Stormchild (25 page)

I strolled past a vast and disorganized woodpile, evidence of the community’s reliance on timber for their heating and cooking. I heard a child cry inside the house, the first sign that people other than my bearded followers were present at the settlement, but when I shouted a greeting through one of the dusty windows, no one answered.

I explored the southern wing. Hens lived in two of the stablelike rooms, but otherwise I saw nothing alive except the vituperative cat that spat at me from the corrugated, rust-streaked roof. At the corner of the building I stopped to stare at the crest of the escarpment where the radio mast was built, but I could not see the gunman David had spotted, and whom I assumed must now be hidden among the tangle of rocks that crowned the ridge. Just to the north of the radio mast was an earth-faced dam, which suggested a reservoir had been created in a saddle of the escarpment, presumably to control the flow of water from the hills to the settlement’s vegetable gardens.

I walked to the building’s southern flank and there I stopped in astonishment. A dozen young people were struggling toward the settlement with a big handcart that was stacked high with freshly cut logs. The clumsy cart was being maneuvered along a muddy path by a disconsolate group of women and children who all wore drab and uniformlike gray overalls. The work party was escorted by two bearded men, who, like the two guardians who still dogged my every footstep, wore green trousers and jerkins.

The woodcutting group, who were still a hundred paces from the buildings, saw me and froze.

One of the women gaped in such abject terror that I thought she would faint.

I walked toward them. The man with the black beard tried to call me back, while the small children clung in terror to their mother’s gray trousers. I could not see Nicole among the women, who all looked lank, unhappy, pale, and ill-fed. One of the frightened children began wailing.

“Hello!” I called aloud. “It’s all right! I’m a friend!”

“Go away!” One of the green-dressed men seized an ax from the stalled woodcart and started toward me. “Go away!”

I stopped some fifty paces from the big cart. “My name is Tim Blackburn,” I shouted, “and I’ve come here to find my daughter, Nicole. Do any of you know where I can find her?”

None of the group answered. The gray-uniformed women huddled together and seemed to shiver with a collective fear of my appearance. They looked to me like zombies, and I recalled Jackie’s assertion how Utopian communities were very often based on one man’s idealism, which, to preserve itself, degraded into a fascist system of discipline. These people, the zombies in gray and their bearded guards in green, seemed evidence that von Rellsteb’s community was an example of that sad fate. The axman, who had a ginger beard, walked confidently toward me as though he planned to split my skull open. “Is Caspar von Rellsteb here?” I asked him.

“You’ve got to go.” The axman, like the black-bearded man, had an American accent.

“Where’s Nicole Blackburn?” I asked him patiently.

“Go away!”

“I’m fed up with all of you,” I said dismissively, and tried to walk toward the frightened women. The ginger-bearded man immediately swung his ax at me. His swing was wildly violent and came nowhere close to me. Instead the energy of the blow unbalanced my attacker so that he tottered helplessly backward. I took two quick steps toward him and brought the toe of my right sea boot hard up into his groin.

His breath whooshed out, his eyes opened wide, the ax dropped into the mud, then he followed it with a sudden scream of pure agony. The other bearded men looked as terrified as the women and children.

I picked up the fallen ax. “Where’s Nicole!” I demanded of all and any of the green-dressed men.

“Go away.” The man with the black beard sounded scared. The man I had kicked was sobbing and whimpering on the ground. David, who could now see me again from
Stormchild’s
cockpit, was insistently demanding to be told what was happening, but the only answer I offered him was a cheerful wave.

Then, because the men were evidently defeated, I tossed the ax into the mud and walked toward the gray-dressed group. “I’m Nicole Blackburn’s father,” I told them again, and in as comforting a voice as I could manage, but before I could say another word one of the green-dressed men ordered them to run.

“Go!” he shouted. “Run! Quick! Go!” He flapped his hands at them as though he drove a flock of hens, and the women, with one last look at me, obeyed. They fled toward the southern hills, the children clinging to their mothers and screaming as they ran.

I turned back to the men. “Are you all mad?”

“Go away,” one of them said.

“I’ll search your house first,” I said, and began walking toward the big sprawl of buildings.

A rifle fired. It was not David on board
Stormchild
who had opened fire, but rather the gunman who was hidden at the crest of the western escarpment. The sound of his gun echoed and re-echoed around the wide bay, while his bullet thudded into the ground just five paces in front of me. At that range it was horribly good shooting and I hoped it had only been intended as a warning shot, calculated to stop me in my tracks.

If so, it worked. I stopped.

“Tim!” David’s voice squawked from the radio.

“Listen.” I was not replying to David, but rather turning to appeal to the bearded men, but my words were interrupted by a second rifle shot, and this time the bullet whacked into the damp earth even closer to me.

“Go,” the man with the black beard said.

“Where’s my daughter!” I shouted at him, and I took a threatening pace forward, but immediately the gunman on the hill fired a third round, and this bullet hissed menacingly close to my head. I froze.

“For God’s sake, what is happening?” David asked plaintively over the radio.

I thumbed the transmit button. “They won’t talk, they won’t say where Nicole is, and the gunfire is calculated to make me leave.”

“I think that might be a very good idea,” David said in a dispassionate voice, “because I’ve spotted another gunman in the house itself. He’s on the top floor, left-hand window. I suggest you withdraw, Tim. We’ve done what we could, now let’s do as we agreed.”

“Like hell.” I was feeling stubborn, stupidly stubborn. I put the radio back into my pocket and looked defiantly at the black-bearded man. “I have sailed ten thousand bloody miles to see my daughter, and I’m not leaving without speaking to her. Where is she?”

The man’s only answer was to raise a hand in an evident appeal to the gunman hidden on the escarpment’s crest, who now switched his gun to automatic fire and loosed a whole clip of bullets at me. The sound of the shots crackled in the still air as the bullets churned a patch of nearby ground into a morass. The rounds came so close that I instinctively twisted away and half fell.

David, thinking that my fall was evidence that I had been shot, fired back.

The old British army rifle made a much louder report than the gunman’s assault rifle, and, long before the echo of his first shot had faded from the bay, David fired again.

The effect was extraordinary. The three men who had been confronting me turned and fled.

Even the man with the ginger beard limped away, still sobbing and gasping. The gunman on the hill began placing single shots very close to me. It was impossible to see where that gunman was hiding because the top of the escarpment was an horrific tangle of rocks and crevices. I decided he was not trying to kill me, but only to drive me away. The Genesis community just wanted to expel me, and, under the encouragement of their marksman’s wicked aim, I turned and walked toward the beach. The hidden gunman, seeing my retreat, instantly ceased fire. David, after his first two warning shots, had also ceased fire. I took out the radio as I walked. “It’s been a bloody washout,” I reported to David.

“Just get back here,” he said, and I could hear the nervousness in his voice.

I reached the bluff above the beach. I hesitated there for a few seconds. One part of me, desperate for news of Nicole, wanted to go back and hammer at the door of the house, but when I turned to stare at the ugly building I saw that David was right and that there was indeed a gunman on the upper floor. The man had opened a window and was mutely watching me. The message of his unmoving menace was very clear: that I should go away.

I went away. I climbed down the steps and started hauling the dinghy toward the water and as I did, one of the gunmen opened a furious fire.

David responded.

I stared in horror at
Stormchild,
expecting to see the bullets chewing up her hull and deck, but
Stormchild
was untouched, the water around her un-scarred by bullets. David, standing in the cockpit, was working the Lee-Enfield’s bolt furiously. His shots echoed flat and hard from the far hills.

I left the dinghy and ran halfway up the wooden steps to see what had caused this sudden firefight. Then, crouching so that I was hidden from both Genesis gunmen, I very cautiously peered over the bluff’s edge.

A single figure dressed in one of the drab gray boiler suits was running frantically toward the beach. It was a young woman who had run from the woodcutting group and now struggled with extraordinary clumsiness toward the sea. For a second I dared to hope it was Nicole, but then I saw this girl had hair as black as night, while Nicole was fair. The fleeing girl tripped and fell, and I was sure she must have been hit, but then she struggled up again. David kept firing, then the second Genesis gunman, the one in the house, saw the girl and opened fire.

He had seen her too late, and the range was too great. The girl was already close to the concealing bluff. She took one panicked look behind her, then half jumped and half fell over the earthen cliff. For a second I thought she had knocked herself unconscious, but then she struggled up and ran toward me.

I shoved the dinghy into the water. David was now firing at the house and his shots dissuaded the gunman in the upper window. The farther gunman, the one on the high ridge, had also ceased fire, but only, I suspected, because he was reloading. “Anchor!” I yelled at David. “Get the bloody hook up!”

The girl, her eyes huge and terrified, swerved into the shallow waves toward the dinghy. She stumbled and fell full-length into the cold sea. She was gasping as she struggled up and scrambled clumsily over the dinghy’s bows. I clambered after her, grabbed the oars, and rowed hard toward
Stormchild.
The girl, sensibly, was curled on the dinghy’s floor and hidden from the Genesis gunmen. The one on the ridge had opened fire again, but the range was too great and his bullets went wide. The man in the house could have shredded the dinghy with his fire, and I flinched as I saw his gun’s muzzle appear at the windowsill, but then it jerked back as a bullet from David’s gun slapped a puff of stone dust and chips from the wall near the window.
Stormchild’s
anchor windlass was thumping away, clattering the pawl-dragged chain over the fairlead. David, who was now standing in
Stormchild’s
bows, fired again at the house. I knew he was not firing to kill, but only to scare, and his tactic seemed to be working.

I rowed to
Stormchild’s
far side. “Over you go!” I told the girl. She obediently tipped herself into
Stormchild
’s scuppers, then slithered into the cockpit. As she wriggled under cover I heard a curious clinking noise and I at last understood why her escape had been so clumsy. She was wearing leg chains.

I followed her on board, tying the dinghy’s painter to the nearest stanchion. The girl quivered on the cockpit floor.

“Anchor’s clear!” David shouted at me.

He had already started
Stormchild
’s engine, so all I needed to do was ram it into gear. Bullets whiplashed overhead. One clipped the backstay, but did no apparent damage. David fired back. The anchor chain was still clanking aboard, but the anchor was hanging clear of the seabed as
Stormchild
gathered speed. The water at her stern churned white.

“I knew this would end badly,” David shouted at me.

“It hasn’t ended yet!” I said, then ducked as a stream of bullets whimpered overhead. It was the gunman on the escarpment’s crest who was firing, but I suspected we were in much more danger from a group of armed men who were running toward the shabby trawler. Someone must have already been aboard the trawler, because black smoke had started to pour out of its slender funnel.

“They’re going to chase us,” I warned David.

David stowed the anchor while I pushed
Stormchild
to her top speed. Behind us the decrepit, green-painted trawler clanked away from the quay. David came back to the cockpit and winced as someone on board the ancient fishing vessel fired a clip of bullets toward
Stormchild’s
stern. “Forget the trawler,” I told David, “and take our guest below. Use the hacksaw on those chains and give her something to eat.”

“Chains!” His eyes widened as he saw the leg irons. “Good Lord above!”

David took the girl into the saloon as a last hopeless clip of bullets from the hills hissed overhead. Then we were hidden from that land-based gunman as
Stormchild
reached the tip of the pine-topped headland where a sudden tidal surge carried her out of danger at the speed of a racing dinghy whipping round a mark. I spun the wheel amidships and, with
Stormchild’s
big turbo-charged engine at full throttle and with her hull borne along by that enormous tide, we traveled quickly away from the trawler. The fishing boat’s stack was spewing a filthy plume of greasy smoke, evidence that her old engine was working at maximum effort.

A rifle fired from the trawler and the bullet clanged off
Stormchild
’s transom. A second bullet drove a jagged splinter of teak up from the coaming. That was good marksmanship, too good, and I snatched up David’s discarded rifle and fired two quick bullets at our pursuer. The rifle’s butt slammed into my shoulder.

“For God’s sake! What’s happening?” With each rifle shot David could sense potential scandal: a man of God caught fighting a private war in Chile.