Crackdown (21 page)

I turned, still gaping. All the halliards were gone, every single one. The halliards were the lines used to hoist the sails and, once hoisted, to hold the sails aloft, and they had all disappeared. At the bows, where I had left the jib, staysail and storm jib halliards sna-phooked on to the pulpit rail, there was now nothing except a pair of bolt-cutters that were a part of
Wavebreaker’s
rigging kit and which had no business lying abandoned by the hawse hole. I picked up the bolt-cutters, reasoning that Rickie must have used them in the dark as he worked his way round the deck to cripple
Wavebreaker.
It had to be Rickie.

I swore. None of the other rigging seemed to have been touched; only the halliards. It was a piece of mindless stupid vandalism. I had hurt Rickie, so he had hurt the boat to gain his puerile revenge. Playing the Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band too loud was not enough, now he had to creep about in the night, cutting the wire halliards from the sails then casting the bitter ends off their winches before, presumably, dropping them overboard. I imagined him laughing at the chaos he knew he would cause.

Then damn him, I thought, because if his desire was to stay in the lagoon and wait for the sun, then I would disappoint him by taking
Wavebreaker
out to sea on her twin motors. Before leaving the lagoon I would thread lightweight lines through the masthead sheeves so that we could easily haul replacement halliards through the blocks. I knew we had coils of spare wire stowed away below so that, even though Rickie’s vandalism was a nuisance, it was not fatal to the boat. By the day’s end, I thought, we should have made good all the damage and be once again safely under sail.

I went forward and started the diesel generator which not only powered the ship’s heavy electrical equipment like the air conditioners, anchor windlass, sail-furlers and bow thrusters, but also performed the daily chore of charging the ship’s batteries. My anger at Rickie had settled into a grim determination that he would not beat me. Instead I would give him an uncomfortable day at sea by driving
Wavebreaker
hard into the wind and waves, and I would threaten him with ten kinds of horror if he dared lay a harmful finger on the boat again.

Thessy, woken by the throbbing of the generator, came yawning from the companionway. “I need you,” I startled him by the sudden energy in my voice. “I want messenger lines put through every halliard block. You find some lightweight line and I’ll dig out the spare halliard wires. We’ve got work to do!” Poor Thessy stared at me as though I was mad. “We should look on the bright side, Thessy,” I went on, “and be grateful for a chance to replace all the halliards before we take this tub across the ocean.”

“Halliards?” He looked at the mainmast, then back to me. “Vot happened?”

I showed him one of the cut stubs. “I suspect it’s our friend Rickie. But if he thinks he can beat me, Thessy, then he will have to think again!”

Thessy frowned. “You think Mr. Crowninshield did this?”

“Can you think of anyone else?”

Thessy looked sad at such evidence of human sinfulness, then glanced up at the ragged clouds that scudded over the lagoon. “It’ll be brisk out there today!” He spoke with relish.

“The brisker the better!” I wanted to take Rickie out into my element; out into the great heaping wilderness of an ocean after storm, and once there I would keep him on deck and make him work. He might not be fit for the intricate jobs like splicing the rope tails on to the new wire halliards, but he could do his share of hauling and lifting, and I did not care how sick he might feel or how much his nose bled. I would make him do some real work for a change. I would sweat him. “That’s where I’ve been wrong,” I told a bemused Thessy, “I’ve let the twins laze about as though this was a holiday cruise. It isn’t. They should be working! They’ve got to take some responsibility for their own lives instead of flopping around like lap-dogs. We’ll give Rickie a proper watch to keep as a deckhand, and Robin-Anne can help Ellen with the cooking, and...” My voice tailed away to nothing because the generator had missed a beat, then it missed another, and I turned and stared forrard as the small engine gave a horrible groaning sound, then seized to a dead halt. It suddenly seemed very quiet on
Wavebreaker’s
deck. “Oh, no!” I walked forrard.

“The fuel?” Thessy suggested.

I prayed he was right, but I doubted that a mere fuel blockage would have created that terrible groan. I opened the hatch and dropped down into the steel-walled generator compartment. The fuel came from the main tanks which were deep amidships and the feed-line was equipped with a glass-bowl trap designed to float out any water that might have contaminated the diesel fuel. The trap was full of the reddish oil, showing that there was no blockage upstream of the glass bowl, yet, strangely, I could see some odd whitish specks suspended in the fuel.

I unscrewed the trap, dipped my finger into the diesel oil and brought out one of the specks. It had a white crystalline appearance, not unlike the cocaine I had scattered to the winds the previous night, and for a mad second I wondered if Rickie had hidden yet more of his drug in the fuel tanks, but then I tasted the speck and knew this was not cocaine. I fished another crystal speck out of the bowl and offered it on my fingertip to Thessy whose anxious face peered down from the hatchway. “Taste that,” I suggested.

He gingerly licked my finger, then instinctively screwed up his face until he realised what he had just tasted. “Sugar?”

“The bastard,” I said. “Oh, the bastard.”

The generator was useless now. Rickie had poured sugar into our main tanks, and the engine, sucking the sugar down the fuel lines, had super-heated the sweet granules into a burnt and sticky treacle that was now blocking the engine solid.
Wavebreaker
needed to be taken to a dockyard where the generator could be stripped and cleaned, and her fuel tanks and lines scoured of the last traces of sugar.

“Oh, hell,” I said bitterly and unhelpfully.

“At least it isn’t the main engines.” Thessy was trying to look on the bright side.

“I’ll kill him!” I hauled myself out of the hatch and gave an entirely useless and somewhat painful kick to a ventilator hood.

Thessy was holding out my cup of cold coffee, as though that would placate me. “But the main engines are all right,” Thessy insisted, and of course he was right, but the main engines were useless without fuel and all of our fuel, so far as I could tell, was fouled with the sugar. I could probably siphon some clean diesel off the top of the tanks, filter it, then rig up a jury supply to run the main engines, but it would all take time, as would re-rigging the halliards. I swore again, knowing that we were stuck in Sea Rat Cay’s lagoon for at least the next twenty-four hours.

“There’s only one thing that consoles me,” I told Thessy as I stumped down the deck and pulled open a locker. “We’re stuck here now, and he’ll have to go cold turkey, and I hope he suffers the pains of hell. I hope it hurts!” I had taken a length of one inch rope from the locker. It was one of the lines we sometimes used as a spring when mooring alongside a dock, and now, to Thessy’s puzzlement, I quickly tied an intricate and rarely used knot at one end of the line. I tossed the rope to Thessy. “Hang that from the lower spreaders, Thessy, then we’ll make ourselves a proper breakfast before we start work.”

Thessy stared dubiously at the rope I’d thrown him, but climbed the ratlines to the mainmast’s lower crosstrees where he obediently suspended the hangman’s noose. It lifted to the now useless wind and I half wished that I dared to use it.

But instead I fried myself some eggs, and I fried Thessy his favourite breakfast which was a mash of bread and bananas, after which, much fortified, we both got down to work.

We did not see Rickie all day. Robin-Anne took him some sandwiches late in the afternoon, and he must have eaten them, for later on I saw the empty plate in the stateroom, but we had no other evidence of his continued existence—except from Jackson Chatterton who offered to drag Rickie on deck so that I could make use of the hangman’s noose. Chatterton confirmed that Rickie had admitted the vandalism, but had offered no reason for it other than a general complaint that shipboard life sucked, and that I sucked in particular. I let the little swine suffer in the uncooled humidity of his dark cabin, for, in an effort to save electricity on a boat that now had no means of recharging its batteries, I had played merry hell with the fuse locker. I had disconnected everything except the VHF radio. We had no television, no hair dryers, no electric razors, no cabin lights, no air conditioners, no refrigerator, and, most blessed of all, no Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band.

Robin-Anne was embarrassed by her brother’s actions and even offered me an apology. She asked me what would happen now, and I told her we would have to sail
Wavebreaker
back to her home port to have her fuel lines cleaned and generator repaired.

Robin-Anne frowned. “So you’re abandoning the cruise?”

“I don’t have much choice.”

“So Rickie will go to jail?” she asked me, as though that decision was in my gift, but I could offer her no answer other than a shrug. “But what about me?” she wailed.

“You’re doing just fine,” I tried to reassure her. “You don’t need us or this boat, you’re doing wonderfully!”

“I’m only succeeding because of the boat! Because of you!” Her solemn face threatened tears. I saw Ellen watching us, and I did not know what to say, so I just turned away and muttered that I had to get on with the repairs.

I might not be able to offer Robin-Anne what she wanted, but at least I could take refuge in hard work. By mid-afternoon all the halliards were replaced, and each was properly equipped with a neatly spliced rope tail, and I celebrated that achievement by hoisting the mainsail and letting it flap impotently in the wind that had become little more than a strong breeze.

Thessy had done most of the work on the halliards, while I had fitfully made progress on rigging a new fuel supply system. The spare fuel tanks I had installed while docked in McIllvanney’s yard were a godsend, and I succeeded in siphoning the best part of sixty gallons of filtered diesel oil out of the contaminated tanks and into the new tanks before the first traces of sugar appeared. Thessy and I then spent the rest of the afternoon and the best part of the early evening rigging new feed lines through
Wavebreaker’s
bilges. The last connection had to be made under the engine room, and Thessy held a flashlight while I wriggled under the gratings to manoeuvre the final jubilee clip into place. Ellen, standing in the engine-room door, was pleading with me to restore power to the microwave so she could heat up some defrosted lasagne. She had to shout at me because the bilge was surprisingly noisy with the sound of waves throbbing beyond the steel hull.

“If this system works,” I called back to her, “and the engines start, then you can have all the power you want.” The ship’s batteries could be charged from either the generator or the main engines. “But not lasagne, for God’s sake. You must have something edible in that damned freezer?”

“I’ll put you in the damned freezer,” Ellen threatened. “There is nothing wrong with my lasagne!”

I decided not to pursue that argument. Instead I gingerly worked the screwdriver towards the jubilee clip. “If I drop the screwdriver,” I said to no one in particular, “then I will know there is no God.”

Something clanged on the hull. Ellen, believing it was the sound of the screwdriver falling, laughed.

“That wasn’t me,” I said. The screwdriver’s blade was in place now, and the clip was tightening nicely. “Did either of you launch the power skiff?” To me the clang had sounded like a metallic object striking
Wavebreaker’s
hull from the outside, and the aluminium skiff was the likeliest contender, except that both Thessy and Ellen assured me that the skiff had still been hanging from its davits when they last looked.

“It must have been a floating log,” Ellen suggested. “The lagoon’s full of flotsam.”

“Probably.” I finished tightening the clip. “That’s done, so it seems there must be a God after all.” I wriggled backwards and suddenly the whole hull rang like a giant bell, then, through the bell’s lingering and deafening echo, I heard something heavy scrape harshly down the ship’s side, and I realised that the throbbing I had noticed earlier had not been the sound of waves, but rather the underwater sound of a propeller. “We’ve got visitors.” I sounded surprised.

Thessy was still holding the torch, so Ellen ran back to the companionway steps. I began to ease myself up through the hatch in the engine-room gratings when suddenly I heard the clatter of footsteps on the deck above my head. I grimaced at Thessy, suspecting that we were about to be the victims of a US Coastguard search, but as I pulled myself free of the hatch I heard a man’s voice shouting in urgent Spanish. Ellen, halfway up the main stairs, seemed to sink back with a look of sad resignation on her face. Then she gave a small scream.

“What the hell...” I began, but then a man appeared on the companionway steps, driving Ellen backwards, and I understood why Ellen had screamed. The man was carrying a Kalashnikov rifle.

And Rickie, I realised, had been cleverer than I. Rickie, I suddenly knew, had won.

I realised, too, that it was my own fault. I should have known that an addict like Rickie would not have risked days of deprivation by disabling a ship. Instead he had crippled
Wavebreaker
because he had known that his supplies were coming to Sea Rat Cay and, in that knowledge, he dared not let the ship move away from the rendezvous. And I also understood now why Rickie had taken such an interest in the ship’s radio equipment, for he had always planned to use the radios to summon his friends to his side.

“Oh, God.” I picked up a two-foot-long steel wrench, but it was a forlorn gesture in the face of a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

The gunman had already reached the foot of the stairs. He was wearing jet-black fatigues and had a blue scarf about his neck. He was a young man, whose darkly tanned face had a scarred chin and dumb animal eyes that made his gaze terrifying. He jerked the Kalashnikov’s barrel upwards, indicating that he wanted all three of us on deck. When we hesitated he shouted at us in Spanish.