Robin looked at him and shivered. “Judgment Day,” she said.
PART 4
CHANNEL
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“There!” called Robin in from the port bridge wing. She took the glasses from her eyes and pointed to the shadow line between the brightening sky and the sea. Richard came out and joined her at once, leaving John beside the helmsman. He took the binoculars she was thrusting excitedly into his hand and looked through them in the direction of her gesture.
At first he thought she was mistaken. Then he thought it was only a shadow. But soon his vision cleared and his heart came close to bursting. It was the Lizard. No doubt of it. They were in home waters at last. He put his left arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him with all his strength. “Number Two,” he called through the open door to John Higgins on the bridge, “you may reset the chronometers now.”
It was dawn on September 9. He had brought them back exactly as he had said he would, and surprisingly easily. The weather in the Bay of Biscay had been rough enough to ensure that Richard would have been unable to open the forward tank tops even had he changed his mind, but it posed no real danger. There had been no further action by the secret saboteur. Nothing had changed. They had signaled passing ships but requested no further help — Richard wanting to keep Demetrios guessing as long as possible. So now they were entering the Channel Separation Zone still without the ability to contact other ships with anything other than the signal lamp. Still with only John’s trusty sextant to pinpoint their position. But, to be fair, that sextant together with Richard’s legendary powers as a theoretical navigator, had brought them exactly where they wanted to be, precisely when they were due to be there.
Richard suddenly remembered first reading as a boy, rereading on his journey to Prometheus, of Horatio Horn-blower’s great feat of navigation, guiding his Brittanic Majesty’s ship Lydia to a perfect landfall off the Gulf of Fonseca after seven months out of sight of land. Five days across Biscay hardly compared, but the feeling of achievement was the same. He knew now why the normally imperturbable Hornblower, hero of his youth, had rushed onto the deck to see the twin volcanoes that marked this miracle of dead reckoning.
John appeared by his side and punched him lightly on the shoulder in unspoken congratulation.
“Ha-h’m!” said Richard.
The first rays of the rising sun struck across the long gray seas and glistened on something tiny and silver lifting busily from the distant land: a helicopter. Richard watched the silver speck growing larger, his mind racing. So much was going to have to be faced now. He had planned it all with infinite care. But now he would just have to see if the plans were going to work. Or whether his suspicions were going to tear the team apart.
Every single off-duty person aboard was standing by the helipad as the copter landed. They looked at it with strange intensity, as though it were something from another planet. Although they had been out of touch for only a short time, they had become so fiercely insular, so closely welded by the power of their experiences, that this came as a shocking intrusion. So the cheerful ball of a man in a blue Coastguard uniform who stepped first onto the deck might just as well have come from a distant galaxy.
If he felt their intense strangeness, he gave no sign, but bustled over to Richard at once. “Captain Mariner? McLean, Coastguard. Heard of you of course: pleasure!” This said, pumping Richard’s hand enthusiastically. “Pleasure and a privilege. Shall we?”
He tried to turn Richard away toward the bridge, but the big man refused to move and McLean had no choice but to turn back, still talking, and perform some sort of introduction for the other passengers climbing down onto the deck. “Brought you all the usual offices and then some. Radio and radio officer, of course. Quine, his name is. Senior Trinity House channel pilot: excellent man called Moriarty. Chap from Lloyd’s called Watson and…”
“DADDY!” Robin’s voice broke off the monologue.
Sir William Heritage paused at the top of the steps. When his eyes met Richard’s they narrowed and the two men might have been separated by inches rather than feet, face-to-face like duelists.
The moment lasted a long second, and held everyone in its power. Richard was taken off balance by the strength of his emotion. It was almost as strong as it had been in that moment when Robin appeared on his bridge like a ghost. He saw through the tear-bright haze of the dawn, the tall, broad-shouldered, soldier-straight frame of the man he most respected in the world. The clear blue eyes; the straight-clipped salt-and-pepper mustache. The steel-gray hair. And, at his side now, arm entwined through his, reed-straight until her golden head easily topped his shoulder, his daughter whom Richard loved.
How could he ever have suspected these two of anything dishonorable? How could he ever have considered standing against them, no matter what they had done? He strode forward decisively, moving for the first time since the helicopter landed.
The older man saw in his eyes something of what was in his heart. They met at the foot of the steps and what started as a handshake somehow turned into an embrace, with Robin’s strong arms around them both. Richard was home again, in more ways than one.
He found he had to clear his throat when formality returned. “Welcome aboard, Sir William.”
“Thanks m‘boy, but it’s been Bill to thee this many a long year. Let’s not change that now.”
Only Sir William would dream of calling Richard “m‘boy”; only Richard had ever actually called Sir William “Bill.”
Richard turned away from his old friend and looked up at the two men in the helicopter’s doorway. A stocky man in uniform: the radio officer. A tall angular man beside him: Watson from Lloyd’s. “Gentlemen,” he said, and they sprang to attention like naval cadets.
Behind them, descending in stately consequence, came the portly, spade-bearded figure, again in uniform, which could only be the channel pilot, Moriarty.
When the group was all together, Richard led them up toward the bridge. The silent crew parted, like the Red Sea parting for Moses, and closed silently behind them as they passed. They lost Watson before they reached the A deck door. The Lloyd’s man lingered behind them, gazing with awed wonder down into the gaping wound in the deck that the others hurried by.
On the bridge, there was an almost embarrassed pause. It was past 08.00, so Robin went about relieving John. Richard hardly knew where to start. But the others did. The radio officer opened the black case he was carrying and began to set up his portable radio on the shelf between the port windows and the captain’s chair, having almost apologetically placed the captain’s binoculars, cast there in the excitement, back into their holster on the chair itself.
McLean turned toward Richard and started talking again. “Should we have brought medical help? The message we received wasn’t too clear on that point, and space on the helicopter was limited. We can radio…”
He said more, but Richard hardly heard him. In many ways he was the least important visitor. As soon as the radio was working, Richard would offer the con to the Channel pilot and let him get on with his job. Then he could talk to Watson, in private. He had also to talk to Bill Heritage — did the man have any idea of what he was really caught up in? He ought to talk to Watson at once, show him the logs and Accident Report Books; to do anything else would look suspicious. But he had to know what Bill was up to first. He would not run the risk of damaging him or the Heritage Corporation through an unwise word.