Stormchild (40 page)

The rain smashed down, flooding every hollow in the uplands and spilling a myriad of rivulets across the escarpment’s edge. This was an earth-drowning rain, a cataclysm of water, a planet-drenching misery. We waited as the wan, wet light faded. Jackie, huddling close beside me for warmth, told me about her vain attempt to find a newspaper that would send her south to explore the Genesis story. Three major papers had been interested, but each had insisted that a more experienced reporter be assigned to the story. So, she and Molly Tetterman had decided to go south themselves. They had flown to Santiago, then, already worried that their money would run out, they had bought second-class rail tickets to Puerto Montt. “The train tickets only cost nine eighty-five U.S.,” Jackie explained, “and the airfare would have been seventy-two dollars each! So we went by train, and then we went to the steamship company and they agreed to bring us here and collect us on their way back from Puerto Natales. They were really great. I thought they were going to charge us a fortune, because the
San Rafael
had to steam miles out of its way to get us here, but they really seemed to want to help us. They’re kind of curious about what goes on here.”

I asked when the
San Rafael
was arriving to collect them, and Jackie said in ten or eleven days, depending on the weather, and then I thought to ask if, by any chance, she was carrying a watch, and she was, and she was sure it was accurate, and it showed us that the time was just three minutes short of the hour.

I climbed to the very top of the rock where, under the guyed mast and in the wind-whipping lash of the rain, I took out my handheld radio. I knew that the higher I was the more chance David had of hearing me. I switched the radio on and tried to ignore the ominous message of its blinking battery light. I tuned the set to channel 37 then pressed the transmit button.
“Stormchild, Stormchild,”
I said, “this is Tim, this is Tim. Over.”

I waited. The red light seemed to be blinking more feebly and I assumed that each wretched blink was draining yet more power from the already weak battery. Rain was seeping inside my collar. “For fuck’s sake, David”—I let my tension show—”talk to me!”

A very offended voice suddenly answered. “This is
Stormchild,
this is
Stormchild.
There’s no need to use offensive language, Tim. We’ve been keeping a radio watch for you, but we’ve had to stand well offshore because of the weather, and there’s a bit of westerly in the wind, as you must have noticed, so I didn’t dare come too close to the coast.” David wittered on, giving me his news, telling me how risky it had been leaving Almagro Channel, and I could not interrupt him, because, so long as he had his transmit button pressed he could not hear my transmissions, so all I could do was wait until he shut up. The small red light on my radio winked tiredly, and still David explained why it had taken him so long to hear my transmissions, but at last he handed the airwave back to me.

“David! I need you at the settlement. David, I say again, I need you at the Genesis settlement. Not at the mine, but at the settlement. Come here now. This radio is on the blink, I can’t transmit much longer. Just come here! Do you read me? Over.”

All I heard in reply was a hiss and a broken jumble of David’s voice, and when the jumble ended I pressed my transmit button. “David! Just come here, just come here, just come here! To the settlement!” The red light was flickering, then disappeared altogether, and, when I released the transmit button, I could hear nothing at all from the set’s small speaker. The red light’s disappearance showed the radio was dead and I could only pray that with its last weary gasp it had sent the precious message and that David would obey my summons.

I went back to my hiding place where, as the light faded and the rain drummed on, I opened a tin of baked beans for Jackie, a can of corned beef for myself, and nothing at all for Stephen. Our enemies were ever more worried about their missing gunmen and sent two new and bedraggled search parties up into the rocks, but the new searchers still did not look right under their own noses and so discovered nothing. By now, I thought, Lisl would be getting close to panic.
Stormchild
was still on the loose, an unwanted visitor was prowling the island, and she had lost a man and his rifle. I hoped her nerves were shredding.

Before the light faded altogether, and after the last searcher had gone back down the escarpment, I took Jackie to the sheltered lee of the rock, smiled at her, then told her it was time she learned to fire a rifle.

Her eyes widened. “Tim,” she began in a very determined voice.

“Shut up,” I said in an even more determined voice, then I showed her how to cock the Ml 6, where its safety catch was, and how to fire it in single shots and how to select automatic fire. “I’m surprised they didn’t teach you how to do this in Sunday School,” I said facetiously. “Doesn’t every little American girl learn how to shoot? Now,” I went on before she could answer, “the gun isn’t loaded, so pick it up and show me how you fire it.”

“I couldn’t even touch it!” She stared with revulsion at the gun which now lay on the rock between us.

“But you can touch it,” I said, “and fire it, and that’s exactly what you’re going to do tonight.”

“No! I can’t!” She shuddered. Anyone would have thought I had asked her to eat a steak.

“Listen!” I said, “I need some help tonight. I’m going down to the settlement and I want them to be looking in the wrong direction. In other words, I want you to distract them. So, show me how you select single-shot fire instead of automatic.”

“Tim! I can’t!”

“For Christ’s sake,” I said, “I’m not asking you to kill anyone! You don’t even have to point the gun at anyone! You just point the damn thing at the stars and shoot the sky! All I want you to do is make a noise with it. Have you got scruples about making a noise?”

She reached out a tentative finger and touched the gun. It did not bite her. “Just make a noise?” she asked.

“Just make a noise,” I reassured her.

She actually succeeded in picking the gun up. “You know I won’t be able to kill anyone, Tim. I don’t mind making a noise with it, but I won’t point it at anyone!” She paused, her eyes huge in the damp dusk, and I felt a pang for the passions of youth.

“I told you,” I said, “I just want you to make a noise.”

“OK,” she said bravely.

I gave her a kiss and, once I was sure she understood just how to fire the rifle, I spent the last of the seeping daylight making a weird contraption from parts of the dead radio, from the batteries of the flashlight I still had in my bag, and from five tins of baked beans. Jackie watched me with a puzzled expression. “What is it?” she asked.

“A vegetarian, nonlethal bomb,” I told her, then I pushed the strange contraption into my bag with all but one stick of the Australian girl’s dynamite.

The sun sank behind the clouds and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the foul murk of day became the fouler blackness of wet night until, shrouded by the darkness, I wormed my way out of the rock crevice. Jackie gave me a kiss, I promised I would be back within the hour, and then, armed and dangerous, I went to make my mischief.

The first mischief was simply done. I climbed to the rock’s peak, where I sawed through the guy wires that held the makeshift aerial upright. I cut two of the twanging wires and the gusting wind did the rest. I heard a splintering torment, then the mast and its aerial crashed down the precipitous slope. For a few seconds the night was filled with the tumble and protest of breaking wood, then there was silence.

“Tim?” Jackie called. “Are you all right?”

“Never better.” The aerial’s coaxial cable was still trapped on a snag of stone and, just to make sure that the toppled aerial was useless, I slashed the cable through. Now, whatever else might happen in this night’s darkness, the settlement could-not talk to von Rellsteb. Then, after calling another farewell to Jackie, I clambered from the rocks and slithered down the escarpment’s steep face. I carried the Lee-Enfield, some of David’s waterproof matches, and one stick of dynamite. I had left Jackie with the rest of the explosives, my vegetarian bomb, the M-16, and stern instructions that, should I not be back within three hours, she was to go north, find another hiding place somewhere on the coast, then use the gun either to signal David as
Stormchild
sailed past or, if
Stormchild
failed to appear, to alert the
San Rafael
when that vessel returned.

I reached the foot of the ridge and began to trudge through the waterlogged vegetable fields. My feet hurt, but I had no choice but to endure the pain. I was also soaked through. The escarpment’s steep slope cheated the wind of much of its force, but the rain still fell on these lowlands with the same malevolence with which it crashed among the high rocks. I slipped and fell a dozen times and tried not to remember the feces that were spread on these damp fields. I cursed when I stumbled into a flooding drainage ditch. I shivered, chilled to my bones. The only lights in the wet darkness were the dim, yellow gleam of candles that flickered weakly behind the settlement’s barred windows. For the moment I was keeping well clear of the house, preferring to begin my work at the stone wharf where the trawler was berthed.

Astonishingly the fishing boat was unguarded. It seemed that after the mysterious events of the day, the community had retreated into the safe haven of their big house, so, for the moment, I had the night to myself.

I used the heavy rigging knife to slice through all four of the trawler’s mooring lines. The last warp parted with a drumming twang to recoil viciously into the darkness where the fishing boat was already drifting away on the strong ebb tide. I could have simply let the tidal current sweep the old boat far away, but I wanted to start a campaign of fear, so I took the tin of waterproof matches from my pocket, and with it the single stick of ancient dynamite with its woven fuse and, praying that the fuse would not burn too swiftly, I knelt down, clumsily struck a match in the teeming rain and, sheltering the fluttering fire under the wing of my coat, I held the dynamite’s fuse into the red flame.

For a second the fuse did nothing and the match, assailed by the wind’s gusting, almost went out, but then, and with an appalling swiftness, the fuse began to fizz bright sparks. The fuse was only five inches long and it seemed that three of those inches turned to instant ash as soon as the flame took hold, but I steeled myself to keep hold of the pinkish stick as I stood, turned, estimated the distance to the drifting trawler, then threw.

I saw the burning fuse arc through the darkness above the black water, then drop accurately down beyond the trawler’s gunwale. I heard the dynamite thump and roll on the wooden deck, then I dropped flat on the quay’s wet stones. I covered my head with my arms, closed my eyes tight, and waited.

Nothing happened, and I supposed that the ancient dynamite had been made useless by its exposure to the weather, which was a damned shame for I had predicated much of this night’s mayhem on the efficiency of Alfred Nobel’s invention and, in my disappointment, and as I tried to work out an alternative course of action, I raised my head to watch the fishing boat’s dark shape drift away in the pouring night.

The boat blew up.

Give Nobel a prize, I thought, because the stick of old explosive had worked. Its blast thumped outward with an appalling, breath-stealing force, a force so great that for a few seconds it seemed as though the rain had been blown clean out of the sky, but then the circle of bright explosive light contracted and the hissing rain came back.

The explosion, scything across the trawler’s deck, had lifted one of the huge fish-hold hatches and slammed it into the canted windows of the wheelhouse. A bright flame streaked up past the air, up past the boat’s derricks, past its aerials, up to where the rain slanted silver and sharp from the low clouds. Another and darker flame was flickering amidst the smoke that was boiling up from the trawler’s deck. That smaller flame was dark red, but suddenly it ran and spread to outline the boat’s tarred rigging in fire. The sea was illuminated for twenty yards around the burning boat, while, in a much wider circle, scraps of burning debris dropped from the sky.

I slithered away, wriggling far beyond the light of the burning boat before I stood, wiped myself and the gun clean of mud, then began walking back toward the escarpment.

To my right the settlement was in tumult. Lights showed in almost every window. Most of the lights were candles, but there were a few powerful flashlights and two of those stronger lights now bobbed across the front stretch of grass as, too late, the Genesis activists ran around the bay’s edge to discover what had happened to their precious boat.

I had thought that the rain might be strong enough to extinguish any fires that the explosion might have started; the very best effect I had dared hope for was that the dynamite might blow in the wheelhouse and shatter the steering lines, but the trawler’s old timbers had been so soaked in oil and tar that they were like an incendiary mixture, and now they blazed to dazzle the night. They rippled fire across the bay and flickered a scarlet flame-light against the house front, and across the wet fields, and against the rocks that edged the bay, and up to the low hurrying clouds. The night was suddenly shining, but I was already a shadow in the margins of the lowlands.

I heard them lamenting their loss, but there was nothing they could do. Soon, I thought, their laments would turn to radio appeals for help, but they could not summon their leader, nor could they use their boat to escape. They were trapped, and I had just begun to play.

“How’s Stephen?” I asked Jackie, “Giving you grief? You’d like me to kick his head in?”

“He’s real quiet.” Jackie gazed wide-eyed at the flame-lit scenery. It had taken me the best part of a half hour to climb back up the escarpment, yet still the burning trawler was shuddering the water with the red reflections of its flames. The boat had gone aground close to the wooded promontory where she now slowly burned down to her waterline and from where her death streaked the black sea with bands of red fire and cast deep shadows into the settlement’s courtyard and into the tumbled rocks by the beach and into the woods above the burning boat. It was still raining and the flames gave a dark crimson sheen to the spreading puddles that made such a misery of the settlement’s vegetable gardens.