Authors: Bernard Cornwell
I tossed the soaking chart into the skiff and stooped to see if there was anything else I should take from the cabin. I was not searching for plunder, but rather for any clue as to who might have owned this boat or what might have provoked its destruction. I found nothing, except that as I stepped back from the companionway my bare feet trod hard and painfully on some lumpish sharp objects. I ducked down in the cockpit, groped on the grating underfoot, and came up with a handful of cartridge cases. Some were brass, but most were green-lacquered steel. They were 7.62 millimetre cartridges, military issue, and I had a half-memory from the dozy days when I had slept through the perfunctory Warsaw Pact familiarisation lectures that only a few East European countries lacquered steel cartridges green.
It was all very peculiar. A Belgian boat in Bahamian waters with Warsaw Pact cartridges? What was clear to me was that someone must have stood in this cockpit and fired a machine-gun down the companionway into the main-cabin. They had hoped to shatter the bottom of the hull so that
Hirondelle
would sink without trace, but they had not reckoned with the foam sandwiched in the boat’s hull, and thus the evidence of their crime, if crime it was, still floated.
Thessy had started
Wavebreaker’s
engines. The wind had been driving the big schooner down on to
Hirondelle
so now Thessy gave the schooner’s propellers a burst of power that churned the sea white and drove her clear. The schooner’s shadow vanished, letting the new day’s sun slash at me with brilliant force and lance through a line of bullet holes that had pierced the side of
Hirondelle’
s coachroof. The shafts of new sunlight lay like spears of gold in the cabin’s muck-ridden gloom. I wondered if I should explore the boat further, but decided that such an exploration was best left to the police.
I tossed my handful of cartridge cases into the skiff, then went forrard along
Hirondelle
’s flooded deck to where an undamaged whisker pole lay in its foredeck clips. I tied the red shirt to the pole’s top, then rammed my makeshift flagpole into one of the bullet holes so that the treacherous hulk would be visible to any other mariner. Then I climbed back into the skiff, feeling oddly desolate. There is something very sad about mindless destruction, especially of a boat.
I went back to
Wavebreaker
where, as Thessy stowed the skiff, I called the Royal Bahamian Defence Forces on the VHF radio. I reported our position and my opinion that
Hirondelle
was a danger to navigation; then, feeling very virtuous, I revealed my discovery of the empty cartridge cases and my suspicions that the Belgian boat, and perhaps its crew, had met with a sinister fate. The Bahamian radio operator did not seem particularly interested.
Ellen, who had come below to pull on a pair of shorts and a shirt, listened to the last words of my transmission. “That was a waste of time,” she said scornfully.
“Why?” I had long learned not to be offended by Ellen’s caustic remarks. She had an Irish-American mother and a Polish-American father, which volatile blend had produced a girl of startling beauty and nitro-glycerine temper.
“Just what do you think happened to that boat?” she asked me in a venomous voice. “You think it’s something simple like an insurance scam? Or a clumsy waste-disposal job?” She paused, waiting for my answer, but I gave her none. “Drugs,” she answered for me.
“We don’t know that,” I protested.
“Oh, Nick!” Ellen was exasperated. “These are the Bahamas! Whoever was on that boat was stupid enough to get involved with drugs, and if you get involved with that boat’s fate, then you’ll be just as stupid. Which means that you should chuck that chart and those cartridges overboard. Now.”
“I shall hand them over to the proper authorities,” I said stubbornly.
“God save me from feeble-minded males.” She turned towards the galley. “You want some coffee?”
“The prime purpose of the Defence Forces is to guarantee freedom of navigation in Bahamian waters,” I said very pompously.
“Oh, sure!” Ellen laughed as she pumped water into the kettle. Thessy was still on deck where he had reset
Wavebreaker’s
sails and taken the helm. I glanced at the fluxgate compass over the chart table to see that we were once again heading northwards. Ellen lit the galley stove, then unscrewed the lid from the jar of instant coffee. “The real purpose of the Bahamian Defence Forces”—she pointed a teaspoon at me to emphasise her words—”is to present the appearance of being zealously engaged in the war against drugs; which appearance of diligence is designed solely to placate the American government who otherwise might issue an official warning to its citizens that the Bahamas are no longer a safe destination for the vacation trade, which warning will effectively stifle the islands’ tourist and casino trade which, after drugs, are its most profitable industries.” She offered me the pitying and self-satisfied smile of someone who has just proved a debating point. “So no one will thank you for drawing attention to a visiting yacht filled with inconvenient bullet holes. Such things are bad for the tourist business.”
“Thank you for explaining it, Professor,” I said sarcastically.
She grimaced at me. Ms Ellen Skandinsky, PhD, never liked being reminded that she had abandoned a tenured professorship in Women’s Studies to run away to sea; a decision that she liked to portray as quixotic, but which I suspected had been sparked by the pure boredom and pomposity of academic life. Ellen herself swore that she had made the change in order to discover ‘real life’, a commodity evidently unavailable on campus and one which she believed necessary to her true ambition, which was to be a writer. For Ellen, ‘real life’ had proved to be a one-room cold-water apartment behind the Straw Market, an unpaid volunteer’s job with a Bahamian Literacy Project, and a paid job as a ship’s cook, a job so traitorous to her former life and feminist beliefs that even she was astonished to discover that she enjoyed it. I think Ellen had been even more astonished to discover that she and I had become friends in the months we had worked together, no more than friends, but close enough for her to be wondering whether to sail away with me around the world. Not in
Wavebreaker,
but in my own boat that needed to be rebuilt before I took it across the South Pacific.
I heard a whine of servo-motors and guessed that Thessy had turned on the automatic pilot. He came down the companionway, holding the chart I had rescued from
Hirondelle
and which I had spread to dry on
Wavebreaker’s
deck. The torn paper was still sodden. “Nick?” There was consternation in his voice. “Do you know vere they vere two nights ago?” Thessy had the Bahamian out-islander’s odd Dickensian accent. He was seventeen years old, skinny as a sopping-wet cat, and was
Wavebreaker
’s first and only mate, which also made him the boat’s steward, gorilla, ship’s boy, skivvy and mascot. His real name was Thessalonians, and he was just as pious as that New Testament name suggested. “Do you see, Nick?” He was pointing at the wet chart that he had draped across the galley table. “They vere there just two days ago. Only two days!”
The chart had been soaked in sea-water, but salt cannot remove the pencil notations from a chart, and whoever had sailed
Hirondelle
had been a meticulous navigator. A pencil line extended from No Name Bay just south of Miami and reached across the Gulf Stream and into the Bahamas.
Hirondelle’
s navigator had sailed much of the course by dead reckoning, and I could see just where that navigator had finally taken a fix and discovered that he or she had underestimated the northwards current of the Gulf Stream, but by very little, so that the Belgian yacht had only been five nautical miles off its estimated course. That course had curved to the south of Bimini towards a tiny island, lost all by itself between the Biminis and the Berrys, with the unprepossessing name of Murder Cay. The pencil line ended there, punctuated by a small circle enclosing a dot beside which the navigator had written the date and time of
Hirondelle’
s arrival. And that arrival, as Thessy had noted, had been just two days before. No neat pencilled line betrayed
Hirondelle’
s departure from the ill-named Murder Cay.
I had never noticed the island before, despite its most noticeable name. It was a very small island, a mere speck that lay some twenty miles south-east from
Wavebreaker’s
present position, and that was exactly the direction from which the currents and wind would drive a derelict boat.
I fetched the pilot book and looked up Murder Cay, but found no listing for the grimly named island. “Try Sister Island,” Ellen suggested laconically.
It seemed a perverse suggestion, but Ellen’s perversity was often justified, so I duly looked up Sister Island and discovered that was the new name for Murder Cay. The Pilot Book offered no explanation for that change of name, which seemed a deal of trouble for what must be one of the smallest inhabited islands in all the Bahamas. Sister Island was only three miles long and was never more than a half-mile wide. The island’s southernmost promontory was marked with a white light which was meant to flash three times every fifteen seconds and be visible up to five miles away, but the book ominously reported that the light was ‘unreliable’. The whole island was surrounded by coral reefs called the Devil’s Necklace, and I wondered what unfortunate sailor had given the island and its reefs their macabre names. The deep-water access to Murder Cay lay through a dog-legged and unbuoyed passage to the west of the island. The best guide to the deep-water approach seemed to be a tall skeleton radio mast that was conveniently opposite the passage entrance and was supposedly marked with red air-warning beacons. There was an airstrip on the island which should have displayed a flashing green and white light, but, like the white light and the air-warning beacons, the green and white light was also said to be unreliable. The eastern part of the lagoon evidently offered good shelter, but the pilot book noted that the island had no facilities for visiting yachts. In other words, mariners were being warned to keep away from Murder Cay, yet the pencil line on
Hirondelle’
s chart led inexorably to that island, and there it had ended.
“The government decided the old name was bad for the tourist business,” Ellen remarked in an odd sort of voice, almost as if she was trying to reassert a commonplace normality over the sinister implications of that line on an abandoned chart.
“Perhaps the islanders shot the crew,” I said, but in a voice that carried no conviction for, despite the missing crew and the all-too-present cartridges, I really could not believe that murder had been done on Murder Cay. I did not want to believe in murder. I wanted the boat’s fate, like I wanted life, to be explicable without causing me astonishment. I had been brought up in a house that specialised in giving astonishment, which was why I had run away from home to become a Royal Marine. The Marines had toughened me, and taught me to swear and fight and screw and drink, but they had not taught me cynicism, nor had they obliterated the innocent hope for innocent explanations. “Perhaps,” I amended my previous supposition, “it’s just an accident.”
“Whatever happened,” Ellen said brusquely, “it’s none of our business.”
“And Mr Mclllwanney varned us to stay avay from the island!” Thessy said.
I remembered no such warning, but Thessy went to the shelves under the chart table and found one of Mclllvanney’s green sheets of paper. I hardly ever read Mclllvanney’s self-styled Notices to Mariners, and I had clearly overlooked this warning that was brief and to the point. ‘You will stay away from Sister Island. The Royal Bahamian Defence Forces have issued a warning that the island’s new owners don’t like trespass, and I don’t want to lose any boats to that dislike, so ALL Cutwater Charter Boats will henceforth keep AT LEAST five nautical miles from Sister Island until further notice.’
I thought of the bullet holes that had shattered
Hirondelle’
s once elegant hull. “Those poor bastards,” I said softly.
“It’s not our business, Nick,” Ellen said in warning.
I looked again at McIllvanney’s notice. “Do you think the island’s new owners are mixed up in drugs?” I asked.
Ellen sighed. She is much given to long-suffering sighs which are her way of informing the male part of the world that it is ineradicably dim-witted. “Do you think they smuggle auto-parts, Nick? Or lavatory paper? Of course they’re into drugs, you airhead. And that is why it is not our business.”
“I never said it was our business,” I spoke defensively.
“So throw those cartridges overboard and lose that chart,” Ellen advised me very curtly.
“The police should see them,” I insisted.
“You are a fool, Nicholas Breakspear,” Ellen said, but not in an unkind manner.
“I’ve already advised the Defence Forces that the police should look at the boat,” I said.
Ellen gave another of her long-suffering sighs. “The dragons won, Nick, and the knights errant lost. Don’t you know that? You’ve delivered the message, so now forget it! No chart. No cartridges. It’s over. No heroics!”
She meant well, but I could not forget
Hirondelle,
because something evil had stirred in this paradise of beaches and lagoons and palm-covered islands, and I wanted the authorities to take the damp torn chart and to find just what lay at the end of its carefully pencilled line. So I shrugged off Ellen’s cynical and doubtless sensible pleading, and went topsides to take the helm.
Wavebreaker’s
wake lay white and straight across a brilliant sunlit sea on which, far to our west, I could see a string of grey warships that were American naval vessels come to the Bahamas for an exercise called Stingray. The sight of the flotilla reminded me of my time in the Royal Marines, and I felt a rueful envy of the American Marines who had this tropical playground with its warm seas and palm trees for their training. I had learned the killing trade under the bitter flail of Norwegian sleet and Scottish snow, but that was all in my past, and now I was a free man and I had just one more charter to skipper, after which I could mend my own boat and sail her on new paths across old oceans.