The Russian was holding onto the starboard rail with both hands, facing away from the wind, kneeling on the hard bench that ran around the inside of the cockpit. The tiller was securely fastened at the proper angle, but the wind was beginning to shift again.
Napoleon shouted his partner's name, and Illya straightened at once. "Aye aye, Captain," floated back over the howl of the wind.
"Stand by the tiller," Napoleon told him as he made his way aft. "The wind's turning."
Illya bent over the long handle and released one of the lines that held it, letting the rudder back easily, though it threatened to wrench itself out of his grip. Napoleon refastened the line on the lee side while Illya tied down the other, then leaped, or more accurately scrambled precariously, back to his position at the bow. The jib had to be adjusted.
On the way he took a quick look at the inertial guidance device whose glowing display showed through the spray-splattered glass plate. They had come about a quarter of the way to the island, and were essentially on course. Napoleon checked his repeated compass, and returned to the prow.
At the far end of the boat, Illya crouched in a cockpit that was regularly filled with water and drained, several times a minute. The stern, sturdy with flotation tanks, seemed to bounce about more than the rest of the boat, and he was holding on with his eyes shut against the driving wind-blown salt whipped in froth off the tops of the leaping waves and flung in his face by the storm. The tiller fought viciously against the ropes that held it, bucking and straining against them as the boat strove to hold its course. A few degrees either way in this blindness could land them in Wales, if they held up that long under the hammering the Bristol Channel was giving them - or out in the Irish Sea, where the full fury of the storm swept down over open water for a hundred miles.
He had nothing against boats, certainly; his naval training had left him quite accustomed to them. But it had also taught him the folly of attempting such a passage in rough weather - if rough was quite the word he wanted. Only his sincere faith in the incredible luck of Napoleon Solo convinced him they could make the crossing. He had been with Napoleon long enough to know what kind of long chances he could take and still come out on top.
Napoleon, meanwhile, didn't care. Even the goal of the little island of Donzerly where they were bound shrank to a small corner of his mind. His whole concentration was focused on his personal, physical struggle with the wind for the mastery of the boat.
Now there was a stout rope tied around his waist and securely belayed to a sunken cleat, lessening the danger slightly. Still the storm whipped about him, pulling and throwing him from side to side. This, he thought, was really his element, battling nature with only a stout ship and his own skill between him and disaster. Even his stomach was holding up well, considering the beating it was getting. He wasn't sure how Illya was doing, astern.
Neither was Illya. The world had resolved into two simple bits of awareness - the rudder must be kept set, and remember which is the downwind rail. Time lost its identity, and was blown away by the endless howl of the wind and the slashing of the silver-dagger rain. It could have been an hour or six months before he became aware of Napoleon calling his name again.
During this period, Napoleon too lost track of reality to some extent. Shaken, bruised, pounded by wind and wave for another indefinite length of time, he gradually heard something over the noise of the storm. So faint and blown-about was the sound, fading beyond the range of hearing from moment to moment, he wasn't sure whether it was his imagination. But then he heard it again, a little louder. The sound bellowed against the night that surrounded it, bellowed and fell away as it paused for breath, then bellowed forth again. The deep distant note cut through under the sounds of rain and wind, and it grew as it sounded again.
Napoleon made a quick knot to hold the sheet reefed, and clambered back to the inner cockpit where the internal guidance calculator continued its eerie green-lit gyrations. They were within two hundred yards of Rainbow's island headquarters!
He spun back to the stern and shouted, "Illya! Stand by to come about! Illya!" The Russian stirred numbly from his position at the tiller and nodded.
"Aye, aye. Ready to come about, sir," he said.
"Watch for my hand signal and swing the tiller towards the same direction as my hand points, about half way."
"Got it," said Illya as Solo scrambled back to his look out post.
Now he began to hear something else under the rain and the lonely hoot of the foghorn - a sea-bell, rocked and rung by the leaping waves at the shore of the island. And then, as they swerved to approach directly, he could hear the hiss of gravel as it was sucked and rolled by the roots of the waves that passed over, and he knew they were very close.
Suddenly a sheer wall of jagged rock loomed out of the night, towering into the darkness beyond their feeble running lights. The bell rang clearly to their right, and Napoleon thrust the rock away with his spar.
They were half in the lee of the island now - the back eddies of the storm pushed them fitfully from side to side, but the force of it was cut. With Illya quick on the rudder, and Napoleon switching the jib from side to side as the rough gusts shifted, they beat along not forty feet from the face of a rugged cliff, as the bell grew louder ahead.
At last, dim against the rain-glittering darkness, they could see a tiny floating dock, at the foot of a wooden staircase that staggered up the face of the cliff and out of sight. They steered in as close as possible, and Napoleon, rope around his waist, poised on the rail, holding onto a brace with one hand, gauged the rise and fall of the dock and the boat, waited, watched, and finally leaped.
The ship lurched towards the shore as he jumped, giving an extra impetus which may have saved him. He landed on hands and knees on the pitching surface of the little square dock, and clutched at an upright to save himself from being pulled away. As the pull slacked off, he hauled in the rope and got an end of it around the same upright with two turns before the waves forced them apart again. This time the boat was held near, and he hauled in more line. When the prow was held securely to the dock and only the stern swung free, he tied it down solidly and ran aft, where Illya threw him the stern line.
The procedure was repeated in a matter of moments, since half the weight of the boat was already anchored, and Illya leaped to the dock, an oilcloth bundle under his arm.
Together they fought their way up the water-slick wood of the narrow stairs. Unwilling to surrender them, the storm seemed to increase in fury, trying to pull them from their perch and carry them away. They climbed, back and forth; twenty steps and a landing - turn around - twenty steps and a landing. The sound of the sea fell away beneath them as they climbed, and the storm came at them from below as well. The dock was now lost to sight, and nothing showed above them yet. Each had a waterproof electric torch, which served no more than to show them where the steps were before them. Their beams were swallowed up by the night less than twenty feet away.
Then there were no more steps, and the top of the rock, rainlashed and windswept, spread before them. Forty feet away across an artificial-looking flat smooth area stood the darkened lighthouse, tall and white, gaunt and forbiddingly lonely in the stormy night. No lights showed anywhere. The foghorn bellowed and died again.