Sea Lord

instructions, he would be safe, but if he struck out on his own he would be lost in some of the world’s most dangerous waters. To the east lay a lee shore, to the west and south were the rocks about the islands and the savage rocks of the Minkies, while to the north lay the fearsome tidal races of Alderney and the Swinge. That thought gave me a new confidence; I was the seaman out here, and that had to be worth something.

“Fifteen,” Garrard said again, perhaps an hour after he transmitted the instruction. “Fifteen.”

So he was nervous, and he was wondering why the lamb hadn’t turned up at the slaughterhouse on time. He’d be fidgeting at the waypoint, staring northwest into the black void, and wondering if everything had gone wrong. I sailed on eastwards. Let the bastard worry.

The Decca continually updated the waypoint’s bearing. I went on sailing east long after the waypoint was due south from me. I sailed on for what I guessed was a further hour, and only then did I let Marianne run south and west. The Decca gave me the course, pointing an invisible line to my revenge.

Now, once more, the distance to the waypoint began shortening. The tide was helping me, and Marianne was making 4.5 knots over the ground. Two miles to go, 1.9. The wind had picked up. It was blowing against the tide with just enough force to make small bad-tempered waves over which Marianne’s light hull bounced sickeningly.

At one mile to go I dropped the mainsail. I let it fall roughly over the boom. My speed dropped. I let the jib sheet fly and waited till I was sure we were dead in the water, then, as the boat wallowed drunkenly, I crouched by the Decca. I wanted to know exactly how the tide was flowing. Marianne herself was not moving in relation to the water, but the sea itself was sweeping us south at half a knot. The drift was not exactly south. The Decca said our present course was 144, which was east of south. I needed to know that tidal direction if the half-plan in my head stood any chance of working. That half-plan also needed the luck of the devil.

I hauled in the jib so that we ghosted onwards. The Decca told me Marianne had one mile to sail, then her job was done. I stared into the black fog seeking a hint of shadow, a sharper edge of darkness amid the night, a light; anything that would betray my enemies.

I was looking, but I heard them first.

Classical music. Vivaldi, I thought.

I rammed the tiller hard to port so that Marianne came slowly round. I tied off the tiller. Marianne was sailing a point north of west now, and I crouched by the Decca again, waiting till the machine told me that the waypoint was bearing exactly 144 degrees from me. Once it did, I went topsides, unlashed the tiller, and let the jib fall on to the foredeck. I was a quarter-mile from my enemies, drifting towards their soft, betraying noise. Marianne rocked to the waves as the sweet sound came intermittently across the water. Now I was drifting to the ambush, carried there by the weakening tide. And still I stared southwards.

And saw the light, and knew where I was.

The light flashed fast, nothing but a pearled flicker in the fog.

The flicker was so hazed by the vapour that the quick flashes were reduced to mere dissipated blinks, but I could see it was a white light flashing nine times in quick succession.

A cardinal buoy. A buoy marking a hazard, and there was only one such buoy I could think of in this part of the sea. If I was right, we were four or five miles off the French coast, hard by the shoaling rocks called Les Trois Grunes which were marked by a single cardinal buoy which lay to the west of the dangerous bank. I was relying on my memory of the old days when Charlie and I had made these waters our hunting territory.

That the buoy was the rendezvous made absolute sense. Garrard, I suspected, was no seaman. For him to jockey a boat against wind and tide to hold it motionless at an exact point in the sea would be an impossible job, even with the Decca’s help. Instead he had been guided to this lonely buoy to which, doubtless, he had made his boat fast.

The light flickered again, and this time I saw the boat which was indeed moored illegally to the buoy. She was a low-sterned working boat with a wheelhouse behind a raised foredeck. She must have been close to thirty feet long; a substantial boat, well-engined, sturdy, and solid enough to give its unfamiliar crew a sense of safety. I blinked as another light showed, this one a searchlight that flickered out into the fog. So Garrard was risking his night vision as well as his hearing. Put not your trust in killers, I thought, unless they’re good seamen. I wouldn’t want to meet Garrard on land, but out here he was in my cold world, not his.

I closed Marianne’s companionway, leaving the money below. I took the coiled rope from the cockpit sole and wrapped it round my waist. We were drifting towards the workboat and even the night-blinded Garrard must see us soon, so it was time to go. I took a breath, then lowered myself over Marianne’s port side.

The water was very cold. It might have been late summer, but the Channel waters can still strike to the heart like an icepick. I shivered and shuddered, but I had to depend on unsettling my ambushers. I’d frayed their nerves by coming late, now I must fray them further by a vanishing act.

I breaststroked away from Marianne. The tide was carrying us both southwards, but perhaps a little to the east of the buoy. I couldn’t see the light now, not from the water, but I breaststroked southwards and hoped to God that I hadn’t misjudged the tides. I was trying to keep pace with the drifting Marianne, but staying far enough away from her so that I would not be seen when she was discovered. The rope about my waist was absorbing the water and threatening to drag me down.

A bank of fog closed round me, hiding even Marianne from me. I trod water. The rope was getting heavy and I felt a moment of panic that I had already been swept past the cardinal buoy, but then I saw the nine flashes hazing in the fog and heard the small waves slapping at the hull of the big waiting boat. The searchlight stabbed out again, its beam swallowed and scattered by the fog, but this time Marianne’s red hull reflected dimly and I heard a shout. The music was abruptly switched off. “Get up front!” The voice was Garrard’s, clear as a bell. I could see two men on board the workboat; clearly the old firm of Garrard and Peel had come to finish their work.

I swam southwards. I could hear Garrard shouting. He had assumed I was on board Marianne and now ordered me to steer for his boat. I was shivering. A drift of fog hid their boat from me, then I heard its motor choke into life and I feared being left in the cold water and turned desperately towards the noise and the now blinding flash of the cardinal buoy.

Garrard must have cast off from the buoy and was now edging his big boat towards the wallowing Marianne. My estimate of the tidal drift had been good, but not so accurate that the small yacht would have drifted directly on to the buoy, and thus Garrard had been forced to go to her. He only needed to travel about fifteen yards. The two boats were east of me and I swam hard, going close by the tall yellow-and-black buoy that heaved up on the short choppy seas. Its intermittent light strobed on the workboat’s stern that was now just a few yards ahead of me. I heard a splintering thump as Garrard misjudged his approach and laid his boat’s bows into Marianne’s hull, then his engine subsided into a soft thumping growl. A man – from his size and weight I guessed him to be Peel – was on the workboat’s foredeck with a boathook. Then, when he brought it to his shoulder, I saw it wasn’t a boathook, but a shotgun or rifle.

I swam a little closer. My teeth were chattering.

“Can’t see the bugger.” That was Peel.

“He’s inside.” Garrard was sheltering from the night’s cold in the workboat’s brightly lit wheelhouse. I saw him light a cigarette, then I swam under the workboat’s counter and lost sight of him. The cardinal buoy flashed behind and, in its quick light, I saw the workboat’s name painted above my head: Mist- Spinner of Poole.

Christ, but it was cold. The cold was slowing me. My wounded ankles were numb. I’d planned to climb aboard their boat somehow when they were busy with Marianne, but I doubted I would have the strength to make that climb. It sounds easy, climbing aboard a boat, but in a choppy sea it can take an immense effort without a helping hand or a boarding ladder. The workboat’s platform was long and low, an easy enough gunwale to climb, but not when you’re cold and weak.

“Get on board!” Garrard shouted. I guessed Peel was somehow clinging to Marianne’s shrouds, holding her alongside Mist-Spinner and fearful of making the jump between the unevenly moving hulls. “Tie her up first, for Christ’s sake!” Garrard’s temper was clearly at snapping point, but he must have turned on the searchlight to help his companion for I saw its