Stormchild (29 page)

Berenice wanted to know about Jackie. I told her what I could, though had to invent an anodyne answer when Berenice asked why her old friend had abandoned
Stormchild
in Antigua. “I think she just wanted to find a newspaper that would commission a story about Genesis,” I lied.

Berenice accepted the answer at its face value, then, after thinking for a few seconds, her face brightened. “Do you think she’ll come here to find me? On her own, I mean?”

“Good God, no,” David said hurriedly. “She hasn’t got the means to come here, has she, Tim?”

“Not unless a newspaper funds her,” I said, and bleakly wondered just how the idealistic Jackie would survive in this maelstrom of failure and violence.

By mid morning the wind had freshened into the south and
Stormchild’s
heavy bows were chopping with a perceptible shudder into each new wave. I feared that the rising wind might already have made the fjord’s entrance impassable, while David was clearly pessimistic of our chances because the ocean swell was huge and, while such big seas were harmless in the open water, they would be killers where they crashed against the cliffs of the barrier islands to bounce back in complex and tumultuous cross patterns of surge and trough.
Stormchild
would have to be steered through those clashing tons of water and through the cold lash of the wind that would be trying to hurl her against the northern cliffs of the fjord’s entrance. The rising wind, reflecting like the water off the cliffs, would be as tricky to negotiate as the sea. I would use the engine to make the passage, but I still faced an immensely difficult piece of seamanship.

Once inside the fjord we would have a fifteen-mile journey to where we could anchor for the night. In the darkness, just before dawn, I planned to go ashore. I hoped to approach the mine in the mists of early morning, make my reconnaissance, then sneak back to the boat unseen and unheard by Genesis. Yet the whole plan, if it could even be distinguished by the word “plan,” depended on successfully negotiating the narrow sea gate where the wind and waves waited in awful ambush.

“There,” David said somberly in the early afternoon, and he handed me his binoculars and I saw, in the great line of cliffs, a place where the spray was being shattered high into the freshening wind. Beyond that shimmering curtain of broken foam was a dark cleft in the rock. I was looking at the seaward face of Isla Tormentos, and at the desperately narrow crack in its stone coast. I let
Stormchild
fall off the wind, then turned the key to put power into the boat’s starter motor. “Go, go!” I murmured encouragement to the big diesel as the starter motor thumped the engine into life.

I suddenly knew this was madness, but I would not turn back. Beyond the shadowed rockbound gut, and beyond the storm of breaking waves, lay Nicole and my confused hopes of her innocence and my equally confused fears for her guilt. And so we plunged toward the rocks.

“God help us!” David, who would have hated me to know he was nervous, could not resist the prayer. I knew he wanted to turn back, but for the moment his pride would not let him make that confession. Instead he just closed his eyes and talked to God.

Berenice, her knuckles blanched white, clung to the safety rail that ran just beneath the collapsed spray hood.

I stood behind the wheel, my legs braced against the boat’s savage roll, and tried to make some sense of the titanic battle of ocean waves that barred our passage to the fjord’s mouth.

The pattern of that battle began in a simple enough fashion. The great swells, born deep in the Pacific, traveled for thousands of miles to hammer themselves into oblivion against the Patagonian rocks. That oblivion was not instantaneous. When one of the massive waves struck the cliff it dissipated some of its energy as airborne spray, but far more of its energy was bounced outward as a reflected wave that went head-to-head with the next thunderous roller. If the cliffs were irregularly shaped, as these were, then that pattern of wave reflection became tangled and unpredictable. Except I had to predict the pattern, or else
Stormchild
would be tossed aside by one of those waves and splintered into shattered steel against the spray-drenched cliffs.

“Turn back! For God’s sake, Tim!” David at last gave way to his fear. “You agreed we wouldn’t take any risks! Turn, for the love of Christ, turn!”

“Just pray!” I shouted at him, “pray!” And a second afterward it was too late for anything but prayer for, if we had now turned broadside to the swells, the suction of the waves would have dragged us down into the roots of the cliffs, there to be overwhelmed as thousands of tons of Pacific rollers hammered themselves to death around us.

Where the reflected waves struck the incoming seas there were huge eruptions of foam that were like the explosions of gigantic artillery shells. The noises of the coast were deafening—the hammer blows of water striking rock, the seething clash of seas in turmoil, the racing of our engine, the crack as the wind took our foresail aback, and over it all, like the screams of devils waiting to pluck our souls to hell, the shrieking seabirds who swooped on long, thin wings through the wind-whipped mist of spray and air. The island’s cliffs appeared like gigantic ramparts crowned by wheeling seabirds. I whooped defiance, then, more sensibly, looked to make sure that my companions were wearing their lifelines. The boat itself was battened down with every hatch dogged shut and every item on deck double-lashed down, though such precautions were mere cosmetics, for surely nothing on God’s earth or in God’s sea could save us if I had calculated this approach wrong.

A wave lifted
Stormchild’s
stern and I felt the raw power of a whole wide ocean surge us forward. I raced
Stormchild’s
engine in an attempt to keep her speed high. A mass of water slammed us from the left, breaking white foam as high as the radar aerial on the mast. The water crashed into the cockpit and swirled down the scuppers. I glimpsed the cliff’s wet rock face off to port and instinctively gave the boat some starboard rubber, but too much, for a reflected wave thumped us on the port bow and Berenice screamed because it seemed as if I was now steering the boat straight for the saw-edged crags on our starboard bow. I snatched the wheel back, but the helm suddenly felt loose and soggy, and I knew that the surging sea was overtaking us and stealing the power from
Stormchild
’s big steel rudder. Then, just as the great sea crashed past and just as it seemed that we must be thrown against the starboard rocks, the deck seemed to drop away to port like a falling airplane, and
Stormchild
slid hard into a trough and there steadied on her keel. The rudder bit, the engine raced, and inch by inch we fought our way into the rock’s gut.

Behind us a new sea threw its shadow across our deck. The wave that had first carried us then overtaken us broke against the cliffs ahead, drenching us with water and deafening us with the sound of its destruction, yet, through the welter of its wind-born foam, I could just see a smooth, green-hearted black path. The path led to safety, and I pushed on the wheel’s spokes as though I could personally force
Stormchild
into the island’s calm heart.

The wave that had been thrashing at our stern now picked us up and threw us forward. The rudder’s power vanished again. We had become a steel missile that was being hurled by a massive force into a rock cliff. Berenice crouched, David stared wide-eyed, and I felt the wheel quivering in my hands.

For a few seconds we ran in the center of a whirlpool. To starboard a thousand tons of water shattered into flailing scraps. Above us the wet sail flogged. To port a sudden dark hole appeared at the base of a wave to reveal a black, jagged rock thick with seaweed and mussels. I heard Berenice scream in terror, then suddenly there were cliff faces to left and right, a smoothly heaving sea beneath us, and a maelstrom of foam behind us. We had made it.

“Piece of cake,” I said, wondering if I would ever manage to uncurl my frozen fingers from the wheel’s spokes.

“Nothing to it,” David said, but in a voice every bit as shaky as mine. “I’m sorry if I panicked.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

He laughed nervously. “I did, Tim, I did. And I’m already terrified of going back out again.”

“That’ll be much easier,” I said dismissively, which it would, so long as no gale was blowing and so long as we shot the entrance at what passed in these seas for slack water. I throttled back the racing motor. The swells heaved down the channel, while behind us the breaking waves roared and growled and clawed at the fjord’s narrow entrance, but we had escaped their fury and were now running into the heart of an island where my daughter and all her secrets lay hidden.

B
erenice became demonstrably more nervous as we sailed further up the fjord and closer to the limestone workings. I asked her if anyone from the Genesis community ever visited the fjord, and she shook her head, but then added that such a visit was not implausible. “They’ve got two cross-country motorbikes,” she explained. “the bikes don’t always work, and they’re usually short of gasoline, but sometimes they ride all over the island.”

I still doubted that the Genesis group would think it worth their while to patrol the seaward coast of their island. They had seen us flee northward, and would surely assume we had kept going toward Puerto Montt or Valparaiso. I did my best to reassure Berenice of her safety, but she was almost catatonic with fear as
Stormchild
nosed ever farther into the island’s heart.

We used the engine, for, though there was plenty of wind, the fjord’s steep sides either cheated us of the wind’s power or else made its direction so fickle that the sails would have been aback as often as they might have offered help. The soft beat of our engine echoed back from massive black cliffs that were slashed by high white plumes of narrow waterfalls. Sometimes the fjord opened unexpectedly into wide lakelike basins that were dotted with tree-covered islands, and more than once we had trouble deciding which waterway from such a lake was the main channel. The charts were no help. They merely confirmed that the Canal Almagro existed, but no one, it seemed, had ever surveyed its tortuous course. “It’s possible,” I told David, “that we’re the first boat ever to come here!”

“That’s a thought,” David said with pleasure. At my request he had broken out the second rifle from its hiding place in
Stormchild’s
bows, but now kept a nervous eye on the depth sounder. He also noted that the glass was dropping. “It’s not desperately worrying,” he said in a voice that belied his apparent confidence, “but neither is it entirely reassuring.” In any normal circumstance the fjord, with its bays and anchorages, would have offered the perfect shelter from a sudden gale, but any such gale would so heap the seas at the fjord’s narrow entrance that we ran the risk of marooning
Stormchild
inside. Then, if the Genesis community did discover our presence, our boat would be like a rat trapped in a barrel. We could not risk such a fate so we agreed that, should the weather threaten to lock
Stormchild
inside the fjord while I was making my reconnaissance of the limestone workings, David would take the boat back to sea and wait for a message from the handheld VHF radio that I would take ashore.

David, even though we had run the major risk of negotiating the fjord’s entrance, was still opposed to my reconnaissance. “You have no certainty that Nicole will be there,” he protested, “nor that you’ll find any news of her!”

“And you’ve got no certainty to the contrary,” I said. “For God’s sake, David, just let me alone for one day. I promise that if I find nothing, or if what I find is bad, then I’ll sail north with you and we’ll call in the cops.”

“But no heroics!” David warned me. “This is just a reconnaissance, and you are not going to take any risks, is that a promise?”

“Scout’s honor,” I said, and gave him the Sea Scouts salute.

“I know you, Tim!” David said in a slightly despairing voice. “You’re in a stupidly heroic mood. You think you can swan across the island, find Nicole, rescue her, then come back here and open a celebratory bottle of champagne. Well, it won’t work! No battle is won by irresponsibility.”

“Of course it isn’t,” I agreed, but without the fervor my brother demanded of me.

“Tim! Please!” David said in exasperation. “We agreed that at the first sign of violence we would withdraw, and yesterday we were fired on, but did we withdraw? Did we act upon our agreement? No we did not. You pulled captain’s rank and here we are taking yet another risk. So I want your promise that you will try no heroics. No stupidity! I want your promise.”

“You have it,” I said, and meant it, too.

It was almost dusk as
Stormchild
reached the fjord’s blind end where the water widened into a large rippled pool that was surrounded by gently sloping hills. The shingle beaches were edged by belts of woodland, where ferns, moss, and wild fuchsia grew in livid green tangles beneath wind-stunted beech trees. Streams tumbled white and cold from the hills. A kingfisher flashed bright across the gray water as
Stormchild’s
anchor rattled down to bite on the bed of a lagoon, where, I guessed, no ship had ever anchored before. The wide lake that terminated the fjord had no name printed on our chart, even the lake was not shown, so I inked in its rough outline and then added a name of my own devising: Lake Joanna.

The evening light was gray and wintry. All day the clouds had been gathering in the west, threatening wind and rain, but suddenly, as
Stormchild
tugged at her bedded anchor flukes, the setting sun emerged from a chasm of smoky vapor to cast a red-gold wash of fierce light across our anchorage. The sunlight made the small mountain streams look like rivulets of molten gold spilling toward a cauldron of liquid silver, above which uncountable seabirds flew on gilded wings toward their nests.

I waited until the glow faded and until the spilling streams of gold had turned back to cold white water again, then I went below. It was my turn to cook, then David would keep watch through the dark hours of the night before, in the first gray light of dawn, I would go to journey’s end.