I watched the powerboat. I was falling off the wind a touch, slowing and widening our own turn to close the range. Wildtrack II was also slowing. The sea was bucking Sycorax, thumping her hull and shaking her sails. “You’re going to have ten seconds!” I shouted at Terry. “For Christ’s sake don’t hit anyone, but go for his hull! Aim as far for’rard as possible and as close to the waterline as you can.”
“Got it, boss.” He grinned, and I heard the snick of the safety going off, then the slam of the gun being cocked. He crouched on the starboard cockpit thwart, steadied by the coaming and the cabin bulkhead. The movement of our boat, and the heaving of the target, would make accuracy almost impossible and I prayed that Terry would not hit any of the three men. I almost told him to hold his fire, but then, when we were just thirty yards from the Wildtrack II, a wave heaved her up and I saw an expanse of her anti-fouling revealed in the moonlight. “Fire!”
Terry held the gun two-handed, braced himself, and opened fire at the speedboat’s belly.
The noise was just like a sail flogging in a gale. The old sailors used to say the wind was blowing great guns when their canvas banged aloft and made a noise like cannons, and now the Colt filled the sea with the same murderous sound. The muzzle flash leaped two feet clear of the boat and I saw a streak of foam reflect red, then I looked at the powerboat and I saw the three faces disappear beneath the coaming. There was no way of knowing where Terry’s bullets went, but water suddenly churned white at Wildtrack II’s stern and she shot away from us.
“Hold your fire! We’re tacking!”
Terry changed magazines. I pulled the tiller gently towards me, wrenched in the mainsheet, and waited till Sycorax’s head was round before releasing the headsail sheets. The effort tore at my back, and I wondered if I ever could sail this heavy boat alone.
We were running now, stern to wind. Wildtrack II, like a startled deer, was circling at full speed. Her bows thumped the waves as she spewed a high wake sixty yards long. Once I saw her leap clear off a wavecrest before slamming down into a trough. Then she headed straight towards us and I suspected Mulder must have his gun and that he planned to have his revenge on Sycorax. “Get ready!” The powerboat accelerated. I guessed they planned to swamp us with their wash as well as loose a broadside at our sails. They would have to be dissuaded, and I decided against waiting to make our own broadside shot at them. “Into the bows, Terry. Fire!” The powerboat’s bows were high and its anti-fouled belly, pale against the night, reared vulnerably above the water. Terry stood, legs spread, and fired. He emptied a magazine at the approaching boat and I swore I saw a scrap of darkness appear in the hull where a heavy bullet ripped the fibreglass ragged.
Terry changed magazines. Wildtrack II was slowing, her bows dropping. Terry braced himself again, fired again and this time the powerboat’s windscreen shattered in the night. The glass shards were snatched away like spindrift, and I saw the three heads twist away in panic. “Cease fire! Cease fire!” I was scared witless that the final shot might have hit one of the three men.
The powerboat veered off. I stared intently and thought I saw three figures still moving in the cockpit. That was a relief for me, but not for them, for they were in trouble. The powerboat would be taking water, needing to be pumped, and now their only safety lay in reaching harbour as soon as possible. They were forced to forget us, and Terry jeered as they fled. I sat down. “Make the gun safe, Terry.”
“Already done it, boss.”
We tacked again, sheeted home, and clawed into the south-west wind. The tide had long turned and the surging channel current was at last coming to our aid. I thanked Terry for his help.
“That’s what the working class are for, boss. To get you useless rich sods out of deep shit.”
“What the working class could usefully do now,” I said, “is get some bloody beer.”
I pegged the tiller. There was nothing to do now until we turned for Plymouth breakwater. We were a darkened ship sailing a black ocean. The wind was brisk, still chilled by the evening’s rain. There was something mesmerizing about Sycorax’s motion; her plunging bow and rocking buoyancy.
Terry asked me about the filming and I told him how the television people kept asking me about the night I’d won the medal, and how I hadn’t really told them anything at all. “I can’t remember very much,” I confessed.
“You were a bloody wally, boss,” Terry said amicably.
“I remember going left round those rocks. The bastards were about ten yards behind, weren’t they?”
“Ten! Bloody fifty.”
“Truly?”
“I could hear you shouting,” he said. “You were like a calf in the slaughterhouse. God knows how those buggers missed you at first.
The Major had come up to tell us to keep our heads down and he was shouting at you to come back.”
“I didn’t hear him.”
“He gave up in the end. He reckoned you were a dead ’un. He said it was your own bloody fault ’cos you’d taken us to the wrong place anyway. We should have been a bloody half-mile away, and instead you was doing a Lone Ranger on their headquarters company.” He chuckled. “Then when you switched out their lights the Major told us to get the hell up after you.”
“It worked,” I said bleakly.
“We screwed ’em,” Terry agreed. Somehow the conversation had made us both morose. I watched the loom of the Start light, then took a bearing on the entrance to Salcombe Harbour. We were making good time. I wondered how much water was in her bilges.
There was bound to be some until the patched hull took up.
“Mind you,” Terry went on, “I don’t know what bloody good it did us. Life’s still a bloody bastard.”
“Is it, Terry?”
“Bloody women,” he said.
I wished I had not heard the note of sad hopelessness in his voice.
“As bad as that?” I asked.
“As bad as that, boss.” He huddled in the cockpit’s corner, sheltering from the wind. “You got out, didn’t you?”
“Melissa left me. I didn’t get out.”
“Would you have bugged out on your own?”
I shook my head. “Probably not. I sometimes think women are more ruthless than us.”
“I wish mine would be sodding ruthless. I wish she’d go back to her bloody mother. Then I could go back to barracks.” He tipped a beer bottle to his lips. “I’ve got some good mates in the barracks.”
“Is Sally still nagging you to get out of the Army?” He nodded. “Never bleeding stops. She says there’ll be jobs in the pits when the fucking strike’s over, but what jobs? All this bloody Government wants to do is gut the miners.”
“Would you want to work in the mines?”
“I’ve two uncles down the pits, so it’s family, like.” He paused.
“And it might take Sally off my back, and I suppose it would be a better life for the nippers, but I don’t know, boss. I like the Army, I do.” His voice tailed away and we sat in companionable misery; he thinking of his Sally, I of Angela. I’d lost her, of course, but I, unlike Terry, was free.
“If you ever want to escape,” I said to him, “there’s always a berth in Sycorax for you. We’re good together, you and I.” He toasted me with his beer bottle. “That’s true, boss.” We fell silent. The cliffs to the north were touched with moonlight and the water broke on them in wisps of shredding white. Everything had gone awry, but at least Sycorax was back where she belonged.