'Well, you didn't tie it tight enough, did you? Got to bloody find it, haven't you? Didn't allow for the bloody gale, did you?'
He sank down into the softness of the sand and felt with his hands and the grains ran through his fingers, but the flashlamp was not at the base of his tripod's stakes.
'Got to be there, hasn't it? Got to be. Can't have bloody walked off, can it?'
The idiot was beside him, on his knees, and his hands were sweeping at the sand, and the idiot squealed.
'Cut my bloody self on glass. It wasn't the wind -
Christ, it wasn't – that shifted it.'
His fingers found the flashlamp, buried, and they ran over shards from its face, and touched the broken end of the bulb where it went into the socket.
The panic became more shrill. 'No light! How the fuck are they going to find us? Out in this shit-heap, how they going to get to us? What'll guide them? You fucked up, putting the light up and leaving it, fucked up big-time. No light, how they going to bring the boat in?'
He had only the pencil torch and a beam with a range of only a few metres.
'It's all round us. Don't know where. The old jerk you shot. The guy who came over the fence, and I lied about him. All round us, and we don't know how close… Can't bloody see them… Watching us
…
How we going to get off of here? You know it and I know it, they're watching us and round us… maybe close enough to bloody touch us. What we going to do?'
He pulled the radio set over the sand, slipped the clasp on the case, opened it, threw the switch, reached out and dragged the idiot close. He felt the shaking fear – and he listened. He heard only the set's static whine and the wind's buffeting.
'You are taking a hell of a chance, Dad. A chance with me in the dinghy, with my boy, with the boat, with yourself. You know that, Dad. And now you're saying they've no light. Going in with that dinghy, it's going to be six shades of hell. I reckon it's one run, that's all. I can't be stooging there, not in that surf.
They'll have to be out in the water, deep enough so I don't snag the outboard, and have to be ready. How am I going to find them if there's no light? Is the money that good? Have you thought, Dad, of just turning round and getting on home?'
What Harry Rogers knew, as he listened to the carp of his son, was that he required two fathoms minimum of draught under the keel of the Anneliese Royal, and twelve feet of water would put him a minimum of four hundred yards from the beach. The dinghy would need three feet of water and it would not come closer than a hundred yards from the beach
… The trawler and the dinghy would both be bucking in swell. The low clouds and the rain's mist would screw his view of the TG15 buoy and the Accumer Ee light and he needed both to get in near. He reckoned he was three hours from getting far enough to the island to launch the dinghy, and the chart in the wheelhouse showed him sunken wrecks, sunken obstructions, and supposedly cleared areas of dumped explosives. There were gas pipes and telephone lines under them, and if they snagged one of those bastards by going off course, they were screwed.
They were on the northern edge of a section marked as Submarine Exercise Area, not that – in these sea conditions – a periscope would be slotting up. The boat yawed, fell into troughs and climbed waves, and his grandson was again retching at the bucket.
Harry said, 'I thought about it, yes, ditching them – but that's not my way. I'll use my light, keep it on you while you're taking the dinghy in, and they'll have to shift themselves and come to you… That's what I told them. Can't do better… You want to hear me say it? I'll say it – I would not dare to ditch Ricky Capel, and that's more important than the fact that I gave my word.'
He was close enough to hear them.
Malachy thought it the perfect battleground.
He had been drawn to the right place, alone, to stand and fight, unseen by any witness. He felt a great calm, and peace, and he thought a road ended here and that he was within sight of a pyramid's summit.
He rested his fingers on the dog-tags at his throat.
Chapter Twenty
He saw the light. Riddled with cramp in his stomach, pain in his hips and knees, sand in his throat that he had to endure and not cough out, Malachy saw the light's blast out to sea. Not a brilliant light but one that was misted and confused by cloud and rain, but a clear enough beacon to those watching for it.
It was not aimed at the shore but was directed upwards and bounced back from the cloudbanks and rolled, cavorted, rocked as if its platform were unstable. He thought the trawler on which it was mounted was shaken by the violence of the swell. He realized, from the light on the cloud ceiling, that the boat edged towards the shore where the surf ran.
Near to him, separated from him by the blunt sand summit of a dune, he heard a little yell of excitement
– the voice of Ricky Capel. He had felt, lying twenty paces from him, the fear of the man. The fear had been on Capel's tongue, in the whine of his voice, and it had grown because he had sensed that he was watched. As the hours had passed, Malachy had felt the man's fear tighten. He had known his own fear when he had walked, without a weapon and without a helmet or flak-jacket, down a narrow street in a village with the sun low and scorching his eyes. It had been the fear of the man that had sustained him as he had lain in the sand, among the dune's grasses. He heard, now, a sharp hiss for quiet and the excitement was stifled.
The other man had shown Malachy no sign of fear.
He heard low grunts, from them both, and sensed they stood.
Far away to his left, if he raised his head, Malachy could see the scattered lights of the village, and in the near sea – if he strained and peered between the bent grasses – there were two marker buoys. In the hours he had been in place, he had learned to recognize the sequences of their flashes, one red and one green. But the light further towards the horizon, beyond the surf bursts, had greater strength. There were the lights of the village, the lights of the buoys, the light from the trawler, but the rest of the scope of Malachy's vision showed him nothing more than black darkness. He had thought the world had emptied, that only he and two men existed, and one was beyond the area of his interest.
As he watched the lights, Malachy did not recognize Polly Wilkins's big picture. Neither did he listen, any longer, to the contempt of a host of soldiers and a psychiatrist, and his wife, and a man who ran a business for buying and selling houses… He involved no one, was owned by no one. He flexed his muscles and readied himself. When they moved, he would follow.
He heard, above the wind, the whine, 'Don't we get moving? I knew he'd come. He's a good boy, my Harry is. Shouldn't we shift down there?'
He heard, over the rain's beat, the response: 'Not yet, too early.'
'They won't hang about for us, you know.'
'It is too soon.'
Malachy realized the authority of the second man. He was Polly Wilkins's target. The second man governed the big picture. Malachy heard the authority, spoken softly. Men, he knew it, who had authority rarely found it necessary to raise a voice, never shouted, did not whine. He thought the man, joined at the hip to Ricky Capel, was burdened.
He watched the light, its beam on the clouds, approach the beach.
He was silent, did not dare to speak. Ricky stood in the force of the wind and saw the light come closer…
Then he shuddered, shook. He was Ricky Capel. He ran a part of south-east London. He was the big man and guys backed off from him. He was above grief, too big a man to be given disrespect. He did not snivel, did not cower.
'Yes, I hear you, Dean, and I'm saying it as well – it's not yet, it's too early to move, too soon.'
