Stormchild (47 page)

“Hold on!” I shouted to Jackie, and, with fingers numbed by the cold, I unlashed
Stormchild’s
wheel.

Christ, but the catamaran was close. Jackie held my arm and I could feel her shaking and shivering. And no wonder, for the catamaran was scarcely forty yards away now. Nicole, braced at its wheel, was aiming to slide her starboard hull just inches from our starboard gunwale, and, at that range, despite the jarring of the sea’s pounding, Genesis’s last gunmen could not miss. Nicole doubtless expected me to turn away and run downwind, and when I did, she would follow. I could see her winch-handler poised to loosen the jib sheets and I knew that the moment I turned to run, the catamaran would pounce on us like a striking snake.

And then we would die, and Nicole would take her chance for freedom in some far, warm sea.

But there was another way.

And I chose it.

I dropped the wheel’s lashing, and, when
Genesis Four
was just twenty yards away, I spun the spokes to drive
Stormchild’s
tons of steel straight at the speeding catamaran.

I saw Nicole’s eyes widen in alarm. She shouted in anger and snatched at the wheel to turn away, but she was too late. The two gunmen clutched for support at a handrail on the cabin roof and one of their two guns skidded into the scuppers and bounced overboard, then I was shouting at Jackie to hold on for her dear, sweet life.

Someone screamed. I think it was my daughter, because she knew I had beaten her.

Stormchild
slammed into the turning catamaran. We smashed her starboard hull, breaking it into splinters of fiberglass. A wire stay whipped skyward. The catamaran’s mainsail was suddenly demented, filling a noisy sky with its maniacal thrashing, then, inevitably, the
Genesis Four’s
mast began to topple. I saw Dominic whirl round, face bloody, as the catamaran’s severed backstay whipped its frayed metal strands across his eyes. The mast was cracking and falling, and still
Stormchild
was driving into the catamaran’s belly like a great killing axe. I heard the tortured screech of steel on steel as our sharp bows slammed into the main beam that spanned the catamaran’s twin hulls. I staggered with the impact, while Jackie, her fingers hooked like claws, clung to my arm.
Stormchild’s
forestay snapped, slashing our jib into the ship-killing wind. A sea thundered across our joined decks, sweeping gear off
Genesis Four’s
scuppers and filling
Stormchild’s
cockpit with a crashing, icy whirlpool. Our bows churned sickeningly in the wreckage of the catamaran. I was sobbing for my daughter, for what I had done.

The great sea turned us broadside, thrusting our stern eastward. Our bows were trapped by the catamaran’s broken hulls. I threw off
Stormchild’s
jib sheet as the two boats screeched on each other, but our boat was afloat and the
Genesis Four
was breaking apart. Already the catamaran’s cockpit was awash and her starboard hull under water. A blue and yellow curtain floated free of the shattered saloon.
Stormchild’s
mast was swaying horribly, but her backstays and shrouds were holding it upright and the damage would have to wait.

“Lifebuoys!” I shouted at Jackie. I could see two yellow-jacketed bodies clinging to the catamaran’s wreckage and I could see a third person in the foam-scummed water beyond. I could not see Nicole. The catamaran’s mast had collapsed to trail the reefed mainsail and a tangle of lines in the foaming sea.

“Nicole!” I shouted, then hurled a life buoy into the wreckage. I slashed with my knife at the bindings of
Stormchild’s
life raft, and Jackie helped me push the big canister overboard. Another thunderous sea crashed cold across the two boats and when it had passed I saw that the two men who had been clinging to the wreckage were gone. I pulled the life raft’s lanyard and watched as the bright orange raft began to inflate.

Another toppling sea hammered like an avalanche at our beam.
Stormchild’s
tortured bows were still buried in the
Genesis Four,
but the lurch and twist of the awful sea loosened and prized us free, then the gale snatched at our jib which still writhed at the end of its halyard, and which now turned us fast downwind. I sliced through the line which tethered the life raft to
Stormchild,
thus leaving the bright orange raft for my daughter. “Engine!” I shouted at Jackie, then I hurled the last buoy overboard and slapped my lifeline onto a jackstay to work my way forward.

Jackie turned on the ignition and, above the throb of our automatic bilge pumps that were dealing with the water let in by the bullet holes, I heard the harsh banging as the starter motor turned over. A wave broke on our counter, swamping the cockpit and crashing white down the companionway. The engine would not start and the wind and sea were carrying us so fast that already the wreck of the
Genesis Four
was hidden by a spume-fretted wave crest.

Jackie advanced the throttle, turned the key again, and this time the motor caught and throbbed. She let in the clutch, then staggered to the wheel to turn
Stormchild
back toward the wreckage, but a great sea, heaped and wind-whipped, slammed us back and almost threw us on our beam ends. Jackie sensibly let the boat run, while I, terrified that our mast would be lost, sawed with my rigging knife at the jib halyard. The cut halyard snaked up through the masthead block to release the jib that sailed away like a demonically winged monster. The forestay was streaming ahead of us, carried almost horizontal by the force of the rising gale, which now leeched the ocean white and bent
Stormchild’s
tall mast like a longbow.

I unhanded the mainsail’s halyard, took some bends off the cleat, carried the halyard forward and shackled it to the foreplate. Then I went back to the mast and winched the halyard tight so that I had jury-rigged a new forestay. In harbor that simple process might have taken three minutes, but in that insane sea it took closer to half an hour. Just to shackle the halyard to the foreplate took immense concentration as the sea tried to snatch me off the foredeck and over the collision-bent bars of the pulpit. The wind screamed and plucked at me, but at last the halyard was secure and the mast safely stayed and I could crawl back to the cockpit to discover that the wind and sea had taken us yet further from the wreckage of
Genesis Four
which was now totally lost in the white hell of sleet and waves behind us. I throttled the engine to full brutal power, and, cursing the bitch of a sea that fought us, I thrust
Stormchild
straight into the throat of Cape Horn’s malevolence.

It took us an hour to find the wreckage of
Genesis Four,
and even then we discovered nothing but scraps: an oar that still had the name
Naiad
burnt into its blade, a plastic bottle, a sail bag, a broken pencil. We found
Stormchild’s
life raft, but there was no one inside. We circled the pathetic wreckage, enduring the shrieking wind and the flogging seas and the demonic rain, but though we found lumps of foam torn from the catamaran’s hulls, and though we found our life buoy, we could not find Nicole. Or any of Nicole’s crew. My daughter was gone. She was drowned. She was gone to the cleansing sea and it had been I who had killed her.

And it was I who now wept for her. As a small child Nicole had been graceful. She had grown up willful, but Joanna and I had been proud of her, we had loved her, and we had thought that our old age would be blessed by her, but then her brother had been killed by terrorists, and Nicole, as if to even the score, had become a terrorist herself. Her cause was different from the cause of those men who had murdered her brother, but her evil was the same, and now she was dead.

At last I turned
Stormchild
away from Nicole’s killing place. A new black squall of sleet and rain clawed across the broken water to overtake and drive us eastward. I set the storm jib on the staysail halyard, and then we ran the shattering seas of the Horn in a full gale that blew us through the night so that it was full darkness when we struck the first Atlantic waves and turned our scarred and battered bows north toward the Falklands. Jackie shared the night watch, huddled beside me in the cockpit, not talking, but just watching the skirl and rush of the seething waters.

And in the dawn, as the tired wind calmed, we saw that the sea was weeping.

Much later, months later, when
Stormchild
was tied fore and aft in a warm lagoon, Jackie asked me what we had achieved in that storm off Cape Horn. She asked the question on a night when our mooring lines led to bending palm trees that were silhouetted against the stars of a lambent tropical sky. We were alone and Patagonia seemed a long way off, indeed, so far away that we rarely talked of it, but that night, under the indolent stars, Jackie’s thoughts strayed back to Nicole and to Genesis, and, in an idle voice, she asked me just what we had achieved. “We were good environmentalists,” I assured her. “We cleaned up some pollution.”

For the Genesis community was indeed gone, though it was hardly forgotten, for its misdeeds and its subsequent destruction had made headlines round the world.

Jackie’s account of the settlement’s harrowing was never published. She had written and rewritten the story, and, in despair of ever capturing the truth, she had torn up version after version until she had finally abandoned her efforts and allowed herself to read the story of the Genesis community in the words of other men and women. Those other journalists had desperately sought Jackie and me, but we had escaped their questions and thus the fate of Nicole and of her crew remained a mystery to the press, though the consensus was that they had simply drowned when
Genesis Four
foundered off the Horn. A few of the more vivid tabloids insisted that Nicole still sailed the murderous seaways, and any mysterious happening anywhere in the oceans renewed the speculation that
Genesis Four
still floated, but the responsible press had long abandoned its search for my daughter. Even the Chilean government, which for a time had made threatening noises about my disappearance, now seemed content to put the whole episode behind them.

Molly Tetterman had taken most of the Genesis community’s survivors back to their families in North America, where Molly became something of a celebrity as the battling mother who had rescued her child from the grasp of evil. She wrote to us of her frequent appearances on television talkshows and even said that a network wanted to make a miniseries about her adventures. We wrote back wishing her luck, but heard nothing more of the project.

David wrote to us with news of the boatyard, of the church, and of his hopes that his brief brush with fame might help his chances of a comfortable bishopric. Betty wanted to know when Jackie and I would be married. Soon, I wrote back to them, soon. There seemed to be no hurry. Jackie and I drifted through warm seas, lazy and happy.

Now Jackie leaned against me in
Stormchild’s
cockpit. Beyond our private coral reef the warm waves broke, their sound a quiet murmur of pleasure in the darkness. I sipped whiskey. Jackie had refused a similar nightcap, indeed she had even shaken her head to my offer of wine with the dinner I had cooked at twilight, upon which refusal I had accused her of returning to her teetotaling ways. She denied it, so I had inquired whether this was some new and ghastly self-inflicted dietary prohibition, but she had just smiled tolerantly at my question. Now, in the placid Caribbean night, she reached up to touch my cheek. “Tim?” she asked very solemnly.

“Jackie?” I answered just as solemnly.

“Do you know why I didn’t drink today?”

“Because you’re an American,” I declaimed, “and therefore believe death to be optional. Or else it’s because you’ve just read one of those earnest health articles in a vegetarian magazine, which claims that drinking nine-year-old Cotes du Rhone gives you terminal zits and unsightly hemorrhoids. Or perhaps you’re going to become unbelievably boring and tell me that alcohol is a drug and that each of us has a societal responsibility to—”

“Shut up,” Jackie said very firmly, “shut up.”

I shut up.

She took my hand and kissed it. “You’re going to be a father again,” she said softly, and I leaned my head on
Stormchild’s
rails and let my tears dissolve the stars.

About the Author

BERNARD CORNWELL
is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Richard Sharpe series; the Grail Quest series; the Grail Quest series; the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles; the Warlord Trilogy; and many other novels, including
Redcoat, Stonehenge2000 B.C.,
and
Gallows Thief.
He lives with his wife on Cape Cod.
www.bernardcornwell.net

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