Stormchild (30 page)

I had been at sea too long. The backs of my legs felt as though they were sinewed with barbed wire, while the breath rasped in my throat and a stitch agonized at my waist. I had plenty of strength in my upper body from wrestling with
Stormchild’s
wheel and hauling on her lines, but my stamina and my leg muscles seemed to have atrophied from the long weeks of being penned up in a small boat.

It was dawn and I was climbing the steep slope above the trees that edged the fjord’s beach. I was carrying one of
Stormchild’s
rifles and a bag which held spare ammunition, my rigging knife, a torch, binoculars, the handheld radio, and a few rations. I also had forty feet of half-inch nylon line looped round my upper body, for Berenice had warned that there were places on the island that were inaccessible without a climber’s rope.

Behind and beneath me, below the trees and scrub which had soaked me with their dew as I struggled through their entanglement in the night’s last darkness, I could just see
Stormchild
in the battleship-gray mist that steamed off Lake Joanna’s sheltered surface. It was my first sight of my boat this day, for I had woken and eaten breakfast in the dark, then exchanged my sea boots for an old pair of walking boots, and had put on two sweaters and an old waxed-cotton shooting coat that offered some rudimentary camouflage, before, still in darkness, David had rowed me ashore. We had used a lantern to search the beach till we found a distinctive pale-colored rock which was the size and shape of a dinner plate, and we had agreed that, should David be forced to move
Stormchild
to sea or to a different anchorage, he would leave me a note hidden under the stone. Otherwise he expected to see me at dusk. If I came back after nightfall I was supposed to signal my whereabouts with the torch. David had stood on the beach offering me instruction after instruction, all very prudent and laborious, and afterward he had rather formally shaken my hand and wished me good luck. “But no heroics, Tim!”

“No heroics,” I had agreed.

Now, six hundred feet above
Stormchild
and beneath a lowering gunmetal sky, I paused to catch my breath. The ground was uneven, tussocked and burrowed by nesting birds, while the rifle seemed to weigh a ton. I glanced up at the sky, wondering when the rain would come. The wind had suddenly sprung cold and fierce. If I had not known this to be the southern hemisphere’s summer I would have thought a fall of snow was imminent.

It took me another half hour to reach the crest of the ridge. Once there I stopped, panting and sweating, and took out the small handheld radio. The set was tuned to channel 37, a VHF frequency that had once been used for contacting marinas and boatyards in British waters, and which I doubted anyone other than David would be monitoring. “I’m on your skyline,” I told him.

David answered immediately. “Shore party, shore party, this is
Stormchild, Stormchild.
Took your time strolling up that hill, didn’t you? Can you see anything. Over.”

“Nothing.” Facing me was not, as I had hoped, a long, shallow slope leading down to the mine workings, but rather a wide bleak saddle that looked suspiciously marshy. I took the binoculars from my bag and searched the high plateau, but nothing moved there except the long grasses that rippled under the wind’s cold touch. “What’s the glass doing?” I asked David.

“Shore party, shore party, this is
Stormchild.
The barometer is still dropping. It is now showing thirty and a half inches. I say again. Three zero point five inches. Over.”

“You mean a thousand and thirty-three millibars?” I teased him.

“I mean thirty and one half English inches, and not some ridiculous French standard of measurement.” David was incorrigibly old-fashioned in such matters. “Over.”

The glass had read 1042 millibars when I woke, which meant that it was dropping more steeply than I had hoped. That drop indicated that a depression threatened us, a threat heralded by the freshness of the wind that I thought was probably stiffening. “If the glass goes on falling at this rate,” I advised David, “then you’d better think of making it to sea.”

“Shore party, shore party, this is
Stormchild.
I agree. I’ll read the glass again in one hour and then decide. May I now suggest you conserve your battery power? Out.”

I dutifully switched off the little radio, shoved it deep into my bag, and marched on. From now on I would be out of sight of
Stormchild,
which meant that the VHF radios, which worked only on line of sight, would be blanketed into silence.

The upland saddle proved to be more than just marshland; it was a stretch of ice-cold bog land that sucked at my boots and sapped what little strength I had left. At times, missing my footing on the firmer tussocks, I would plunge up to a thigh in the wet, peaty mess. It had begun to drizzle, but soon that drizzle turned into a chill rain that thickened into a miserable downpour that blotted out the horizon like sea fog. I had not thought to bring one of my old prismatic compasses, but I doubted I would get lost, for if the charts were right then the dead end of the Desolate Straits, where Berenice assured me the limestone workings were built, lay just beyond the saddle’s eastern ridge, which, in turn, was no more than a mile away, yet already the marshland had consumed over two hours of painful, wet, slow struggle. I tried to console myself that some people paid small fortunes to be just so discomfited as they stalked deer on the Scottish hills, but the consolation did not help.

At last the going became firmer and the upward slope steeper, evidence that I was reaching the far side of the saddle. Rain was dripping from my hat and my boots squelched with every step. The cold was seeping into my bones, while my heels had been rubbed into painful blisters. Off to my left I could see a rocky peak which looked uncannily like one of the granite tors on Dartmoor, while directly ahead of me the skyline seemed to be crowned with a rampart of ice blocks. It was not until I was within a few paces of the blocks that I saw they were actually pale limestone boulders that were scattered along the ridge line above the quarry and where, winded, sore, and tired, I collapsed onto the wet turf and stared eastward.

Far off, dim through the smearing rain, were the slopes of the Andes, while nearer, though still watered into obscurity, was the labyrinth of islands and twisting channels that made this coast so tangled and broken. It was, despite the rain, a magnificent view, yet beneath me was something that interested me far more—the limestone workings. I had come, at last, to Genesis’s inner citadel.

The most obvious, and the ugliest, evidence of the old limestone workings was the quarry itself—a vast open scar that must have been a full half mile across and six hundred feet deep, and which had been ripped out of the hillside to leave a curving artificial cliff that faced toward the headwaters of the Desolate Straits. Trickles of peaty-brown water made miniature falls over the cliff; falls that tumbled hundreds of feet to the quarry floor which was cut into vast terraces so that it looked like an amphitheater for giants, littered with jagged boulders, dotted with pools, and strewn with shale and the detritus of the explosions that had once ripped the limestone out of the hill’s belly. Dark holes in the quarry’s sides betrayed where mine shafts had been driven horizontally into the mountain. To my left, beyond the big quarry, I could see a second and much smaller quarry, which appeared to face directly onto the straits.

At the seaward side of the larger quarry’s floor, where the amphitheater spilled its dark, wet litter of shale toward the sea, was a group of rusting and ugly buildings. The buildings were dwarfed by the quarry’s size, yet when I examined them through the binoculars and counted the flights of iron steps that zigzagged up the flank of the largest structure, I realized just how huge the old sheds were. The largest one, a great gaunt structure, seemed big enough to house an airship. The buildings were grouped together, sloping roof touching sloping roof, presumably so that the men who had once lived and worked in this god-awful place would never have needed to expose themselves to Patagonia’s merciless weather. I raised the glasses a fraction to see a covered loading ramp sloping down from the large building toward the stone pier that jutted into the Desolate Straits. The profits from limestone must have been huge to have made it worthwhile to bring in all that corrugated iron and timber and machinery.

I could see no one moving around the buildings, or on the hugely stepped floor of the quarry. No boats broke the wind-chopped surface of the straits beyond, though the lip of the quarry hid the closest stretch of water from my high viewpoint. The limestone works seemed deserted; indeed, they looked as though they had been deserted for years, and I felt a twinge of anxiety that Berenice might have invented her story of Nicole using the mine as her sanctuary.

There was only one way to find the truth, and that was to descend into the quarry. I meant to keep my promise to David, so, before making any move, I used the binoculars to search the lip of the small quarry, then to painstakingly investigate the larger quarry and all its buildings again. I stared hard at every door and window, yet I saw nothing threatening, and the only movement in the quarry was the rippling of the rain-speckled pools under the wind’s lash.

Still I waited as the rain pelted onto the empty landscape. I had a flask of cold tea and a great slab of fruitcake that I consumed as a second breakfast while I watched the old workings for any signs of life. I was soaked and chilled to the bone, yet I endured the discomfort for a full hour, seeing neither man nor beast. The only oddity, apart from the fact that the quarry and its buildings existed at all, was a tractor that was parked beside one of the ramshackle sheds, but even with the binoculars it was impossible to tell whether the machine had been abandoned fifty years before or just left there a few hours ago. After a further half hour, during which I became increasingly certain that the limestone works were deserted, I picked up my gun and bag and walked down the right-hand edge of the quarry.

It should have been a moment of heightened apprehension, even drama. For years I had dreamed of finding my daughter, and now, miraculously, half a world away from home, I was carrying a gun into the heart of von Rellsteb’s mad empire. Nicole might be just a mile away from me, and, even if she was at sea, I still hoped that I would find some evidence that she was innocent of anything worse than a fanatical desire to cleanse the planet. I tried to buoy up my anticipation, to tell myself that I was on the brink of a dream’s fulfillment, but I was too wet and too cold and too aching and too tired to feel the proper apprehension.

So, numbed by cold, I stumbled downhill. I splashed through peaty streams and tripped on thick tussocks of springy grass. My throat was sore and I prayed that it was not the first symptom of a cold. There was still no movement by the huge sheds, which, as I came closer, appeared more and more dilapidated. Whole roof sheets of corrugated iron had been ripped away by the winds to leave rotten holes, in which only the beams were left exposed. Other iron sheets, half loosened by the storms, creaked and flapped in the wind. Rainwater poured off the sloping roofs, cascading through the broken sheets into the shadowed shed interiors. Where there was paint on window frames or doors it was peeling and cracked. The place looked as miserable and deserted as an abandoned whaling station on a remote Antarctic island.

I stopped a quarter mile from the rusted sheds and again examined them through my binoculars, but still I saw nothing to worry me. I gazed for a long, long time, but saw no one move across the sodden quarry floor or past one of the windows. The quarry, and its old works, seemed as empty as the backside of the moon.

I reached the bottom of the hill. Now I was just a hundred yards from the sheds. Still nothing threatened me. If an ambush had been set, then the ambushers were being as silent as the grave, but I felt no instinctive apprehension of danger. I only felt the anticipation of disappointment, for it seemed ridiculous that I might find anything of value in this rusted, derelict place. I looked at my watch and reckoned I had time to search for three or four hours and still be back at the fjord long before dusk, and the thought of returning to
Stormchild
made me long to sit in front of her saloon heater with a hot whiskey-toddy. That tantalizing vision made me wonder whether
Stormchild
would be waiting when I returned. The rain was falling more heavily and the wind blowing more strongly than it had at dawn; the gale David feared might be swirling its way toward the coast and David might already have taken
Stormchild
to safety on the last of the morning’s ebb tide. I hoped he would be there nonetheless, for I was soaked through, the rain was leaking down the collar of my coat, and the temptation of
Stormchild’s
spartan comforts was a torment as I paused once more to search the quarry buildings with the binoculars. No one moved there, nothing threatened, and so, throwing caution to the wind, I splashed through puddles made milk-white by limestone dust to push open the nearest door that hung ajar off ancient rusted hinges.

I found myself in an old stable, a reminder that these limestone workings must once have been powered by ponies or mules. No one waited for me. No one shouted a warning. I seemed utterly alone as I walked past the old stalls and under the cacophony of the metal roof being tortured by the rising wind. Water dripped and trickled onto the cobbled floor. Some of the stalls still had their iron feeding baskets, while in a couple there were even frayed head ropes hanging.

Next to the stables, and in equal disrepair, were the bunkrooms where the quarrymen had slept. The windows were broken and the old wooden floor was rotted and covered with bird droppings. A faded calendar was tacked to one wall. I gingerly crossed the room, treading only where nail heads betrayed the existence of joists under the decaying floorboards, and I saw that the yellowing calendar was for the month of
Dezember,
1931. The script was a big, black, ornate German gothic. There was a photograph, faded almost to invisibility, that showed a tram in front of a big stone building, while two uniformed men, presumably the vehicle’s proud crew, stood with chests thrust out by the tram’s steps.