Johnson Johnson 04 - Dolly and the Doctor Bird (21 page)

“I don’t want to lose my bloody life, that’s what,” said Johnson. “Free her. We’re going to port.”

“No, we’re not,” Harry said. He leaped forward to stop Johnson freeing the mizzen, but not soon enough. Johnson turned the wheel hard to the left and I freed the main and leaped like a hare to winch it in on the starboard: beside me Trotter worked like a fiend. The boom swung, catching Harry neatly behind his tanned ear, and flinging him into the cockpit where he landed on Johnson and pulled him with his weight to the floor. I grabbed the wheel.

Dolly
, wavering, turned to port in a few swaying motions, caught the wind, and settled down on her side. I looked aft.
Haven
had got to the channel.

Johnson rose to his feet, followed by Harry, their eyes on the white boat astern. Johnson said, “Keep her there,” to me, and got up on top of the cabin; the others all followed. Over our wake the shoals were now hard to distinguish. Green water or biscuit, channel or sandbank, which was she entering?

“Well?” said Johnson.

Trotter had taken two steps up the shrouds. A little above us, shielding his eyes from the sun, he watched and said nothing, and climbed higher and watched again. Harry said, “Well? Has she missed? Has she got into the channel?”

Trotter said, “No. She hasn’t missed. She’s got to the sandbank.”

“Hell,” said Johnson with feeling.

Trotter looked down on him. “Yes,” he said. “You’re right. She’s over the sandbank. She’s sailing over the sandbank and she hasn’t bloody well stuck. That was the risk you took, wasn’t it? Why wouldn’t you jam
Dolly
? The tide’s making too fast and
Haven
’s draft is too shallow.
Haven
can cross them sandbanks. And we can’t.”

I saw Harry stop breathing. And for the first time I knew, really knew, what it is like to be advised of forthcoming death. Straight as a ruler death was coming toward us:
Haven
was beating toward us over deep water and shallows alike. And idling here, trapped in our imprisoning channel, we had no means now left to avoid her.

Johnson said: “Beltanno, sail straight. Get a bearing and stay on it until I give the word. Spry!”

He was moving aft as he spoke. Trotter said, “What sail do you want, Doctor? Is she pulling the wheel?” I told him, and he and Harry did what they could with the sheets. I watched the burgee and the wheel, and when I could, the racing blur of the white boat behind. You didn’t need to look. The engine noise was enough, and the sound of the spray. In fact, it was better not to look, and watch the wheel, moving magically, a fraction this way and that. Trotter said, “Doctor… What are they doing?”

For a moment I couldn’t see it myself. And then I said, “They’ve got up a net.”

It was a heavy, coarse-meshed nylon affair, of the kind they use in fast catamarans, and bright red in color. I remember thinking how gay and incongruous it looked, lying on Johnson’s fine varnish. But then it was all out of key: the blue sky and hot beating sun, the marvelous shades of the water, the long white luxury yacht with her elegant cushions. And the workmanlike boat with its neat, roped cargo, now devouring the short space between us.

Johnson said, raising his voice, “Right. If this doesn’t work, I want you to jump. There’s not a great deal of hope; we’ll be too near the collision. But dive: don’t stay on the surface a moment longer than you have to. And keep in deep water. No lifebelts. There’ll be plenty of wreckage…”

He didn’t mention the sharks. He said, “
Now
!” And the red net flew over the stern and into the water, straight in the path of the oncoming
Haven
. He added gently, “Now, Beltanno.” And I knew why I had to keep
Dolly
straight.

I was better off than the others, perhaps, because I had
Dolly
to think of. The others had nothing to do but to stare helplessly aft, watching the scarlet net float gently backward, and
Haven
racing closer and closer toward it: toward it and us.

It had seemed a tension past bearing, a moment ago on the sandbank. This time it was happening here, the crisis. If the net didn’t float toward
Haven
— if it didn’t stop her or slow her or hinder her — death would be upon us in seconds.

She got to the net in a gush of white spray. Harry said, “Oh Christ!” on a gulp, and I could hear Trotter swear.
Haven
’s engine roared undiminished. Johnson’s voice said curtly, “Ready about!” and he put the wheel hard down to the left while Spry jumped to the ropes. After a second Trotter went to help him. I didn’t see that it mattered. In fact, if we were to jump to starboard, it merely meant that
Haven
would overtake
Dolly
beside us. Then Johnson said, “All right. Get ready to jump,” and I guessed what he was doing, and saw by Spry’s face that I was right. He was going to unload us and stay there on board, in order to sail
Dolly
clear.

I am used to making decisions. This is one which, thank God, I was saved from completing. Johnson drew breath to call, “Jump,” when he saw me coming toward him. He said instead sharply, “Get back, Beltanno,” and in that instant, one of
Haven
’s twin screws missed its beat.

Spry turned, and the two other faces showed from the weather rail, bloodless and taut. The engine grunted again.

We watched. We had reached the safe right-hand wall of the channel; Johnson turned the wheel gently and Spry without being told adjusted the sail for midchannel. No one said anything. There was another splutter behind, a moment’s slience, and then the rattling sound of
Haven
’s engine resuming on a new and wholly alien tone.

The spray at her bows had quite vanished. The boat was still moving; it was still following us; but her speed was now no more than our own. One of her propellers had taken the net.

One by one we left the side deck, our eyes on
Haven
, and stepped slowly into the cockpit where Johnson stood, his hand on the wheel, his lips under the dark glasses twitching. “Hallo,” he said. “And how are
your
emboli doing?”

Surprisingly, it was Trotter who laughed: a cackle of pure amusement which owed nothing to hysteria. “I tell you something,” he said. “At least I know me heart’s good for a century, and you could shove a ball-point pen clean down me arteries. I may, of course, still go off me poor bleedin’ nut.”

“Don’t boast,” said Johnson. “She’s swallowed the net, but she may chew it up and discard it. At best she’s going at the same speed as we are. The wind may die, or we may be stuck on a sandbank. And talking of sandbanks…”

Bad news comes soon enough. I hadn’t told him, but of course he had noticed. Where the chart had been were four drawing pins adhering to four scraps of paper. “It was torn off,” I said. “When Harry fell into the cockpit. At least, it was gone when I took the wheel. It must have flipped overboard. I’ve looked,” I added.

They looked as well, but the chart wasn’t aboard. And while they were looking, Trotter got up in the shrouds and started to call out the soundings.

Perhaps it sounds easy. He didn’t know the tricks of these waters: he didn’t know what the colors denoted. The person who knew them best was Harry; and Harry, it turned out, had no head for heights. Spry took charge of the sails, with Harry and myself to help him, while high above on the ratlines, Trotter leaned on the top, swaying spar and called out.

To this day, I remember the lesson: a light blue for ten to fifteen fathoms, said Harry; a light green, four to five fathoms; a pale green one and a half to two fathoms; the pale marine straw of the shoals, a fathom or less. They called that white water, and if we sailed there, we were dead. Watch out, he said, for patches of coral and rock: yellow brown, deep brown, or black. Watch out for coral heads embedded in debris: grass, or sponges, or marine vegetation. Then they are harder to spot. But look for the ring of white sand around the rock or the coral, where the fish swim and wait for their prey and their plankton, and the bed is fanned clear of grass.

Trotter had a clear voice: an enunciation ungainly but perfect through years of instructing obscure foreign militia when to jump through their hoops. He had well-trained responses and an ability to keep his head and his balance on a thin swaying ratline on a slow, tacking ketch. He called out what he could see, and we hauled on ropes and released and belayed them; we ducked as the booms swayed across and the next moment seemed to sway back, guided by Spry and by Johnson and by Harry, interpreting the crazy mosaic of that brilliant seabed into a channel which would bear the passage of
Dolly
.

And all the time the choked whine of
Haven
’s engine sang in our ears, cutting corners — always there, never falling behind. And I knew what Johnson was doing: stealing every inch to port that he could make with the channel: bearing left and always left, trying to win out of the shallows he had entered so desperately and reach the deep water where we had been once before.

Then, with our engine failed and wind dropping, we had been no match for
Haven
. Now, with full sail crammed on her,
Dolly
could draw away from the crippled storeship and run until she found help or harbor. Help, in the form of another ship which could take us on board, or could explode the
Haven
by fire from a safe distance; harbor, only when we were free of our enemy.

But the shoals held us trapped. The channel wound around the sandbars, but whether it was the right channel we had no means of knowing. Sometimes the sand brushed our keel or our sides and we were all silent, wondering if, like a party astray in a maze, we had come up a blind alley and, unable to reverse, must wait there to be caught. Dazed with sun and strain, my hands raw from the ropes, my back aching with something which would soon become total exhaustion, I wondered how the others were faring. The men might be stronger, but I wouldn’t give much for Harry’s mental endurance and the strain Trotter was undergoing, up there on those swaying shrouds under the glare of the sun. About Spry I knew nothing and he showed nothing of weakness. But then neither did Johnson; and I knew more about Johnson than he had wanted me to know.

And still the sand closed us in. Sometimes ahead Trotter would spy freer water, and we would sail for it, letting the sails fill all they would. But always in the end the channel thickened and narrowed.

In one of these spaces, Johnson called Trotter down, and when I saw him, I knew he shouldn’t go up again, although he was convinced he could, and said so all the time he was resting. I gave him a drink and a wet towel and dodged along to attend to the sheets on the foredeck, while Spry climbed the ratlines as lookout. But I knew I hadn’t Spry’s endurance, or his speed or his grip. In Harry and myself, Johnson had a pretty poor crew. And if Trotter came down with heatstroke…

Then Johnson gave Trotter the wheel and ducked forward to where I was crouching. “Doctor MacRannoch,” he said.

I said, “He can’t…”

“I know he can’t,” said Johnson mildly. “Neither can you, or any of us for very much longer. But listen to Trotter’s suggestion. We haven’t enough speed for skiing. But if we let out a warp, he thinks he can drop back to
Haven
on it and board her.”

I looked at him, but the dark glasses told nothing. I said, “The sharks. He’s tired. What if he loses his grip? We couldn’t stop. We couldn’t pick him up, could we?”

“Not before
Haven
reaches us,” Johnson said. Behind us, Harry was complaining. The main basis for it, so far as I could gather, was that if Trotter drowned, or was carelessly mown down by
Haven
, we should not only have lost ground, but be short of one man to sail
Dolly
. Johnson added, “Beltanno, if only three of us are left to run
Dolly
, could you go up that shroud?”

I was glad at least that he knew what was happening to Harry. And there was no avoiding the issue. If only Spry and Johnson were left to tackle
Dolly
, I should have to be pilot. “I don’t see why not,” I replied.

He nodded, but his attention had left me. Trotter strode by, stripped to his trunks. He spoke, and Johnson put up his hand. Spry had already belayed a long coil of rope near the sternpost. There was a light grappling iron, I saw, at one end.

Johnson brought
Dolly
half up into the wind to let Trotter drop overboard, and for a moment I think we all believed she had lost way for good. Then Trotter’s head, shaking off spray, appeared in the water. We saw him lean over, exposing one brown, sinewy shoulder and his two powerful forearms, the broad fists clutching the rope. The wind filled
Dolly
’s sails. She drew away, and Trotter’s body, rising, began to cut through the water. His head in the crook of his right arm was turned left cheek upward, drawing air from the vortex caused by the shape of his body resisting the drive of the sea.

He was a magnificent swimmer. We all knew that. We had watched him scores of times towed by
Dolly
’s launch skimming up ramps and leapfrogging barrels on water skis. Broad and small with a body like muscular teak, he ignored his tiredness.

He braced himself, foetuslike in the water, and was drawn through it, his gasping mouth taking the air as Spry, as fast as he dared, paid out the cable.

It disturbed his rhythm, the lengthening cable. The first time, Spry misjudged it and the rope suddenly slackened, slamming Trotter under the water. He rose half-choked, legs threshing to keep him on top and swimming, until
Dolly
drew off and the rope tautened again. After that, Spry kept the warp tight, releasing it little by little, his eyes on
Haven
as much as on the swimmer.

We had lost ground. The white boat was far closer: the gap getting shorter. There was only so much time this maneuver could cost. But Spry didn’t lose Trotter again; and Trotter, snatching glance after glance over his shoulder, must have seen
Haven
’s bows getting closer. He was almost upon her.

It was then that I found the wheel in my hands. “Good luck,” said Johnson; he grinned briefly, and walked to the rail. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. I stared after him, and then my attention was snatched back to Trotter by a shout from Spry and from Harry.