Stormchild

  I knew they would be watching for me. They must have realized I was hidden somewhere in the bleak tangle of rocks on the foreshore, and that if I did not break cover soon I would drown or else die of hypothermia in the rising waters. The wind suddenly seemed bitterly cold. It was blowing ever more strongly, gusting close to gale force as it flecked the water behind me white. The deterioration of the weather gave me hope that David would have decided to take Stormchild out through the fjord’s gut into the wide, safe ocean, and would already be beating his way offshore and waiting for my radio signal.

  The thought of the radio made me remember how something had broken during my panicked and bruising descent of the old lime chute. I opened the bag and fished out the small handheld radio, which, to my relief, proved to be intact. It had been the right-hand barrel of my binoculars that had broken. I shook the scraps of broken lens and the useless prism out of the barrel and pushed the now half-useful glasses back into the bag. Then, in desperate hope, I switched on the radio and tuned it to channel 37. “Stormchild, Stormchild! This is Tim. Do you read me? Over.”

  I released the transmitter button and heard nothing but an empty hiss from the speaker. A small red light glowed to show me that the radio’s battery was still strong, but rather than waste its electricity in vain I switched the set off. I was shadowed by the cliffs and high hills, so only some freak meteorological condition might have bounced my signal to wherever Stormchild was; if indeed Stormchild still floated, or was in friendly hands that knew which channel to monitor.

  I put the radio in the bag, then ate my last piece of hoarded fruitcake which I washed down with the dregs of the cold tea. The incoming tide was surging up to my feet and I knew I must move very soon. I peered over the rocks to stare at the limestone workings. I saw no movement there, but that did not mean my enemies were not scanning the shrinking shoreline for a sign of me. I ducked down again, slung the bag and rifle on my shoulder, then crawled under the cover of the seaweed-stinking rocks to the base of the cliff.

  I had decided that Lisl and her companions would expect me to break cover along the shore, scrambling over the slippery rocks to put more distance between myself and their guns, but I had seen another route out of my predicament, and that route lay directly upward.

  In my younger days I had been a halfway decent rock climber. I had never approached the finest standards, but I had been good. When we were schoolboys David and I had often hitchhiked on holiday weekends to the Lake District or Snowdonia and, equipped with a second-hand rope and some scavenged pitons, we would tackle some dangerously severe climbs. I had been the daring one; indeed one word of caution from David had usually been sufficient to send me up some dizzyingly fearful crag while he cringed below. Later, on an army climbing expedition to the Dolomites, I had suffered a crippling bout of vertigo that had persuaded me to abandon rocks in favor of seawater. These days not all the tea in China could have persuaded me onto some of the frightful rock faces I had so blithely climbed as a youth, yet the cliff above the rocky shoreline offered me the only sheltered and unguarded route out of my flooding hideout, so it was time to swallow my fears and start upward.

  The cliff, even though it was running with rainwater, was not a difficult climb, but its broken stone made me nervous and my stomach churned sourly as I moved steadily up. It was not the holds that unnerved me—they were firm and wide—but every time I looked down I saw the sea foaming white in the fissures of the rocks, and each such pulsing surge opened the pit in my belly like a greased trapdoor. I forced myself to ignore the seething sea and the clutching wind, and just to keep climbing steadily. I edged northward as I went, going still further from the gunmen, aiming to reach the hill above the quarry. From there I would find a safe place in which to plan my next moves. A good soldier, when in doubt, always goes for the high ground.

  But that maxim was also appreciated by my enemies, and they had an easier route than I to that high ground. My first intimation that they were not looking for me from the buildings, but had reached the cliff top before me, was when some stones and turf clattered down the rock face to my left.

  I froze. I could hear the voices of a man and a woman above me, and I supposed that Lisl and one of the Genesis gunmen were patroling the cliff’s edge in search of me. And, judging by the loudness of the two voices, I had only a few moments before they found me.

  To my right I could just see the smaller quarry that I had first glimpsed from the high ridge above the main workings. This smaller excavation was about a hundred feet deep and half as wide across. The smallness of the quarry suggested that it was the place where the first von Rellsteb to colonize this coast had begun his search for limestone, which beginnings he had later abandoned for the more promising deposits to the south. Whatever, the remains of his first diggings provided me with almost perfect cover, and, trying hard not to make any noise, I edged my way toward it. I was aiming for a ledge which ran round the quarry’s face like a balcony. The ledge was wide enough to have trapped soil washed from the hill above, and a thick canopy of scrub, stunted beech trees, wild fuchsia, and giant ferns offered me a perfect hiding place. I glanced up, saw nothing of my pursuers, and risked a swift scramble across the soaking rock face.

  But the risk proved too great. A shout from above betrayed that I had been seen. I heard Lisl’s voice call out in triumph, then a bullet hissed and cracked through the rain not far from my right ear. I swore in panic, then scrambled over the ledge’s lip and wriggled deep into the base of the soaking bushes where I burrowed like a desperate animal into the heart of the undergrowth. A nesting bird squawked away in panicked wing beats. I thrust myself into the wet leaves, trying to flatten myself against the cliff face in the hope that I was somehow rendering myself invisible.

  I may have been hidden, but my enemies knew they had me trapped. They could shoot me whenever I broke cover. They began firing down at the ledge’s thick foliage in an attempt to flush me into the open. I was temporarily safe from their efforts because a slight outcrop of the rock above offered me protection, but that same rock bulge also prevented me from firing back at my enemies.

  I shivered. The gunfire snapped angrily, its sound diminished by the rising wind. The bullets flicked the leaves and cracked into stone. Ricochets whined down to the base of the quarry, which, except for a small rain-flecked pool, was as thickly overgrown with scrub as the ledge on which I had trapped myself. I seemed to have a talent for being on low ground with an enemy above me, but I had escaped before, and I would have to escape again. The trick of this escape, I decided, was to persuade Lisl and her companion that they had killed me.

  I had been sitting with my knees drawn tight against my body so that no part of me showed under the overhang. I stayed in that cramped position, but slowly, very slowly, and very awkwardly, I unlooped the nylon rope from my torso. Near me was the relatively thick trunk of a stunted beech tree, about which I threaded the forty-foot length of line with a small silent prayer that the beech roots had enough grip in the ledge’s damp and friable soil to hold my weight. I then wrapped the two ends of the line round my waist, fastened them in place with bowlines, and concealed the knots beneath my jacket. What I planned depended on my enemies not knowing that I had fashioned this lifesaving tether.

  Then, with the knotted rope hidden at my waist, I slithered toward the lip of the small quarry. Once over that lip I would be hidden from the view of anyone at the top of the cliff. The greatest immediate danger was that my enemies would see the movement of the leaves and bushes as I pushed through them, but the wind was heaving the branches and I moved with exquisite care. The rain sheeted down, blinding me and, I hoped, my enemies, too. As I wriggled I shoved the telltale double strand of pale-colored rope under leaves and bushes to further conceal it.

  When I reached the lip of the ledge I peered over to discover that the artificially made rock face was an almost sheer drop of forty feet, though I could just see a jagged sloping ledge some eight feet below the lip. That le
dge would have to be enough for my survival.

  I closed my eyes for a few seconds. I was praying. Unlike my brother I did not often pray, because I believed God’s usefulness, like that of any other piece of emergency equipment, decreased according to how often He was used. This moment, poised above the cliff face, was one of those rare occasions when I needed divine aid, so I uttered a fervent prayer that God would hold me in His precious hand for the next few terrifying seconds.

  Then slowly, I raised my face until I could see the heads of my enemies. The two of them seemed to be lying full-length at the lip of the cliff to peer down into the quarry. Lisl was recognizable from her bright red hair, while her companion had a shaggy black beard and, tied around his forehead, a bright yellow headband. The two were some sixty feet above me and perhaps fifty feet to my right. I lifted the rifle, then began to stand upright. I was on the very edge of the quarry, its lip and sheer drop just an inch behind my boots. As I stood I twisted my upper body to the right so that I could aim at the black-bearded man. I stood fully upright. The two had still not seen me. The thick, wet ferns reached up to my waist, hiding the twin strands of line that hung beneath my jacket. The two heads were outlined against a dark gray sky, in which the rain slashed silver.

  O God of sailormen, I prayed, be with me now, and then I fired. A chunk of rock spat off the cliff’s rim just a few inches from the man’s unkempt beard. He gasped and jerked back. I worked the bolt, fired again, worked the bolt, and fired a third time. I was no longer aiming, just snapping shots wildly at the place where the two heads had flinched back. Then, blessedly, they both pushed the barrels of their assault rifles over the cliff and, without exposing themselves to take aim, blindly ripped off two full magazines of bullets in my general direction.

  God was indeed keeping me safe for the unaimed bullets whipped far above my head.

  The crack of the two Genesis rifles was snatched into the wind and rain. I waited till the last ejected cartridge had flickered bright in the day’s gloom, then I screamed.

  I screamed as though the devil had taken my soul in his bare claws and was tearing it from my guts. I screamed in an awful agony, and, as I made that dreadful shriek into the sky and at the wind, I watched the cliff top and, sure enough, the yellow headband suddenly appeared there, then Lisl’s face showed alongside the bearded face, and I had already thrown my arms up in the air, letting the rifle tumble and fall into the void behind me. I followed it, still screaming, and anyone watching me must have thought that I had been hit by a bullet and was now falling backward, spread-eagled, off the rock face and into the deep quarry.

  As I fell out of my enemies’ sight I scrabbled to get a grip on the doubled rope to soak up some of its impact, and I also twisted around so that my belly and not my spine would take the force of the line’s tightening. The rope snaked above me and I had a sudden terror that the line must have come free from the stump. I was certain I must have fallen more than the six feet I had bargained for, but then, abruptly, and with a sickening shock, the rope snapped taut. Being nylon, the doubled line stretched, but still the force was worse than a kick to the belly. I had been screaming as I fell, but the wrench of rope in my belly drove the wind clean out of me so that my tormented dying shriek was abruptly and very convincingly choked off.

  In the sudden silence the rifle clattered and banged its way to the bottom of the quarry.

  I struck the cliff, swung, hit the rock again, then hung motionless. I dangled like a dead thing hooked in the gut and strung up to be voided of blood. Except I was alive, and I was hurting. I felt as if the rope had ripped my stomach muscles clean out. I wanted to be sick. My vision had sheeted red and I was choking, but I dared not make a sound, or else my enemies would know I was alive and would climb down the cliff to kill me.

  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.