Bernard Cornwell - Thrillers 04, page 37
Someone screamed. I think it was my daughter, because she knew I had beaten her.
Stormchild slammed into the turning catamaran. We smashed her starboard hull, breaking it into splinters of fiberglass. A wire stay whipped skyward. The catamaran’s mainsail was suddenly demented, filling a noisy sky with its maniacal thrashing, then, inevitably, the Genesis Four’s mast began to topple. I saw Dominic whirl round, face bloody, as the catamaran’s severed backstay whipped its frayed metal strands across his eyes. The mast was cracking and falling, and still Stormchild was driving into the catamaran’s belly like a great killing axe. I heard the tortured screech of steel on steel as our sharp bows slammed into the main beam that spanned the catamaran’s twin
hulls. I staggered with the impact, while Jackie, her fingers hooked like claws, clung to my arm. Stormchild’s forestay snapped, slashing our jib into the ship-killing wind. A sea thundered across our joined decks, sweeping gear off Genesis Four’s scuppers and filling Stormchild’s cockpit with a crashing, icy whirlpool. Our bows churned sickeningly in the wreckage of the catamaran. I was sobbing for my daughter, for what I had done.
The great sea turned us broadside, thrusting our stern eastward. Our bows were trapped by the catamaran’s broken hulls. I threw off Stormchild’s jib sheet as the two boats screeched on each other, but our boat was afloat and the Genesis Four was breaking apart. Already the catamaran’s cockpit was awash and her starboard hull under water. A blue and yellow curtain floated free of the shattered saloon. Stormchild’s mast was swaying horribly, but her backstays and shrouds were holding it upright and the damage would have to wait.
“Lifebuoys!” I shouted at Jackie. I could see two yellow-jacketed bodies clinging to the catamaran’s wreckage and I could see a third person in the foam-scummed water beyond. I could not see Nicole. The catamaran’s mast had collapsed to trail the reefed mainsail and a tangle of lines in the foaming sea.
“Nicole!” I shouted, then hurled a life buoy into the wreckage. I slashed with my knife at the bindings of Stormchild’s life raft, and Jackie helped me push the big canister overboard. Another thunderous sea crashed cold across the two boats and when it had passed I saw that the two men who
had been clinging to the wreckage were gone. I pulled the life raft’s lanyard and watched as the bright orange raft began to inflate.
Another toppling sea hammered like an avalanche at our beam. Stormchild’s tortured bows were still buried in the Genesis Four, but the lurch and twist of the awful sea loosened and prized us free, then the gale snatched at our jib which still writhed at the end of its halyard, and which now turned us fast downwind. I sliced through the line which tethered the life raft to Stormchild, thus leaving the bright orange raft for my daughter. “Engine!” I shouted at Jackie, then I hurled the last buoy overboard and slapped my lifeline onto a jackstay to work my way forward.
Jackie turned on the ignition and, above the throb of our automatic bilge pumps that were dealing with the water let in by the bullet holes, I heard the harsh banging as the starter motor turned over. A wave broke on our counter, swamping the cockpit and crashing white down the companionway. The engine would not start and the wind and sea were carrying us so fast that already the wreck of the Genesis Four was hidden by a spume-fretted wave crest.
Jackie advanced the throttle, turned the key again, and this time the motor caught and throbbed. She let in the clutch, then staggered to the wheel to turn Stormchild back toward the wreckage, but a great sea, heaped and wind-whipped, slammed us back and almost threw us on our beam ends. Jackie sensibly let the boat run, while I, terrified that our mast would be lost,
sawed with my rigging knife at the jib halyard. The cut halyard snaked up through the masthead block to release the jib that sailed away like a demonically winged monster. The forestay was streaming ahead of us, carried almost horizontal by the force of the rising gale, which now leeched the ocean white and bent Stormchild’s tall mast like a longbow.
I unhanded the mainsail’s halyard, took some bends off the cleat, carried the halyard forward and shackled it to the foreplate. Then I went back to the mast and winched the halyard tight so that I had jury-rigged a new forestay. In harbor that simple process might have taken three minutes, but in that insane sea it took closer to half an hour. Just to shackle the halyard to the foreplate took immense concentration as the sea tried to snatch me off the foredeck and over the collision-bent bars of the pulpit. The wind screamed and plucked at me, but at last the halyard was secure and the mast safely stayed and I could crawl back to the cockpit to discover that the wind and sea had taken us yet further from the wreckage of Genesis Four which was now totally lost in the white hell of sleet and waves behind us. I throttled the engine to full brutal power, and, cursing the bitch of a sea that fought us, I thrust Stormchild straight into the throat of Cape Horn’s malevolence.
It took us an hour to find the wreckage of Genesis Four, and even then we discovered nothing but scraps: an oar that still had the name Naiad burnt into its blade, a plastic bottle, a sail bag, a
broken pencil. We found Stormchild’s life raft, but there was no one inside. We circled the pathetic wreckage, enduring the shrieking wind and the flogging seas and the demonic rain, but though we found lumps of foam torn from the catamaran’s hulls, and though we found our life buoy, we could not find Nicole. Or any of Nicole’s crew. My daughter was gone. She was drowned. She was gone to the cleansing sea and it had been I who had killed her.
And it was I who now wept for her. As a small child Nicole had been graceful. She had grown up willful, but Joanna and I had been proud of her, we had loved her, and we had thought that our old age would be blessed by her, but then her brother had been killed by terrorists, and Nicole, as if to even the score, had become a terrorist herself. Her cause was different from the cause of those men who had murdered her brother, but her evil was the same, and now she was dead.
At last I turned Stormchild away from Nicole’s killing place. A new black squall of sleet and rain clawed across the broken water to overtake and drive us eastward. I set the storm jib on the staysail halyard, and then we ran the shattering seas of the Horn in a full gale that blew us through the night so that it was full darkness when we struck the first Atlantic waves and turned our scarred and battered bows north toward the Falklands. Jackie shared the night watch, huddled beside me in the cockpit, not talking, but just watching the skirl and rush of the seething waters.
And in the dawn, as the tired wind calmed, we saw that the sea was weeping.
Much later, months later, when Stormchild was tied fore and aft in a warm lagoon, Jackie asked me what we had achieved in that storm off Cape Horn. She asked the question on a night when our mooring lines led to bending palm trees that were silhouetted against the stars of a lambent tropical sky. We were alone and Patagonia seemed a long way off, indeed, so far away that we rarely talked of it, but that night, under the indolent stars, Jackie’s thoughts strayed back to Nicole and to Genesis, and, in an idle voice, she asked me just what we had achieved. “We were good environmentalists,” I assured her. “We cleaned up some pollution.”
For the Genesis community was indeed gone, though it was hardly forgotten, for its misdeeds and its subsequent destruction had made headlines round the world.
Jackie’s account of the settlement’s harrowing was never published. She had written and rewritten the story, and, in despair of ever capturing the truth, she had torn up version after version until she had finally abandoned her efforts and allowed herself to read the story of the Genesis community in the words of other men and women. Those other journalists had desperately sought Jackie and me, but we had escaped their questions and thus the fate of Nicole and of her crew remained a mystery to the press, though the consensus was
that they had simply drowned when Genesis Four foundered off the Horn. A few of the more vivid tabloids insisted that Nicole still sailed the murderous seaways, and any mysterious happening anywhere in the oceans renewed the speculation that Genesis Four still floated, but the responsible press had long abandoned its search for my daughter. Even the Chilean government, which for a time had made threatening noises about my disappearance, now seemed content to put the whole episode behind them.
Molly Tetterman had taken most of the Genesis community’s survivors back to their families in North America, where Molly became something of a celebrity as the battling mother who had rescued her child from the grasp of evil. She wrote to us of her frequent appearances on television talkshows and even said that a network wanted to make a miniseries about her adventures. We wrote back wishing her luck, but heard nothing more of the project.
David wrote to us with news of the boatyard, of the church, and of his hopes that his brief brush with fame might help his chances of a comfortable bishopric. Betty wanted to know when Jackie and I would be married. Soon, I wrote back to them, soon. There seemed to be no hurry. Jackie and I drifted through warm seas, lazy and happy.
Now Jackie leaned against me in Stormchild’s cockpit. Beyond our private coral reef the warm waves broke, their sound a quiet murmur of pleasure in the darkness. I sipped whiskey. Jackie had refused a similar nightcap, indeed she had even
shaken her head to my offer of wine with the dinner I had cooked at twilight, upon which refusal I had accused her of returning to her teetotaling ways. She denied it, so I had inquired whether this was some new and ghastly self-inflicted dietary prohibition, but she had just smiled tolerantly at my question. Now, in the placid Caribbean night, she reached up to touch my cheek. “Tim?” she asked very solemnly.
“Jackie?” I answered just as solemnly.
“Do you know why I didn’t drink today?”
“Because you’re an American,” I declaimed, “and therefore believe death to be optional. Or else it’s because you’ve just read one of those earnest health articles in a vegetarian magazine, which claims that drinking nine-year-old Cotes du Rhone gives you terminal zits and unsightly hemorrhoids. Or perhaps you’re going to become unbelievably boring and tell me that alcohol is a drug and that each of us has a societal responsibility to—”
“Shut up,” Jackie said very firmly, “shut up.”
I shut up.
She took my hand and kissed it. “You’re going to be a father again,” she said softly, and I leaned my head on Stormchild’s rails and let my tears dissolve the stars.
About the Author
BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Richard Sharpe series; the Grail Quest series; the Grail Quest series; the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles; the Warlord Trilogy; and many other novels, including Redcoat, Stonehenge 2000 B.C., and Gallows Thief. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod. www.bernardcornwell.net
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Resounding praise for international
bestselling author
BERNARD CORNWELL
“Cornwell is the master.”
Publishers Weekly “A very fine novelist…he tells a cracking yarn and fills it with vivid characters and writes crisp dialogue…One can ask no more.”
Sunday Telegraph (London)
“It may be argued that the oldest literary form of all is the adventure story…Bernard Cornwell is carrying on an august and ancient tradition.”
Charleston Post and Courier
“Cornwell’s vivid descriptions and accurate characterizations make for gripping reading.”
Tampa Tribune
“A rare talent…Bernard Cornwell has few equals.”
Birmingham Post (UK)
Books by Bernard Cornwell
The Sharpe Novels
(in chronological order)
SHARPE’S TIGER · SHARPE’S TRIUMPH
SHARPE’S FORTRESS · SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR
SHARPE’S PREY* · SHARPE’S RIFLES · SHARPE’S
HAVOC SHARPE’S EAGLE · SHARPE’S GOLD · SHARPE’S
ESCAPE
SHARPE’S BATTLE* · SHARPE’S COMPANY
SHARPE’S SWORD · SHARPE’S ENEMY
SHARPE’S HONOUR · SHARPE’S REGIMENT
SHARPE’S SIEGE · SHARPE’S REVENGE
SHARPE’S WATERLOO · SHARPE’S DEVIL
The Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles
REBEL* · COPPERHEAD* · BATTLE FLAG
THE BLOODY GROUND
The Grail Quest Series
THE ARCHER’S TALE* · VAGABOND
HERETIC
Other Novels
A CROWNING MERCY* · SCOUNDREL
REDCOAT · STONEHENGE, 2000 B.C.: A NOVEL
GALLOWS THIEF · STORMCHILD
*Published by HarperCollinsPublishers
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
STORMCHILD. Copyright © 2006 by Bernard Cornwell. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Stormchild, Bernard Cornwell - Thrillers 04
