Sea Lord

without a reflector in Marianne’s rigging, my sails and wooden mast offered them lousy echoes that would be further confused by the water-soaked air. The wavetops were probably reflecting as much as Marianne.

It was dark, cold and dank in the fog. If it had not been for the compass I would have been lost in minutes, but I crept onwards. I was steering northeast, but the tide’s effect was to drive me almost due east. I imagined the patrol boat would be idling along on scarce-turning engines, making a box-search in the whiteness. My hope was that I’d decoyed them into going too far south, then I dared to hope that I might have escaped them altogether by crossing the invisible line which separated British waters from French. That was a happy thought which I celebrated by rubbing my hand along the underside of the boom, then licking the condensation off my palm. I was parched, and the fresh water tasted good.

The patrol boat’s engines suddenly roared, faded, roared again. I swivelled in alarm, but saw nothing. A moment later I thought I saw the patrol boat’s lean dark shape in the fog, but the dark shape was just a phantom of the fog which roiled and faded. A ship’s bell clanged, apparently from the port side. I heard a distant voice shouting and I wondered whether the game was over. Had they found Garrard and Peel? Was that it? Had Harry been cleverer than my opponents and already made his arrests? Was Elizabeth sitting in a police interview room, protesting her nobility? That thought almost tempted me to shout a reply, but there was only one way to be sure of this game’s ending, and that was to see it through, and so I kept silent and let my little boat sail on.

After a half hour or so I hauled in the sheets to power the sails, and Marianne began to slam her hollow bows. This was a fog such as Charlie had described that morning; a fog that did not blanket a wind, but was carried by it. The fogs on this coast could come with gale force; ship-killing winds cloaked in invisibility, and this light southwesterly air would never clear such a fog, but merely stir it. I judged from our wake that we were making close to three knots and knew Marianne would go no faster without her engine.

I heard nothing more of the patrol boat. Maybe an hour passed, maybe more. The only hint of time was the slow darkening of the fog as it went from pearl grey to dirty smoke. My evasive action had taken me too far to port and the Decca was telling me to steer a good fifteen points further south. I obeyed it. I still didn’t use the engine in case the patrol boat had not given up the chase. Another hour passed and the dirty grey turned into wet gloom. I didn’t see the patrol boat again, nor hear him. I was alone. There was neither radar nor human eye, neither boat nor aircraft to watch me, there was only the dumb instructions of the Decca beckoning me on into the darkening fog.

It was a lonely place. Lonely and cold and frightening. The sea had lost all colour to become a dull grey and black broken by a few feeble whitecaps. Sometimes I would sail into a less dense patch of fog, but always the wraith-like clouds wrapped around us again, and sometimes so thickly that I completely lost sight of Marianne’s stemhead. Once night came it was as if we sailed in a thick, black and silent limbo. There was no light in the compass, no moon could penetrate this fog, and the stars were hidden. It was dark, but not quite silent; waves slapped against my thin hull, the frayed ropes rasped in their blocks and the mast creaked, but there was none of the sea’s great noise because the fog absorbed it all. It also dampened my matches, but I managed to light a pipeful of tobacco with the last useful match.

I was cold, and beginning to think I was wasting my time. Perhaps Harry had won, and all I now did was sail blindly towards the treacherous coast north of Carteret. Surely by now, I reasoned, my enemies would have revealed themselves, but nothing untoward disturbed the thick, blank night. The pipe went out. I tried to light another match, but they were useless. For supper I scraped moisture off the boom, trickled it into my cupped palm, and lapped like a dog. I slapped my arms about my chest to keep warm, but still shivered.

“Fifteen,” said a voice on the radio, and the sudden word made me cry aloud in scared astonishment. It had been so long since I had been disturbed by a command, now suddenly the radio had sounded and I twitched on the thwart then stared about the darkness as though I might see my enemy. Nothing stirred in the night. It was so dark that I could not even see the fog. I was in an absolute darkness, the blackness of the blind. I could feel the fog cold on my skin, but I could see nothing.

“Fifteen,” the voice repeated again, only this command wasn’t being transmitted in the voice of the radio announcer, but was being given in a man’s voice. “Fifteen,” he said yet again, as though he did not trust the electronic wizardry at his command, and this time I recognised the clipped, savage tones of Garrard.

I slid into the cabin and pressed the Decca buttons. The small illuminated numerals instructed me to head southeast towards a waypoint that was just 6.4 miles distant. That was a mere two hours’ sailing away, less with the tide’s help, and I knew I was close to the game’s end, for my enemies had been forced to abandon their first radio, the one with the tape-cassette attached, and must be using a radio aboard a boat. My killers waited there, but they lacked the assurance of my first controller for they had repeated the number three times in quick succession. They didn’t trust their machinery, and that lack of trust told me they were nervous. Garrard was a confident and able man, but perhaps he was no seaman. And perhaps he was frightened by this utter blackness above a colourless sea, and that thought gave me a pulse of hope in the cold darkness.

Marianne’s motion was easier after we turned. Now, instead of fighting the tide set, we travelled with the water. The wind had edged southerly, so we were tight hauled, but I could hear the purposeful slap and hiss of the water at her bows that betrayed a quicker progress.

“Fifteen,” Garrard said again, and I felt a fierce joy. He was nervous. He’d been told what to do, and he didn’t really trust the instructions. He was making sure by repetition, and that repetition betrayed his uncertainty to me. He was not at home out here, but I had spent years of my life on the ocean. It was not much of an advantage, but it was all I had; that and two lengths of rope.

He did not transmit again. I had stopped noticing the cold because I was thinking hard, and the results of that thinking were helping my confidence. Till now, they had played with me. They had sent me on a variety of courses, but they had never once let me sail so far that I reached the waypoint to which they pointed me. They had used the courses alone and, when I had travelled far enough along any particular line, they had turned me in a new direction.

Yet this new waypoint was close, suggesting that I was being guided to the rendezvous itself. My enemies, I reasoned, would not trust the conjunction of two courses to define the rendezvous, for the crossing of two invisible lines drawn across the sea left too much room for error. Either of the boats could overshoot the mark, and the Decca would never betray that overshoot. Instead the careful, clever mind that had prepared this meeting would have made the rendezvous the waypoint itself, for the silicon chips inside the Decca were designed to take a boat to that exact spot. If I passed the waypoint the Decca would tell me, if I went too far to port or starboard, the Decca would tell me. The Decca was taking the four million pounds home, but the Decca was also telling me exactly where my enemies waited. They had set an ambush, but, to make their ambush foolproof, they had been forced to tell the victim just where it was placed. I knew where they were, and they did not know where I was. All they knew was that by some electronic trickery I should sail docilely into their grip.

So God damn their cleverness, because it might yet let me win.

I watched the Decca like a hawk. The tide was quickening, helping me. My speed over the ground inched up. Three knots, 3.1, 3.5. The distance decreased fast. I went too far to port and the Decca told me, so I took Marianne back until the little box said I was aiming true. Three point eight knots, then four, and I began looking about Marianne for a weapon. There was the Decca aerial itself, a whiplike thing, but it would be clumsy to carry, and I needed to keep it in place till the very last minute. I wondered if I could wrench the drive shaft from the outboard motor, but knew it would be a hopeless task without tools. So I had nothing but the two mooring ropes.

I also had cleverness, except that I wasn’t being very clever, for Garrard must have known roughly what time I should reach the waypoint. Thanks to the tide I had little choice but to approach from the north, but I could control the time of my arrival, yet now I was doing exactly what he had been told to expect. He was waiting for me, and I needed to stretch his nerves in this cold dark, so I turned Marianne on to a broad reach that took her eastwards. I knew Garrard wouldn’t give up; I was carrying four million good reasons why he wouldn’t give up.

And why, I wondered, was Garrard trusted to collect the money? I could understand why Elizabeth would not get close to the transaction herself, but why trust a crook? I would not have trusted Garrard with four pence, let alone four million pounds in bonds. The only answer I could devise was that Elizabeth was relying on Garrard’s lack of seamanship. He had a boat and, doubtless, a Decca like mine. If he followed the Decca’s pre-programmed