, drank a bottle of beer, stole some of Jackie’s omelette, had another beer, made myself two cheese sandwiches because I was still famished, and then, after wolfing down a tin of peaches slathered with evaporated milk, I brewed a pot of tea strong enough to scald the barnacles off a battleship’s bum. “Oh, Christ,” I said, “but that does feel better.”
Jackie went below to wash and change, and I sat alone in Stormchild’s cockpit as the engine took us seaward. As we neared the ocean the narrow channel became choppy and, where rocks reared up from the sea bed, the water ran in slick, fast kelds to betray the presence of tidal rips. Jackie joined me on deck where, with our oilskin hoods over our heads, we watched sea otters, kingfishers, fur seals, and geese. “I looked round the galley,” Jackie suddenly said in a rather ominous tone.
“So?”
“I couldn’t find my sprouting kit.”
“Your what?”
“My sprouting kit. You know? The thing that makes fresh sprouts from seeds and beans?”
“It disappeared in a freak wave,” I said. “I tried to save it, but alas.”
“Tim?” she said sweetly, “you are so full of it, your eyes are brown.”
I laughed. I could feel the tremor of the ocean in the way that Stormchild was breaking the channel’s chop now. We were getting close. Soon, I knew, we would hear the crash of the surf battering against the rocks, and then, under the day’s gray shroud of rain and cloud, we would be at sea. At our stern the faded red ensign slapped in the gusting wind. When it was all over, I promised myself, and the last questions had earned their horrid answers, I would let that ensign go into the deep waters and I would buy another flag to mark a new beginning.
In the late afternoon, as the first shearwaters flighted back from the sea to their nests, Stormchild’s cutwater thumped into the open water. That first big, cold wave exploded white on Stormchild’s bows and ran green down her scuppers. To port and starboard the massive rollers broke ragged on black rocks under a sullen rain as Stormchild, like a tiny projectile, arrowed straight from the channel into the vast ocean’s wastes. The seas streamed at us in battalion formation, row after row of them, huge and ponderous, each shuddering our boat and making its engine labor, and so, while Jackie took the wheel, I hoisted Stormchild’s sails and immediately the yacht stiffened and, when the motor was switched off, settled comfortably into the ocean’s own undying rhythm.
By dusk it had stopped raining and the far sun was staining the chasms of a ragged cloud bank with a scarlet touch. The wind was gusting strong and cold from the south, while the endless seas, like restless mountains of liquid slate, heaved Stormchild high as they roared blindly beneath her keel. We had left the land far behind, way beyond our sight, as now, alone on a tremendous sea, we reached toward the dying sun to find Nicole.
I had learned the Genesis transmission schedule from von Rellsteb’s radio operator, so I knew on what channel and at what times the Genesis Four would listen and so, at nightfall, I went below and turned on Stormchild’s big radio. Jackie, at the wheel, peered anxiously down the companionway as I tuned the radio, and, at last pressed the transmitter button. “Stormchild calling Genesis Four. This is Stormchild calling Genesis Four. Over.”
Nothing. A great wave rolled past Stormchild’s flank and I heard the sea scouring down the scuppers. “Stormchild calling Genesis Four. This is Stormchild calling Genesis Four. Over.”