Island of Death (14 page)

At the sight of her, camera in hand, stepping out in that cocky, superior way she had, his guts convulsed with hate. It was her fault, her and her bloody camera, that he was in this mess; her fault that Hilda had turned against him; her fault that he’d lost everything that had made his life worth living, after he’d had to abandon any hope of reaching the top in politics.

This might be his chance. He looked round the cabin.

There seemed to be nothing that he could use as a weapon.

But then he saw it: the simple, heavy wooden chair by the dressing table. In a moment, it was upended, his grip tightened around the base of one of the legs, and with a twist to break the brittle glue, and a wrench to free it from the joints, he was supplied with a club as deadly as any baseball bat.

Thank God he’d recovered his strength.

Hefting it in his hand, he cautiously followed the girl out onto the deck, being careful to keep out of sight.

Maybe he’d lost her. No! There she was, on the lifeboat.

At first it seemed that she was determined to keep within sight of the figure on the bridge, the one they called the Doctor.

But at last she climbed back onto the deck, and came towards him. He drew back into the shadow of a large ventilator and froze into the rapt stillness of a cat waiting for the moment to pounce, pressing himself against the ventilator to keep himself stationary as the ship swung up and down with the waves.

He watched, only his eyes moving, as she crossed the deck, pausing every so often to take a shot. If only...

Yes... she was coming closer, working her way down the guard rail, leaning out to find the shot she wanted.

And then she stopped not ten feet away, just out of sight of the bridge, with her back to him, snapping away as if she’d found the ideal position at last.

He took a step forward and froze again, as the ship sank into the trough of a wave.

There was no sign that she’d noticed him.

One more step...Wait for the pause at the top of the rise...

Now!

He should have crept nearer to her. As he rushed forward, his makeshift club aloft, she heard the movement and turned.

And screamed.

The scream was cut short as the chairleg marginally connected with the side of her skull. All in a moment, before she could slip to the deck, he grabbed her by the legs and tipped her over the guard rail.

He turned to flee, but there on the deck was the cursed camera. Picking it up, he hurled it viciously after her.

The job was done.

Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart had always been impatient. Being an only child, with a hefty pair of lungs, and a mother (and later a substitute mother in the shape of Granny McDougal) who couldn’t deny him a thing, he’d soon learnt that his widower father, with the bark of a Rottweiler, had the bite of a miniature poodle. It was school, and Sandhurst (public school writ large), that taught him that instant gratification was the privilege of the spoilt toddler.

But that didn’t make him feel any better inside. Tucked out of the way in a corner of the bridge house, peering through one of the spinning discs of glass that did duty in lieu of windscreen wipers, he felt that the entire world was conspiring to thwart him.

The waves looked as big as ever, which seemed not only illogical but unfair - as the wind had by now dropped almost completely.

‘We’ll give it another hour or so,’ said Pete Andrews. ‘The swell’s easing quite fast.’

You could have fooled him. It still felt more like a scenic railway than the bridge of one of Her Britannic Majesty’s ships.

Bob Simkins was busy at his chart table as he tried to get some idea of how much they’d been swept off course, keeping a weather-eye on the radar, to make sure there was nothing to collide with. Only half listening to himself, he’d explained that the waves were now ‘a heavy swell’, rather than ‘a sea’.

But that was just playing with words, for God’s sake. What difference did it make? It was the feeling of utter helplessness, that there was nothing he could do that...

The door of the port wing slammed open.

Man overboard! It’s Sarah!’

What!

‘Where away?’ sang out the Cox’n.

‘Port side,’ came the Doctor’s voice.

Even before the First Lieutenant could give an order, the Cox’n was spinning the wheel to port, to swing the stern with its murderous screws away to starboard.

But by now the Brigadier was through the door, to find that the Doctor had flung off his cloak, and pulled off his boots, and was climbing up as if to dive into the water.

‘What the devil?’ cried the Brigadier, clinging onto the door jamb as the ship came broadside onto the swell, and rolled alarmingly to starboard.

‘Look!’

As the ship came to the crest of the wave and started to recover, Sarah’s body could be seen briefly on the next wave to the south.

She was face down in the water.

The Doctor didn’t dive in. As the ship rolled to port, on the downhill side of the wave, he held his nose like a seven-year-old jumping off the side of the swimming bath and plunged feet first some thirty feet into the sea.

‘Bob! Get a scrambling net rigged.’

‘Aye aye sir. Which side?’

‘Port. No, better make it both sides.’

The Navigating Officer shot off to see to it.

A scrambling net. The meaning of the term was self-evident. But couldn’t they lower a boat? It had been quite obvious that there was no point in hurling a life buoy after the pair in the water, but surely... ‘What about a boat?’ the Brigadier asked.

‘Negative. No visibility so low in the water. At least we’ve a chance of spotting them from up here.’

Pete grabbed a pair of binoculars and vanished onto the wing of the bridge. The Brigadier tried to follow him, but the roll of the ship was so extreme that he lost his footing completely and landed on the deck.

When he regained his feet, he clung onto the ledge at the front and tried to see through the glass. He’d soon lost sight of the Doctor, swimming away from the ship with the confident strong strokes of an Olympic gold medallist. How old had he said he was? Four hundred years? Seven hundred? But how could anybody survive in these conditions?

The Cox’n’s careful explanation of the danger of travelling with the waves had become fearsomely real. When the
Hallaton
was going precisely in the same direction as the swell, the rudder had no effect at all. But then, as her bow swung, it began to bite, and the Petty Officer spun the wheel hard over in the opposite direction, in an attempt to bring her back on course before she reached the critical point of utmost danger; and then he had to spin it back again, so that he wouldn’t bring her round too far and let her roll over the other way.

The sum total was a series of near-fatal swoops and rolls, saved at the last moment, it seemed, by the hard-won skill of the man at the wheel.

‘Okay, Cox’n?’ Pete Andrews had reappeared, and was scanning ahead through his glasses.

‘All right so far, sir, as the man said when he fell off the Blackpool tower.’

At least the Royal Navy lot seemed to know what they were doing, thought the Brigadier grudgingly.

‘The trouble is that with our turning circle they’ll have been swept quite a way off by now. Can’t twizzle round like Margot Fonteyn. It takes time,’ said Pete, who seemed as calm and in control as the Petty Officer. ‘Haven’t had a sight of them yet,’

he went on. ‘But it’s early days. The theory is that if we keep on the reciprocal course, two hundred degrees - sou’sou’west near as dammit - we’re bound to come across them. But in this weather...’

As if to confirm his thought, the
Hallaton
heeled over so violently that even he staggered and had to catch hold to save himself.

‘Cox’n...’

‘Sir?’

‘I’m going up top. Get a better view from there.’

‘Aye aye sir.’

Pete made his way towards the door in the corner. The Brigadier knew that this led to the deck above, which was a de facto additional bridge, open to the sky.

‘Who give... who was’t give th’ order to change course?’

Lieutenant-Commander Eugene Hogben, whose eyes seemed to be as out-of-focus as his words, stood in the doorway, clinging onto the handle for a precarious swaying support.

Pete Andrews turned at the bottom of the ladder. ‘I did sir.

You see...’

‘And why have you dis... dis’beyed a direct order, may I ask? Only asking.’

‘Man overboard, sir. Or rather, two of them...’

‘Who?’

‘The Doctor and Miss Smith.’

‘And you think you can pick ‘em up? In a sea like this? You must be bloody joking, mate.’

‘I thought...’

‘Yes, well, stop thinking and start... start doing what you’re told. Start ‘beying bloody orders, right? Try this one for size.

Resume...’

Before he could finish speaking another particularly severe lurch brought the Commanding Officer to his knees. Pete hurried over and helped him to his feet.

‘Sir, don’t you think it would be a good idea if...’

This brought out the CO’s latent rage, which had been sim-mering below the surface, the blind anger of the alcoholic, disappointed and frustrated by the unjustness of life.

‘Take your hands off me! ‘ he said harshly. ‘Or I’ll have you for ‘ssaulting a superi... sup... your commanding officer!’

Pete Andrews released his arm, and stood back, his face white with fury.

Hogben gave him a vicious look. ‘I’ll ‘tend to you later,’ he said. ‘Cox’n!’

‘Yessir?’

‘Port ten!’

‘Port ten, sir... Ten of port wheel on.’

‘Very good. Bring her round and steer 020.’ He turned back to his First Lieutenant. ‘Is’t my fault if they’re fool enough to fall in?’ he said.

Much later, Sarah would look back and wonder why she didn’t actually say, ‘Where am I?’ when she came round.

Perhaps it was the journalist in her - the years of trying to avoid clichés - that stopped her voicing what would have been an absolutely accurate expression of her feelings.

To wake up, lying back luxuriating in a moving bath, with a hand behind her head supporting her (with one finger pressing hard on the top of her spine), became doubly mysterious when she realised that the hand belonged to the Doctor.

Then to be held firmly as the dreamy contentment gave way to a spluttering, choking, vomiting that sent salt water up her nose and, it seemed, into her very brain was no way to discover that she’d fallen into something like two hundred fathoms of Indian Ocean.

For a moment, she panicked, and clung to her rescuer with a grip the Doctor could hardly free himself from.

‘Gently, gently,’ said the Doctor, as he loosened her fingers.

‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, ‘but I can’t swim. I mean, only a bit.’

‘You’re quite safe. I have positive buoyancy, you see. Think of me as one of those big blow-up spotted horses you see at the seaside.’

The image was so ludicrous that, even though she couldn’t summon up a giggle, she was able to relax a little, and hang onto his shirt. It was then, as the sea carried them up towards the sky, that she saw the ship way off in the distance, and nearly freaked out again.

‘They’re miles away!’ she said. ‘How will they ever find us?

What are we going to do?’

There’s nothing we can do, but wait,’ said the Doctor, with a little smile; and this time she did giggle.

‘What happened? Did you slip? I heard you scream and saw you falling.’

Yes, what had happened? She remembered waving to the Doctor... and then... ‘I don’t know. It’s just a blank.’

‘I thought as much. Concussion. You must have hit your head as you fell.’

What did she remember? Oh yes. She remembered clinging onto the falls of the lifeboat, and - yes, leaning right out over the sea! She must have been bonkers!

‘Oh, Doctor, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s my fault we’re in this mess. I was all hyped up with... with the look of the waves, and...’ Her voice trailed away.

‘I know. I’d spent several hours just watching them myself.

Immersed in them, you might say. But I didn’t expect to be immersed quite so literally.’

He could always find a joke, even at the worst of times.

Down they went into the trough, and up again, twenty feet or more - and this time, the ship was nearer, much nearer!

‘I told you. Don’t worry, they’ll find us. All we have to do is...’

‘I know, wait!’

The water was fairly warm, in spite of the storm. It was lucky they were in the tropics, the Doctor said. If they’d been off Murmansk, they’d have been dead long ago.

He kept talking, taking her mind off the terrible situation they were in. He told her of his days at the Academy on Gallifrey, and the pet flubble he’d kept hidden under the bed in his first year, just so he’d have something to talk to – ‘A flubble? It’s a bit like a koala, I suppose, only with a smaller nose - and six legs’ - and how he was nearly caught when his pet came on heat and started singing her mating song.

He told her about his friends, and the time they put their teacher (who deserved it) into a time loop, so that he relived the same lesson over and over for a whole day, while they whooped it up in the city.