Wildtrack

  WILDTRACK

  A Novel of Suspense

  BERNARD CORNWELL

  HarperCollins e-books

  Wildtrack is dedicated to the memory of David Watt

  PROLOGUE

  They said I'd never walk again.

  They said I'd be in a wheelchair till they lifted me into the box and screwed down my lid. I should learn a trade, they said. Something cripple-friendly, like computers.

  They'd had me for damn nearly a year. They'd put a metal rod into my right thigh, and grafted skin where my thighs and arse had been burned. They did a mixture of rough carpentry and microsurgery on my spine and, when it half worked—which meant I could twitch the toes on my left foot—they opened me up again and did a bit more. It had all taken months and still I could not walk.

  You must get used to it, they said, because you're never going to walk again. You're never going to sail again. You're a paraplegic now, Nick, so kiss it all goodbye. I told them to get stuffed.

  "That's not the spirit, Nick!" Doctor Maitland said in his no-nonsense voice. "There's no stigma involved, you know. Quite the opposite!" He flipped the pages of a yachting magazine that lay on a pile of similar magazines beside my bed. "And you'll be afloat again. You can go sailing this very spring!"

  It was the first sign of hope he'd given me, and I responded eagerly. "Can I?"

  "My dear Nick, of course you can. There's a motor sailor on the Solent that's specially adapted for your sort of case."

  My eagerness ebbed. "My sort of case?"

  "Ramps for the chairs and a trained volunteer staff on board." Maitland always spoke of these things in a matter-of-fact voice, as if everyone in the real world went around on wheels with tubes sticking into their bladders. "And perhaps you'd let the press go along?" he added hopefully. "They all want to interview you."

  "Tell them to go to hell. No press. That's the rule, remember? I don't want to see a bloody reporter."

  "No press, then." Maitland could not hide his disappointment. He loved publicity for his paraplegic paradise. "Perhaps I'll come along. It's been many a long year since I went sailing."

  "You can go on your own," I said sullenly.

  "That isn't the right spirit, Nick." He twitched at my curtains, which didn't need twitching.

  I closed my eyes. "I'm going to walk out of this bloody place on my own two feet."

  "That won't stop you going sailing in the spring, will it now?" Maitland, like all his staff, specialized in that bright interrogatory inflection at the end of statements; an inflection designed to elicit our agreement. Once they had us accepting that we were doomed, then half their battle was won. "Will it?" he asked again.

  I opened my eyes. "The last time I went sailing, Doc, I was in a friend's forty-footer coming back from Iceland. She was knocked down near the Faeroes and lost all her mast above the spreaders. We hacked off the broken stuff, rigged jury hounds, and brought her into North Uist five days later. That was a neat piece of work, Doc." I didn't add that the friend had broken his arm when the boat had broached, or that it had happened in the depths of a bloody awful night. What mattered was that we took on that bitch of a northern sea and brought our boat home.

  Maitland had listened very patiently. "That was before, Nick, wasn't it?"

  "So there's no bloody way, Doc, that I'm going to sit on your cripple barge and watch the pretty boats go by." I knew I was being churlish and ungrateful, but I didn't care. I was going to walk again.

  "If you insist, Nick, if you insist." Maitland's voice intimated that I was my own worst enemy. He went to the door, then stopped to glance back into my room. A look of utter astonishment dawned on his round pink face. "You haven't got a television!"

  "I hate bloody television."

  "We find it an extremely effective instrument for therapy, Nick."

  "I don't need bloody therapy. I want a pair of walking shoes."

  "You really don't want a television?" Maitland asked in utter disbelief.

  "I don't want a television."

  So that afternoon they sent the new psychiatrist to see me.

  "Hello, Mr Sandman," she said brightly. "I'm Doctor Janet Plant. I've just joined the orientation staff."

  She had a nice voice, but I couldn't see her because I had my back to the door. "You're the new shrink?"

  "I'm the new orientation therapist," she agreed. "What are you doing?"

  I was holding on to the bedrail with my right hand and edging my right foot down to the floor. "I'm teaching myself to walk."

  "I thought we had a physio department to do that?"

  "They only want to teach me how to pee in a wheelchair. They promise me that if I'm a good boy we'll go on to number two in the spring." I flinched from the excruciating pain. Even to put a small amount of pressure on my leg was enough to twist a fleshhook in the small of my back. I supposed the psychiatrist would say I was a masochist because, as soon as the pain struck, I put more weight on the leg.

  God, I was weak. My right leg was shaking. The nerves of the leg were supposed to be severed, but I'd discovered that if I locked the knee with my hands it would stay locked. So now I thrust the knee down and very gingerly pushed myself away from the bed. I was still holding on to the rail. My left leg took some of the weight, and the pain slid down those tendons like fire. I had no balance and no strength, but I forced myself away from the bed until I was standing half bent, with my right hand gripped so hard about the bedrail that my knuckles were white. I could not breathe. Literally. The pain was so bad that my body could not find the breathing instructions. The pain coursed up into my chest, my neck, then flared red in my skull.

  I fell backwards on to the bed. The pain began to ebb out of me as my breath came back, but I kept my eyes closed so the tears would not show. "The first thing I have to do"—I tried to sound nonchalant—"is learn to straighten up. Then how to put one foot in front of the other. The rest will come easily." I wished I had not spoken, for the words came out as sobs.

  I heard Doctor Plant draw up the chair and sit down. I'd noted that she'd made no attempt to help me, which was all part of the hospital's treatment. We had to fail in order to discover our new limits, which we would then meekly accept. "Tell me about your boat," she said in the statutory matter-of-fact voice. It was the same voice she would have used if I'd claimed to be Napoleon Bonaparte. "Tell me how you won the battle of Austerlitz, Your Imperial Highness?"

  "It's a boat," I said sullenly. My breathing was easier now, but my eyes were still closed.

  "We sail a Contessa 32," Doctor Plant said.

  I opened my eyes and saw a sensible, short-haired and motherly woman. "Where's your Contessa moored?" I asked.

  "Itchenor."

  I smiled. "I once went aground on the East Pole sands."

  "Careless."

  "It was at night," I defended myself, "and there was a blizzard blowing so I couldn't see the marks. And a dirty great flood tide. I was only fifteen. I shouldn't have tried to make the Channel, but I thought my old man would tan the hide off me if I stayed out all night."

  "Would he have done?" she asked.

  "Probably not. He didn't like using the cane. I deserved it often enough, but he's a soft bugger really."

  She smiled, as if to indicate that I was at last entering a territory she could understand; a channel well marked by the perches and buoys of the clinical studies of parenthood. "Your mother had left you by the time you were fifteen. Isn't that so?"

  "I'm a right bloody monkeypuzzle tree for you, aren't I?"

  "Is that what you think?" she asked.

  "What I think," I said, "is that I hate it when bloody shrinks ask me what I think. My father's a grease-coated crook, my mother did a bolt, my brother's a prick, my sister's worse, and my wife has left me an
d married a bloody MP. But I'm not here for any of that, Doctor. I'm here because I got a bullet in my back and the National Health Service has undertaken to put me together again. Doing that does not, repeat not, involve poking about in my doubtlessly addled brain." I stared up at the ceiling. I'd spent nearly a year staring at that bloody ceiling. It was cream-coloured and it had a hairline crack that looked something like the silhouette of a naked woman seen from behind. At least, it looked like that to me, but I thought I'd better not say as much to Doctor Plant or else I'd be strapped on to a couch with the electrodes glued to my scalp. "I delivered a Contessa 32 to Holland once," I said. "Nice boats."

  "They are," she said enthusiastically. "Tell me about your boat."

  I suppose it was because she was a sailor herself that I told her. The trick of surviving the National Torture Service is to have one dream they can't meddle with, one thing that gives you hope, and mine was Sycorax.

  "She's called Sycorax," I said. "Thirty-eight feet, mahogany on oak, with teak decks. Built in 1922 as a gaff-rigged ketch. She was built for a rich man, so no expense was spared. Her usual rig is jib, staysail, main, topsail and mizzen; all heavy cotton. She's got brass scuttles, gimballed oil-lamps in the cabin." My eyes were closed again. "And the prettiest lines this side of paradise. She's dark blue, with white sails. She's got a long keel, is built like a Sherman tank, and can be as cantankerous as the bloody witch she's named after." I smiled, remembering Sycorax 's stiffness in a freshening wind.

  "The witch Sycorax." Doctor Plant frowned with the effort of placing the name. "From Shakespeare?"

  "From The Tempest. Sycorax was Caliban's mother and she imprisoned her enemies in timber. It's a joke, you see, because a timber boat imprisons you with debts."

  Doctor Plant offered a dutiful smile. "I hope you've had her ashore since you've been in here?"

  I shook my head. "I wasn't given time to take her out of the water, but she's sheathed in copper and berthed on a private wharf. She's been battered about a bit, but I can repair her."

  "You're a carpenter?" There was a touch of surprise in her voice.

  I rolled my head to look at her. "Just because I was an Army officer, Doctor Plant, doesn't mean I'm totally bloody useless."

  "You're good at carpentry?" she insisted.

  I held up my hands that were calloused from the exercises I did, but, though the callouses were hard, the fingertips were white and soft. "I used to be. And I was a good mechanic."

  "So you see yourself as a practical man, do you?" she asked with the professional inflection.

  "You're meddling again," I warned her. "You've come here to sing Doctor Maitland's song. Get a skill, Nick. Learn to be an accountant or a computer programmer. Talk to the newspapers, Nick. They'll pay you for the interview and you can buy a nice little electrically-driven wheelchair with the cash. In short, give up, Nick, surrender. But if I'd wanted to do that, Doctor, I'd have stayed in the Army. They offered me a desk job."

  She stood and went to the window. A cold wind drove spits of winter rain against the glass. "You're a very stubborn man, Mr Sandman."

  "It's true."

  "But how will your stubbornness cope when you discover that you can't walk?" She turned from the window with a quizzical look on her motherly face. "When you discover that you'll never sail your Sycorax again?"

  "Next year"—I ignored her blunt questions—"I'm going to take her south. I'm going to New Zealand. There's no particular reason for New Zealand, so don't ask." At least, there was no particular reason I could think of. I knew no one in New Zealand, had never been there, but somehow the place had become my Promised Land. I knew they played good rugby and cricket, had splendid sailing waters, and it seemed like a place where an honest man could spend honest days unencumbered by the pomposities of self-important fools. Doubtless, if I ever reached New Zealand, I would discover I'd deceived myself, but that disappointment could wait till my boat made its far landfall. "I'll sail to the Azores first," I went on dreamily, "then across to Barbados, south to Panama, across to the Marquesas..."

  "Not round the Horn?" Doctor Plant interrupted sharply.

  I gave her a warning look. "More meddling?"

  "It isn't an unfair question."

  "You think I don't want to go to the South Atlantic again?"

  She paused. "That thought did cross my mind, yes."

  "I don't have nightmares, Doctor, only dreams." That wasn't true. I still woke up shivering and thinking of an island in the South Atlantic, but that was my business, not hers.

  Doctor Plant smiled. "Dreams can come true, Nick."

  "Don't patronize me, Doctor."

  She laughed and suddenly sounded much more like a sailor than a psychiatrist. "You really are a stubborn bastard, aren't you?"

  I was, and two weeks later, though I told no one, I managed to hobble, hop and shuffle as far as the window. It took three minutes, much pain, and my breath was rasping like glasspaper in my throat when I finally clutched the sill and rested my forehead against the cold glass. It was a cloudless winter night and there was a full moon over the hospital grounds where the bare trees were frosting black and silver. A car turned a corner in the neighbouring housing estate and its headlights dazzled me for an instant, then were gone. When my night vision returned I searched for Aldebaran among the stars. There had been a time when I would bring that far sun sweetly down to the dawn's horizon, mastering it with the miracle of a sextant's mirror. Now I was a shivering cripple, but somewhere far to the west and south my boat waited. She would be plucking at her warps, rubbing her rope fenders against the stone quay, and waiting, like me, to be released to the long long winds under Aldebaran's cold light.

  Because one day, whatever the bloody doctors said, Sycorax would take me to New Zealand. Just the two of us in great waters, sailing south, and free.

  PART ONE

  I walked out of the hospital fourteen months later.

  I knew Doctor Maitland would have told the press that I was leaving, so I discharged myself two days early. I didn't want any fuss. I just wanted to get back to Devon and walk into the pub and pretend I'd been away for a week or two, nothing more.

  So I limped down the hospital drive and told myself that the pain in my back was bearable, and that the hobbling walk was not too grotesque. I caught a bus at the hospital gate, then a train to Totnes, and another bus that twisted its way into the steep river-cut hills of the South Hams. It was winter's end and there were snowdrops in the hedgerows. I wanted to cry, which was why I'd told no one that I was coming home, for I had known just how glad I would be to see the hills of Devon.

  I asked the bus-driver to drop me at the top of Ferry Lane. He watched me limp down the vehicle's steps and heard me gasp with the effort of the last, deep drop to the road. "Are you all right, mate?"

  "I'm fine," I lied. "I just want to walk."

  The door hissed shut and the bus grumbled away towards the village while I went haltingly down the lane which led to the old ferry slip. From there I would be able to stare across the river at Sycorax.

  To stare at my home, for, however battered she might be by the winter's ice and gales, Sycorax was home. She was the only home I had, or wanted any more, and it had been thoughts of her that had steered me through the long months to this moment when I walked towards her.

  Or rather limped. It hurt to walk, but I knew it would hurt for the rest of my life. I'd simply have to live with the pain, and I'd decided that the best way to do that was to forget it, and that the best way to forget it was to think of something else.

  That was suddenly easy, for, as I turned the steep corner halfway to the river, a watery sunlight reflected with surprising brilliance from the windows of my father's old house which stood high on the far bank.

  I stopped. The new owner of the house had extended the river facade, making a great sweep of plate glass that looked down the wide expanse of sloping lawns to the water. The towering mast my father had put on the terrace still stood com
plete with its crosstree, shrouds and angled yard. No flag hung from the mast, suggesting that the house was empty. To me, as I gazed across the river, the house seemed like a foreign place for which my visa had long been cancelled.

  I picked up my small bag and hobbled on. In summer this lane was busy with dinghy-sailors who trailed their craft to the water's edge, but now, in the wake of winter's cold, there was just one car parked at the head of the old slip. It was a big shooting-brake filled with paint and tools and warps and all the other gear needed to ready a boat for the season. A middle-aged man was stowing cans and brushes into a bag. "Morning! It's a bright one, isn't it?"

  "It is," I agreed. There were a dozen boats moored out—only a handful compared to the scores that would use the anchorage in summer, but just enough to hide Sycorax from me. She was on the wharf by the deep cut that led to my father's old boathouse on the far bank.

  The tide was ebbing. I hoped the middle-aged man would ignore me now, for this was the moment that had kept me alive through all the months of hospital and pain. This was the dream; to see the boat that would sail me to New Zealand. I was prepared for the worst, expecting to see her topsides shabby and her hull clawed by the ice of two winters. Jimmy Nicholls had written in the autumn and said she needed work, and I'd read between the lines that it would be a lot of work, but I had persuaded myself that it would be a pleasure to mend Sycorax as the days lengthened and as my own strength seeped back.

  Now, like a child wanting to prolong a treat, I did not look up as I limped to the slip's end. Only when my shoes were almost touching the swirl of falling water did I at last raise my eyes. I was holding my breath. I had come home.

  And Sycorax was gone.

  "Is something wrong?"

  My right leg was shaking uncontrollably. Sycorax was gone. In her place, tied to the ancient wall that was my private berth, was a box-like houseboat.

  "Excuse me?" It was the middle-aged man who had approached me on soft-soled sea-boots. He was embarrassed by needing to ask the question. "Are you all right?"