Stormchild (34 page)

So I hung, and I choked back the sobs as I tried to drag a desperate breath into my aching lungs. I could hear nothing except the thumping of blood in my ears and a small, slight whimpering noise that I suddenly knew was coming from my bile-sour throat, so I clamped my mouth shut.

Then, from above me, the man in the yellow headband whooped in joyous triumph. “Way to go! Did you see that? Oh, shit! That sucker just learned to fly! Fuckin’ A!”

The sucker was trying to find a grip on the cliff face. I had levered myself upright by pulling on the taut rope. Then I felt with the tips of my boots until I discovered the small ledge beneath me and, by pushing up with my toes on that ledge, I was able to take some of the weight off the rope that was threatening to cut me in two. I managed to take in a deep and tentative breath. The absence of any sharp pain in my chest persuaded me that at least no ribs were broken, but I still feared I might have torn some muscles. The pain was excruciating, but I had to ignore it because I needed to get down to the floor of the small abandoned quarry before either Lisl or the triumphant man thought to clamber down the upper cliff to search for my corpse.

I found a finger hold for my left hand, then untied one of the bowlines. I was unsupported now and a slip on the wet rock would finish what my enemies thought they had already accomplished. I tried not to think of the void below as, slowly and agonisingly, I lowered myself until I could get a finger hold on the ledge with my right hand. I looked for holds lower down, but the rain and the hurt were blurring my vision and I dared not wait for my sight to clear. Trusting that the holds were there, I pulled the long rope free. It came reluctantly, constantly snagging on some obstruction on the upper ledge, and once it stuck so hard that I thought I might need to use my rigging knife to cut myself free, but I gave the line one last hard, smooth tug and it slithered loose. I dared not pull too hard or fast for fear that the sudden movement in the ledge’s foliage would betray my continued existence. Nor did I dare leave the rope in place in case my enemies explored the ledge. I could hear nothing from the cliff top.

The end of the rope at last fell over the rim of the quarry and collapsed on me. I let the rope dangle from my waist as I edged downward with only my toes and fingers touching the wall. The rock wall was sheeted with running water. My fingers were numb. Blood was seeping from a cut on my left hand.

I looked down, blinking my eyes to clear my vision, and I could just see the stock of my fallen rifle showing at the edge of a bush. If it had fallen another four feet to the right it would have plunged into the small pool. The rest of the quarry floor was thickly covered with scrub and my immediate concern was to reach that shelter undiscovered. A stone fell from above, suggesting that one of my enemies was scrambling down the upper and easier cliff face to make certain I was dead. I looked left and saw no quick route down to the quarry floor, then I looked right and saw, just four feet away, a buttress of rock that resembled an oversized and crooked drainpipe clinging to the quarry’s face. I made a desperate lunge, risking the emptiness below, and somehow gripped the top of the buttress, then half fell and half shimmied down to the base of the wall. The pain was making me gasp. I knew I was going too fast, and that I risked making a terrible noise as I crashed into the shrubbery on the quarry’s floor, but when I tried to slow my descent I only ripped the skin off my right palm. My boots juddered on the rock, then branches whipped at me, and, gasping and whimpering, I rolled off the rock onto a pile of stones that were covered by a thick umbrella of beech scrub. I felt a horribly sharp blow on my left wrist, and heard a distinct snapping noise at the same instant, but I dared not move to investigate the damage.

Instead I lay like a dead man. I was winded and bruised, but I was making neither noise nor movement. I hurt all over; I hurt so much that it was impossible to distinguish any particular pain in my left wrist, and thus tell if it was broken. I kept my eyes tightly closed, as though to open them would reveal unwilling news about my injuries. Rain smashed into the leaves above me, gurgled down stone gullies around me, and hissed on the black pool behind me. Chunks of stone were cascading down the cliff, evidently dislodged by my pursuers as they scrambled down to the ledge. I was sure they would not risk the climb to the quarry floor. They merely wanted some confirmation that I was indeed dead and, even if they could not see me, they would surely assume from the stillness and silence at the bottom of the pit that I had fallen to my death.

I waited. The stones stopped bouncing and falling. At last, faint through the rain, I heard Lisl’s voice way above me. “Is that his gun?”

“Yeah.”

Silence again.

“Perhaps he fell in the pool?” Lisl again.

“The sucker couldn’t fly, and the sucker sure couldn’t swim after that fall. In fact, if you think about it, that sucker isn’t much fucking good for anything anymore!” The bearded man laughed.

I counted a minute, then another, then a third. I counted to twenty minutes, and still I did not move. Nor did I hear any movement above me, but I had to assume that my enemies might have the patience to outwait me. I counted a further twenty minutes, marking the seconds with a childish chant I had learned as a Sea Scout—one coconut, two coconut, three coconut, and so on up to sixty coconuts, then back to the first coconut again. And I remembered the damp hut where as a boy I had been taught bowlines and sheepshanks and the rudiments of seamanship, and then I started counting off another coconut-marked minute of my life. Surely they had abandoned me for dead by now? Yet still I waited. The rain was remorseless, and I lay under its chill onslaught for a full hour before, bruised and cramped and cold and wet and hurting, I slowly rolled over and stared upward.

The skyline was empty.

I could hear an engine throbbing somewhere in the distance. It was too deep a throb to be one of the motorbikes and too heavy a sound for the tractor I had seen, and I wondered if the Genesis community kept a generator in the old mine buildings.

I stood. It took me a long time, because I ached all over. No one responded to the rustle of leaves and the clatter of stones dislodged by my boots as I struggled upright. It seemed I was alone and, for the moment, at least, safe.

I looked fearfully at my left wrist only to discover that it was my expensive wristwatch that had taken the full force of the blow and had been broken beyond repair. I took it off and tossed it into the black pool.

My stomach was still a belt of agony. The pain lessened if I bent double so, crouching like Quasimodo, I forced my way through the undergrowth to retrieve the rifle. It seemed undamaged, but I dared not fire a shot to test it. At the seaward side of the quarry was a smaller rock face, no more than twenty feet high, that formed the outer wall of the small excavation. It was hard to climb, and even harder because of the pain in my stomach muscles, but I inched my way up and at last I hooked an elbow over the crest and could stare down into the Desolate Straits.

The engine I was hearing belonged to the fishing boat which had vainly pursued
Stormchild
two days before and which now had steamed up the Desolate Straits and was berthed alongside the pier. Black smoke drizzled from her tall chimney.

The sea kayaks that I had holed with bullets were now piled on her deck. Outboard of the trawler was a catamaran, while in the center of the waterway a stained and weathered sloop lay hove-to. I fished out what was left of my binoculars and trained the single lens on the boats. The sloop turned as I watched and, with a burst of troubled water at her stern, began motoring down the straits toward the far settlement.

I panned to the catamaran, daring to hope it was Nicole’s boat, but instead I saw that it was the old catamaran in which von Rellsteb had come to my English river so long ago. I recognized neither of the men on board who now cast off from the trawler and, their engines going, turned to follow the sloop.

The trawler alone was left. Lisl was standing on the pier by the fishing boat’s gangplank, from where she stared toward the factory ramp down which I had tumbled. It was evident that she was waiting for something or someone. Above her the gulls wheeled and screamed in the rain. The Desolate Straits looked gray, greasy, and cold, while the colors of the far hills, which only two days before had seemed so bright and heavenly, were now dulled by the rain into a dun drab. I shivered.

I assumed that, obedient to von Rellsteb’s parting instructions, the Genesis crews were retreating to the settlement. There they could rendezvous and assess what damage, if any,
Stormchild’s
visit had caused them. If von Rellsteb had captured my boat, then that damage would have been minimal, whereas if David was still free and threatening to carry Berenice’s testimony to the authorities, von Rellsteb would urgently need to start his pursuit, and I wondered if the departure of the two yachts was the commencement of that urgent pursuit.

It did indeed look as though every Genesis boat and every Genesis crew member was being committed to
Stormchild’s
chase, for, as far as I could tell, they were leaving the mine workings unguarded. That implied there was very little at the workings worth protecting, but it also indicated that Lisl believed me to be dead. That misconception was my one small advantage over Genesis.

I watched Lisl stamp her feet against the cold, then, panning my broken glass right, I saw what it was she waited for. Two men were struggling toward the fishing boat with the body of the gunman I had wounded, and whom, I suspected, the Genesis group had themselves finished off. Now one man held the corpse by the shoulders of its coat while the other grasped the dead man’s ankles. The cadaver’s bearded head hung backward so that its long hair brushed at the pier’s stones and its huge beard jutted pugnaciously toward the rain clouds. Lisl seemed to shudder and back away from the body’s passing. The two men very nearly dropped the corpse into the water as they shuffled across the makeshift gangplank, but at last they had the body safe aboard, and Lisl, still keeping her distance from the dead, cast off the trawler’s mooring lines. The engine smoke thickened as, with an awful wheezing and clanking, the decrepit vessel steamed away up the wide straits.

When the fishing boat disappeared I rolled over the lip of the quarry.

No one shot at me. It seemed that no one had been left behind to guard the mine against my ghost. I lay panting and pained on the thin turf, then slowly, when my stomach muscles uncramped, I gathered my strength, stood up, and, using the rifle like a crutch, I limped toward the mine buildings, where I still had a daughter to find.

It was in the low stone buildings, which were built into the hillside at the back of the quay, that I found the first signs of Nicole. The buildings were single-storied, and crouched against the spite of the sea wind like a row of Cornish fishermens’ cottages. The buildings were locked, but not locked well enough, and inside I discovered crude and uncomfortable living quarters. Some effort had been made to decorate the five bedrooms; one boasted a livid mural showing a humpback whale venting beside an iceberg, while a second was decorated with a painted effigy of an Indian god, its colors bright as the sun, but mostly the rooms were as characterless and cheerless as an army barracks. I wondered which of the beds Nicole used, though the barrenness of the small bedrooms suggested that they were used only when the severity of the weather drove Nicole’s crew out of their boat and into the shelter of the cottage’s stone walls. There was a small kitchen equipped with a woodstove, a cupboard which held nothing but packets of dehydrated stew, and a battered enamel washing bowl, in which a large evil-looking spider lived. There was also a wooden table, six chairs, and a wall that was covered with peeling paper, or so I thought until I pushed back the kitchen’s shutters and saw that the peeling paper was, in fact, rows of curling photographs.

I had found Nicole.

I felt the sudden catch and choke of incipient tears, for there was my daughter’s face among the Genesis crews. “Nicole,” I whispered her name aloud like an incantation, “Nicole, Nicole.” I even reached up a tentative finger and stroked one of the photographs. Suddenly it was all worth it—the voyage, the cold, the pain, and the fear, for here she was, my daughter, and I had found her.

Or rather I had found her face among the photographs, which showed a variety of Genesis activists. In some of the pictures they were attacking fishnets with grapnels and cutting gear, while in another a Genesis group in an inflatable boat was taunting a French naval patrol vessel which had presumably been guarding France’s nuclear-testing site in the Pacific. The pictures were amateurish, like fading holiday snapshots, and somehow that suggested that the Genesis eco-terrorists were a group of energetically carefree young people enjoying a most innocent and happy vacation; whenever two people were photographed together they inevitably had their arms about each others’ necks, and in almost every snapshot they seemed to be shouting good-natured insults at the camera.

The pictures, I saw, were all of the same crew: Nicole’s. Nicole herself appeared in a dozen of the photographs, and in all but one of those she was either smiling or laughing. One photograph had been taken while she took a bucket shower on her catamaran’s foredeck. She had been naked, and had clearly not known that she was being photographed, for the next picture showed her indignant, but good-humored face as she attacked the photographer. In a half dozen of the pictures she was shown with a thin, flaxen-haired boy, who had a blunt face that reminded me uncannily of my dead son. The more I looked, the more the boy in the pictures looked like Dickie. It was unsettling, for there was something about the way in which Nicole and the blond boy had been photographed together that suggested they were lovers.

I tried not to follow those insinuations. Instead I gazed for a long time at those pictures of my daughter, and I wondered just what thoughts and dreams moved her in this new life. None of the happy photographs revealed the answer to that question, but there was a clue in the one unsmiling picture of Nicole. That picture had been taken in an inflatable boat which had been thrashing through a choppy sea beneath a threatening sky. Nicole, sitting in the bows of the rubber boat, had just turned to face the photographer, and the camera had caught her face in a grim and taut expression that put me in mind of Berenice’s timid description of my daughter as “fierce.” I had a horrible feeling that the grim face was the real face, a face that betrayed no forgiveness nor any love. The picture worried me.