Sea Lord

Then the radio startled me. It hissed suddenly, then a woman’s stilted voice sounded loud. “Fourteen,” the voice said.

I didn’t respond. I was tuned to Channel 16, the emergency and contact channel, so I could expect to hear a lot of stray traffic. The single word I’d heard seemed to have been broken from a longer transmission and I wondered if the radio was working properly. Then, perhaps a minute later, the voice sounded again. “Fourteen.”

Still I didn’t react. Another minute or so passed, then the single word was patiently transmitted again. “Fourteen.” The intonation was bland, not at all insistent, almost robotic.

It occurred to me that I’d heard no other traffic, and clearly the word meant something, so I picked up the radio and pressed the transmit button. “Station calling Marianne, station calling Marianne, identify yourself and say again. Over.” I suspected Harry would already have arranged for direction-finding gear to track down the source of any mysterious transmissions, and I wanted to make the caller speak longer to give that gear a chance. At least, I thought, the woman had used Channel 16, the emergency and calling channel, and the obvious wavelength for Harry to monitor, so all I had to do now was persuade the woman to speak for the two or three seconds it would need for the DF to spot her. “Station calling Marianne,” I transmitted again, “identify yourself and say again your message, over.”

The radio was silent, and I began to suspect that my enemies were not so foolish as I’d thought. I tested that assumption by pressing the transmitter button again. “St Peter Port Radio, St Peter Port Radio, this is yacht Marianne, yacht Marianne. Radio check please. Over.”

There was no answer. I switched to Channel 62, St Peter Port Radio’s working channel, and asked for a radio check again.

Nothing. Which meant the radio wasn’t transmitting. It could receive, but it wouldn’t transmit. The clever bastards, I thought, the clever, clever bastards, and I began to turn the dial back to Channel 16 when the radio, ignoring the fact that I was flicking the tuner across the channels, sounded once more. “Fourteen,” said the toneless voice.

So not only had the enemy made sure that I couldn’t transmit, but they had by-passed the tuner so that the radio was permanently fixed on an unidentifiable channel. It could have been any one of the fifty-five public channels, or one of a dozen private channels, or they might even have installed an American channel into the radio. Doubtless Harry was combing the VHF bands to find any transmissions that sounded suspect, but I was beginning to have a great respect for the people who had designed this voyage and I did not see Harry succeeding quickly.

“Fourteen,” the woman’s voice said a moment later.

So what the hell did that mean? It clearly wasn’t a course. A buoy perhaps? I looked around to see if there were any numbered buoys in sight, and then the solution struck me. Marianne had been stripped to functional bareness, yet someone had thought fit to install a very expensive Decca set. That wasn’t there for decoration. Whoever was transmitting to me was providing me with a waypoint. These people were not just clever; they were very clever. They had doubtless programmed the Decca with ninety-nine waypoints scattered randomly throughout the Channel Islands and they could use the waypoints to send me skittering about the sea while they made sure I was not being followed. Finally, when they were certain that I was alone, they would use the Decca to point me towards the rendezvous. Instead of public telephones, they were using invisible points in a vast sea.

I crouched in the low cabin. The instruction book for the Decca was jammed behind the power-lead, but it was the same brand of set as the one I’d possessed for such a brief time on Sunflower, and that made me remember Jennifer’s childish delight in the machine. I said a brief prayer that I would one day share that childish delight with her again, then punched the buttons for waypoint fourteen. The machine blinked, then ordered a course of 089 to reach a point 12.4 nautical miles away.

I went back to the cockpit. If I went more than a half-mile on a heading of 089 I’d pile Marianne on to the rocks of Herm, but I turned nevertheless. I let out the main sheet and Marianne picked up her dowdy skirts and fairly flew in front of the wind. I watched the shore approach.

“Twenty-five,” the girl’s voice said a few minutes before I would have struck rock.

I rammed the tiller hard over to bring Marianne swivelling round into the wind. I left her hove-to while I went down to the cabin and asked the Decca where to go. Waypoint twenty-five was ten miles due north. I wondered whether to compensate for magnetic north. The Decca could have been giving me a true course, pointing me at the North Pole, or perhaps it had the magnetic correction programmed in so that its instructions would match my compass. I decided my enemies had thought of everything else, so why should I guess the compass correction for them. I’d trust their machinery and see where it took me.

I eased Marianne’s head round, and settled back on a reach. The tide was with me, sweeping us north towards the open sea. I looked up and saw my attendant plane circling high above. And where, I wondered, was the girl who was transmitting the waypoint numbers? She had to be within my view, for a VHF will only work within line of sight, but it was hopeless to look, for she could have been on any of the score of boats within view, or on Guernsey, or on the smaller islands of Herm and Sark that lie to the east of the Little Russel.

I sailed on. The radio had gone silent, and I guessed that I had passed the first test by following the first instructions. I cleared the Platte Fougere light at the northern end of the Little Russel and felt the western swell lifting Marianne’s frail hull. The wind was light but steady, the air was warm.

“Thirty-six,” the voice said from the radio, and there was something oddly familiar and annoyingly complacent about that voice. I was feeling rebellious, so I didn’t obey, and a moment later the number was repeated, and this time I noticed that the intonation of the repeated message was exactly the same as when the number had first been transmitted. I also recognised the voice; it belonged to a girl who read out the marine forecasts on Radio Four. My opponents had taped her, chopped the numbers from her forecasts, and were now playing me those numbers over the air.

Damn their cleverness.

Waypoint thirty-six took me on a course fine into the southwesterly wind. Marianne was too light to head up into wind so I started the engine and let the sails hang while the propeller plugged me into the sea’s small chop. The new course would take me plumb through a score of boats which fished for bass off the island’s northern reefs. Any one of those boats could contain my enemies, yet I was helpless to determine which, if any, it might be. I deliberately steered close to some of the boats, yet all looked innocent. A woman waved to me from one boat, while a man on another called out that it was a fine day.

“Twenty-five,” the voice said.

I’d been given that waypoint before and knew it lay due north. I let Marianne’s head fall off the wind, hardened her into a reach, then stopped the engine. The waypoint number wasn’t repeated which meant they must have been watching me, for they only repeated the transmissions when I failed to obey. And that annoyed me. They were training me, programming me. I had become a rat in a maze of invisible electronic commands that spanned the sea, and their game was to spin me round the maze till I was tired, hungry and ready to be slaughtered.

“Six,” said the voice, which took me northwest.

“Eighteen.” Which took me a few points north of east.

“Thirteen.” An unlucky number, but which merely took me west.

“Eighty-four.” A brief curtsey to the southeast, then they gave me twenty-five again to send me reaching northwards once more.

They played with me for two hours. At first I could divine no pattern in the commands. I sailed towards every point of the compass, but was never given enough time to reach the invisible waypoint which lay at the end of the required course. Always, and usually within a mile of the last command, I would be made to change my heading. Gradually, though, I was being pushed northwards, zigzagging away from the fading coast. I was being sent into the empty sea, far from any help. My mouth was dry, but at least the humid air was warm on my naked skin.

“Forty-four.” The voice broke into my thoughts.

Well practised now, I pressed the Decca buttons. Waypoint forty-four lay fifty miles off on a bearing of 100,