He sensed the urgency of the situation. “Then she’d have to walk down the valley from the farm.” Angelo had lodgings with a peasant family up near the spring, it was a threemile walk.
“God, let us be in time,” I whispered. The truck was bellowing down the avenue, and I hit the gears in a racing change as we went out through the gates in a screaming broadside, and I slammed down hard again on the accelerator, pulling her out of the skid by main strength.
“What the hell is it, Harry?” he demanded once again. “We’ve got to stop her going aboard Dancer,” I told him grimly as we roared down the circular drive above the town. Past the fort a vista of Grand Harbour opened beneath us. He did not waste time with inane questions. We had worked together too long for that and if I said so then he accepted it as so.
Dancer was still at her moorings amongst the other island craft, and halfway out to her from the wharf Judith was rowing the dinghy. Even at this distance I could make out the tiny feminine figure on the thwart, and recognize the short businesslike oar-strokes. She was an island girl, and rowed like a man.
“We aren’t going to make it,” said Angelo. “She’ll get there before we reach Admiralty.”
At the top of Frobisher Street I put the heel of my left hand on the horn ring, and blowing a continuous blast I tried to clear the road. But it was a Saturday morning, market day, and already the streets were filling. The country folk had come to town in their bullocks, carts and ancient jalopies. Cursing with a terrible frustration, I hooted and forced my way through them.
It took us three minutes to cover the half mile from the top of the street down to Admiralty Wharf
“Oh God,” I said, leaning forward in the seat as I shot through the mesh gates, and crossed the railway tracks.
The dinghy was tied up alongside Wave Dancer, and Judith was climbing over the side. She wore an emerald green shirt and short denim pants. Her hair was in a long braid down her back.
I skidded the truck to a halt beside the pineapple sheds, and both Angelo and I hit the wharf at a run.
“Judith!” I yelled, but my voice did not carry out across the harbour.
Without looking back, Judith disappeared into the saloon. Angelo and I raced down to the end of the jetty. Both of us were screaming wildly, but the wind was in our faces and Dancer was five hundred yards out across the water.
“There’s a dinghy!” Angelo caught my arm. It was an ancient clinker-built mackerel boat, but it was chained to a ring in the stone wharf.
We jumped into it, leaping the eight foot drop and falling in a heap together over the thwart. I scrambled to the mooring chain. It had quarter-inch galvanized steel links, and a heavy brass padlock secured it to the ring.
I took two twists of chain around my wrist, braced one foot against the wharf and heaved. The padlock exploded, and I fell backwards into the bottom of the dinghy.
Angelo already had the oars in the rowtocks. “Row,” I shouted at’him. “Row like a mad bastard.”
I was in the bows cupping my hands to my mouth as I hailed Judith, trying to make my voice carry above the wind.
Angelo was rowing in a dedicated frenzy, swinging the oar blades flat and low on the back reach and then throwing his weight upon them when they bit. His breathing exploded in a harsh grunt at each stroke.
Halfway out to Dancer another rain squall enveloped us, shrouding the whole of Grand Harbour in eddying sheets of grey water. It stung my face, so I had to screw up my eyes.
Dancer’s outline was blurred by grey rain, but we were coming close now. I was beginning to hope that Judith would sweep and tidy the cabins before she struck a match to the gas ring in the galley. I was also beginning to hope that I was wrong - that Sherry North had not left a farewell present for me.
Yet still I could hear my own voice speaking to Sherry North the previous day. “You have to open the main gas cylinders first - and don’t forget to close them when you finish, or youtil turn the boat into a bomb.” Closer still we came to Dancer and she seemed to hang on tendrils of rain, ghostly white and insubstantial in the swirling mist.
“Judith,” I shouted, she must hear me now - we were that close.
There were two fifty-pound cylinders of Butane gas on board, enough to destroy a large brick-built house. The gas was heavier than air, once it escaped it would slump down, filling Dancer’s hull with a murderously explosive mixture of gas and air. It needed just one spark from battery or match.
I prayed that I was wrong and yelled again. Then suddenly Dancer blew.
It was dash explosion, a fearsome blue light that shot through her. It split her hull with a mighty hammer stroke, and blew her superstructure open, lifting it like a lid.
Dancer reared to the mortal blow, and the blast hit us like a storm wind. Immediately I smelled the electric stench of the blast, acrid as an air-sizzling strike of lightning against iron-stone.
Dancer died as I watched, a terrible violent death, and then her torn and lifeless hull fell back and the cold grey waters rushed into her. The heavy engines pulled her swiftly down, and she was gone into the grey waters of Grand Harbour.
Angelo and I were frozen with horror, crouching in the violently rocking dinghy, staring at the agitated water that was strewn with loose wreckage - all that remained of a beautiful boat and a lovely young girl. I felt a vast desolation descend upon me, I wanted to cry aloud in my anguish, but I was paralysed.
Angelo moved first. He leapt upright with a sound in his throat like a wounded beast. He tried to throw himself over the side, but I caught and held him.
“Leave me,“he screamed. “I must go to her.”
“No.” I fought with him in the crazily rocking dinghy. “It’s no good, Angelo.”
Even if he could get down through the forty feet of water in which Dancer’s torn hull now lay, what he would find might drive him mad. Judith had stood at the centre of that blast, and she would have been subjected to all the terrible trauma of massive flash explosion at close range.
“Leave me, damn you.” Angelo got one arm free and hit me in the face, but I saw it coming and rolled my head. It grazed the skin from my cheek, and I knew I had to get him quieted down.
The dinghy was on the point of capsizing. Though he was forty pounds lighter than me, Angelo fought with maniac strength. He was calling her name now..
“Judith, Judith,” an an hysterical rising inflection. I released my grip on his shoulder with my right hand, and swung him slightly away from me, lining him up carefully. I hit him with a right chop, my fist moving not more than four inches. I hit him cleanly on the point below his left ear, and he dropped instantly, gone cold. I lowered him to the floorboards and laid him outcomfortably. I rowed back to the wharf without looking back. I felt completely numbed and drained.
I carried Angelo down the wharf and I hardly felt his weight in my arms. I drove him up to the hospital and Macnab was on duty.
“Give him something to keep him muzzy and in bed for the next twenty-four hours,” I told Macnab, and he began to argue.
“Listen, you broken-down old whisky vat,” I told him quietly, “I’d love an excuse to beat your head in.”
He paled until the broken veins in his nose and cheeks stood out boldly.
“Now listen - Harry old man,” he began. I took a step towards him, and he sent the duty sister to the drug cupboard.
I found Chubby at breakfast and it took only a minute to explain what had happened. We went up to the fort in the pick-up, and Wally Andrews responded quickly. He waived the filing of statements and other police procedure and instead we piled the police diving equipment into the truck and by the time we reached the harbour, half of St. Mary’s had formed a silent worried crowd along the wharf. Some had seen it and all of them had heard the explosion.
An occasional voice called condolences to me as we carried the diving equipment to the mackerel boat. “Somebody find Fred Coker,” I told them. “Tell him to get down here with a bag and basket,” and there was a buzz of comment.
“Hey, Mister Harry, was there somebody aboard?”
“Just get Fred Coker,” I told them, and we rowed out to Dancer’s moorings.
While Wally kept the dinghy on station above us, Chubby and I went down through the murky harbour water. Dancer lay on her back in forty-five feet, she must have rolled as she sank - but there was no need to worry about access to her interior, for her hull had been torn open along the keel. She was far past any hope of refloating.
