“A bit, sir!”
“I’ll paddle!” That was Jill-Beth, in a whisper. She pushed the dinghy along the bank, keeping under the trees’ cover. “That bastard wanted to kill me!” she whispered.
“I thought he was raping you.”
“That was just for starters. Does that engine work?”
“I was cheated of ten quid if it doesn’t.” Seagulls might not be flash, but by God they work. I pulled, the old engine coughed and caught, and the noise brought the stab of a torch beam that swept round towards us from Bannister’s garden, but we were now well under the cover of the overhanging trees. The branches whipped at us as I opened the throttle, and I heard Jill-Beth giggle, apparently in reaction to the panicked escapade. “There are dry clothes in the bag,” I said.
“You’re a genius, Nick.”
I waited till we had rounded Sansom’s Point before I broke out from under the trees’ shelter. We were hidden from Bannister’s house by now and I curved the dinghy towards the main channel and opened the throttle as high as it would go. Seagulls might work, but they’re not fast and we were going at no more than a hearse’s crawl as we left the black shadows under the trees and emerged into the moonlight where I found myself sharing the dinghy with one very wet, very tanned and entirely naked girl who was rubbing herself dry and warm with one of my spare sweaters. She seemed quite unabashed, and I had time to notice that she was tanned all over and how nice the all over was before I politely looked away.
“Enjoying the view?” she asked.
“Very much.”
She pulled on the sweater and a pair of my dirty jeans that she rolled up around her calves. She pushed at her soaking hair, then looked upriver. “Where are we going?”
“Jimmy Nicholls’ cottage. You know Jimmy?”
“I’ve met him.” The village lights were bright on the starboard bank while two miles further south the town lights quivered on the water. Beyond that was the sea. Jimmy’s cottage was just short of the town.
Jill-Beth was searching through the duffelbag. “Got any sneakers here?”
“No shoes, sorry.”
She looked up at me and smiled. “Thank you for the rescue.”
“That’s what we white knights are for,” I said.
At which point the dragon growled, or rather I heard a percussive bang and then the throaty roar of big engines, and I knew it was too late to reach Jimmy’s house. I pulled the outboard’s lever towards me and prayed that the puttering little two-stroke could outrun the gleaming monster engines on Wildtrack II’s stern. I’d forgotten the threat of the big powerboat crouched in Bannister’s boathouse.
Jill-Beth turned as the engine noise splintered in the night. She knew immediately what the sound meant. “That bastard doesn’t give up, does he?”
“A Boer trait.” I was running for the darker western bank where more overhanging trees might hide us. I glanced behind to where the dying flares still silhouetted Sansom’s Point. They also lit the shredding remnants of my smokescreen through which, as yet, there was no sign of the big powerboat.
Jill-Beth was suddenly scared. “He knew why I’m here,” she said in astonishment.
I suspected that I knew why she was here too, but it was no time for explanations because a brilliant stab of white light suddenly slashed across the river. Mulder, if it was Mulder in Wildtrack II, had turned on the boat’s searchlight. He was still beyond Sansom’s Point and the light was far away from us, but I knew it would only be seconds before the powerboat came snarling into our reach of water.
“Come on, you bastard!” I enjoined the engine.
“Jesus!” Jill-Beth cowered as the sharp prow of Wildtrack II burst into view. There was a speed limit of six knots on the river and he must have been doing twenty already and was still accelerating.
That was his mistake, for the acceleration was throwing up his bows so he could not see straight in front. The wake was like twin curls of moonlit gossamer that spread behind him.
“Head down!” I called out. Jill-Beth ducked and the dinghy scraped under branches. I killed the engine as the dinghy’s bows jarred on some obstruction. The searchlight whipped past us as the powerboat slewed round into the main channel. She must have been doing thirty knots now and her engines could have woken the dead in village graveyards a mile away. I scrambled past Jill-Beth and tied the dinghy’s painter to a low bough. “Give me your wet trousers,” I said.
She frowned with puzzlement, but obeyed. I hung the white trousers over the dinghy’s side, looping one leg over the gunwale and hanging the other straight down into the water. “Breaking our shape,” I explained. “He’s looking for a wooden dinghy, not a brown and white pattern.” The drooping tree branches would help confuse our shape, but I knew Mulder’s searchlight was powerful enough to probe through the leaves and I hoped the white cloth would disguise us.
“He’s stopping.” Jill-Beth was down in the dinghy’s bilge and her voice was scarce above a whisper.
The power-boat was slowing and I heard its engines fade to a mutter as its bow dropped and its shining aerofoil hull settled into the current. Mulder had accelerated to where he thought we might be; now he would search. “Head down!” I crouched with Jill-Beth in the boat’s bottom.
The light skidded past us, paused, came back, then went on again.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Wildtrack II was burbling along the river now, searching. Mulder had missed us on his first pass. But he would be back.
Jill-Beth tweaked the trousers I’d hung over the gunwale. “A soldier’s trick?”
“Is it?” I said.
“Because you weren’t injured in a car crash, were you?”
“You shouldn’t listen to gossip at parties.”
“Gossip?” She laughed softly, and her face was so close to mine that I could feel her breath on my cheek. “You’re Captain Nicholas Thomas Sandman, VC. Your last annual report before the Falklands was kind of non-committal. Captain Sandman’s a fine officer, it said, and did well in Northern Ireland, but seems frustrated by the more commonplace duties of soldiering. In brief, he’s not very ambitious.
He spends too much time on his boat. The men liked you, but that wasn’t sufficient reason for the regiment to recommend you for staff college. They really wanted you to leave the regiment to make room for some younger gung-ho type, right? You lacked the motivation to excel, they said, then someone gave you a real live enemy and you proved them all wrong.”
I said nothing for a moment. The water gurgled past our fragile hull. I had pulled away from Jill-Beth, the better to see her face in the shadows. “Who are you?”
“Jill-Beth Kirov, like the ballet.” She grinned, and her teeth showed very white against her dark skin. I raised my head high enough to see Wildtrack II searching the far bank and I made out Mulder’s distinctive silhouette against the glare caused by his searchlight on the thick leaves.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“I work for a guy called Yassir Kassouli. Heard of him?”
“Bannister’s father-in-law.”
“Ex-father-in-law,” she corrected me, then stiffened suddenly as the searchlight whipped round and seemed to shine straight at the two of us. I saw the willow leaves above our heads turn a mixture of bright silver-green and jet black as the light slashed into the branches. “Jesus!” Jill-Beth hissed.
“It’s all right.” I put an arm over her shoulder to keep her head low. The light swept on, probing another shadow, but I kept my arm where it was. She did not move.
“What do you do for Kassouli?” I whispered the question almost as if I feared Mulder might hear us over the growl of his idling engines.