still clutching Tracey.
There was just a moment to recognize the big, reassuring bulk of
Sergio Caporetti beside him and feel an arm like the trunk of a pine tree steady him before the rush of mud down the conveyor room hit them and knocked all three of them down, sending them swirling and rolling end over end before its strength dissipated in the new space beyond the conveyor room door.
Johnny pulled himself up the bulkhead. He had lost Tracey. Dazed but desperate he looked for her, mumbling her name.
He found her swilling aimlessly in the waist-deep mud, floating on her face. He took a handful of muddy hair and lifted her face out, but the mud had hold of his legs, pulling him off balance as it surged back and forth.
“Sergio. Helpp he croaked. “For God’s sake, Sergio.” And Sergio was there, lifting her like a child in his arms and wading to the ladder that led to the deck above. The mud knocked Johnny down again, and when he surfaced Sergio was climbing steadily up the ladder.
Despite the mud and water that blurred Johnny’s eyesight, he could see that Sergio’s wide back, from shoulders to hips, was speckled with dozens of punctures as though he had been stabbed repeatedly with a knitting needle. From each tiny wound oozed droplets of blood that spread like brown ink on the blotting-paper of his sodden jacket.
At the head of the companionway Sergio turned, still holding
Tracey in his arms; he stood like a C colossus looking down at Johnny wallowing and slipping in the mud below.
“Hey, Lance - go switch off your bloody machine. She drown my ship. I sail her myself now - the right way. No bloody fancy machine.” Johnny steadied himself against the bulkhead and called up at him: “Sergio, what happened to Benedict van der Byl, where is he?”
“I think he go with Wild Goose - but first he shoot the hell out of me, not half. Fix your machine, no time for talk.” And he was gone, still carrying Tracey.
Another rush of mud carried Johnny down the flooded passage and threw him against the door to the control room.
Already his body seemed to be one aching bruise, and still the battering continued as he tried to unlock and open the control room door.
At last, using the suck of the mud to help him, he yanked it open and went in with a burst of yellow slime following him and flooding the compartment shoulder deep.
Clinging to the console of the computer he reached up and punched the master control buttons.
“Dredge Stop.”
“Dredge engines Stop.”
“Main engines manual.”
“Navigation system manual.”
“All programmes abort.” Instantly the roar from the severed dredge pipe, which had echoed through the ship during all their strivings, dwindled as though some vast waterfall had dried.
Then there was silence. Though only comparative silence, for the hull still groaned and squeaked at the heart-breaking burden it now carried and the mud slopped and thudded against the plating.
Weak and sick, Johnny clung to the console. He was shivering with cold, and every muscle in his body felt bruised and strained.
Suddenly the ship changed her motion, heaving under his feet like a harpooned whale as she swung broadside to the storm. Johnny roused himself with alarm.
The journey back through the flooded passages to the companionway was an agony of mind and body - for Kingfisher was now behaving in a strange and unnatural way.
The scene that awaited Johnny as he dragged himself on to the bridge chilled his soul as the icy mud had chilled his body.
Thunderbolt and Suicide lay less than a furlong off Kingfisher’s starboard quarters Both islands were wreathed in sheets of spray that fumed from the surf that was breaking like cannon-fire on the cliffs.
The maniacal flute of the wind joined with the drum of the surf to produce a symphony fit for the halls of Hell, but above this devil’s music Sergio Caporetti bellowed, “We got no power on port main engine.”
Johnny turned to him. Sergio was hunched over the wheel, and Tracey lay on the deck at his feet like a discarded doll.
“The water, she kill port main.” Sergio was pumping the engine telegraph. Then abandoning the effort, he looked over the side.
The reeking white cliffs were closer now, much closer as though you could reach out a hand to them. The ship was drifting down rapidly on the wind.
Sergio spun the wheel to full port lock, trying to bring
Kingfisher’s head round to meet the sea and the wind. She was rolling as no ship was ever meant to roll, hanging over at the limit of each swing, so that the wheelhouse windows seemed but a few feet from the crests of the green waves.
She hung like that as though she meant never to come upright again. Then sluggishly, reluctantly, she swung back, speeding up as she reached the perpendicular and the great mass of mud and water in her hull shifted and slammed her over on her other side, pinning her like that for eternal seconds before she could struggle upright again for the cycle to be repeated.
Sergio held the wheel at full lock, but still Kinesher wallowed down towards the cliffs of Thunderbolt and Suicide. The wind had her the way a dog carries a bone in its teeth. Under half power and with her decks awash Kingfisher could not break that grip.
Johnny was a helpless spectator, held awe-bound so he could not break away even to succour Tracey who was still lying on the deck. He saw everything with a supernatural clarity - from the dribbling little shot holes in Sergio’s back, to the ponderous irresistible rush of the white water up the cliffs that loomed so close alongside.
“She no answer helm. She too sick.” Sergio spoke now in conversational tones which carried with surprising clarity through the uproar of the elements. “All right then. We go the other way. We take the gap.” For a moment Johnny did not understand, then he saw it.
Kingfisher’s bows were coming up to the narrow opening between the two islands.
A passage less than a hundred yards wide at its narrowest point, where the vicious cross-currents met head-on and leapt fifty feet into the air as they collided. Here the surface was obscured by a thick froth of spindrift that heaved and humped up as though the ocean were fighting for breath under the thick cream-coloured blanket.
“No.” Johnny shook his head, staring at that hideous passage. “We won’t make it, Sergio. We won’t do it.” But already Sergio was spinning the wheel from lock to lock, and unbelievably Kingfisher was responding. Helped now by the wind she came around slowly, seeming to brush her bows across the white cliff of Thunderbolt, and she steadied her swing and aimed at the gap. It was then Johnny saw it for the first time.
“Christ, there’s a boat dead ahead!” The steep swells had hidden it up to that moment, but now she bobbed up on a crest. It was a tiny trawler, flying a dirty scrap of canvas as a staysail at her stubby mast, and struggling piteously in the granite jaws of Thunderbolt and
Suicide.
“Wild Goose!” roared Sergio, and he reached for the handle of the foghorn that hung above his head.
“Now we have some fun.” And he yanked the handle.
The croaking bellow of the foghorn echoed off the cliffs that were closing on either side of them.
“Kill my boys - hey? Shoot me - hey? Trick me - hey?
Now I trick you - but good!” Sergio punctuated his triumphant yells with blasts on the foghorn.
“Christ, no! You can’t do it!” Johnny caught urgently at the big
Italian’s shoulder, but Sergio struck his hand away and steered directly for the trawler as it lay full in the narrow passage.
“I give him plenty warning.” Sergio sent another blast echoing off the cliffs. “He no give me warning when he shoot me - the bastard.”
There was a group of men on the trawler’s foredeck.
