The Going Down of the Sun (27 page)

“You mean you can't take this boat through that channel without someone hanging over the front shouting out how deep the water is?”

I shrugged ingenuously. “That's how I've always done it. We can try it by guess and by God, but my guess is we'll hole her. But listen, you're in charge. All I'm saying is, if I was calling the shots, no way would I go through there without a look-out in the bows.” It was at least half true. The other half was that I wouldn't try it with someone in the bows either.

“All right,” said Mackey, turning away. “Barry'll do it.”

“Lib hell Barry'll do it,” retorted the big man fast. “You're the one fancies himself as Captain Bligh: if there's any hanging out over waves to be done, you'll be the one doing it.”

They glared at each other for so long I began to wonder if I should propose the obvious solution. But Mackey got there on his own. “Curragh can do it.”

It was gone seven o'clock when
Flag
drove her unlovely nose where angels fear to tread. The tide had been ebbing for three hours: the main overfall would be like a step, a wall of tumbling waters for
Flag
to climb. If we got that far. If the whirlpools didn't get us first.

Stifling my deep misgivings as best I could—because if the ungodly could be kept in the dark for just a few minutes longer it wouldn't matter what they guessed then—I said, “I'm going to need that lookout now.”

Mackey opened the cabin door. “Curragh, get out here.” Because Alex and I were now both on deck, and Duncan no danger to anyone, he didn't bother to shut the door again.

I explained to Alex for all the world as if we hadn't spent long minutes going over it in microscopic detail in the cabin. He nodded. “OK.” I raised a minutely inquiring eyebrow to ask if he'd secured Duncan as I'd instructed, and with as tiny a nod he confirmed that he had.

There was nothing more to be done, except to do it. Alex went forward; I fastened both hands firmly on the wheel.

If either of them had known the first thing about boats, the ungodly would have guessed that something was wrong before
Flag
was much more than her own length into the strait. Narrow channels often develop powerful and characteristic currents, but not like this. That short hard chop of the sea, all temper and no direction, coming from nowhere and with nowhere to escape to, was telling enough. It snapped and slapped at
Flag
's hull, pushing her this way and that, and her steering deteriorated rapidly from idiosyncratic to barely possible. The bottom of the channel must have been in a state of the utmost chaos to foster such disturbance.

While I was wrestling with the steering, scared of the speed we were doing but reluctant to sacrifice any of the manoeuvring power of those big engines when the rudder itself was so unreliable, we came on fresh evidence of the extreme and extraordinary violence of the forces at work beneath us. Whirlpools spun, deceptively glassy amid the heaving chop, like oases in a desert of warring crests. When we drew closer we could see how their centres were tugged viciously down, so that there were little spinning worm-holes into the heart of the sea. Some of them were just a few feet across, others big enough to take a boat the size of the
Fairy Flag.
I'd heard they could swallow boats whole, so that they'd never come up. I jockeyed the throttles and, the inconstant wheel to keep them at a distance.

But even if they thought the choppiness was to be expected, and the whirlpools and interesting side-effect, God knows what the ungodly made of the noise. They must have been aware of it, been aware that it was growing. At first it sounded a little like peals of distant thunder. By now it was like standing under a railway arch while the Flying Scotsman snorted overhead.

It scared the hell out of me, but then I knew what it was: the sound of millions of tons of wild water battling for control of the narrow strait. Casualties were piling up in white foam on the rocks on either side.
Flag
ploughed on through the increasingly disturbed waves, heaved up now like little pyramids with the wind tearing their peaks off. The wind wasn't actually that strong, but it didn't have to be. The chaos below shoved up crests and pinnacles of water that hadn't the strength of purpose or direction to survive long. It hardly mattered. There were more where those came from.

I found Barry at my shoulder, peering anxiously over the side. The grin I gave him was nothing short of idiotic. “You think this is rough? You should see Corryvreckan.”

There was another reason, beside the steering, to keep
Flag
's speed up as high as my nerve would stand. It was so that, when I started her waltzing, the violence of the movement would be as savage and unpredictable as possible. It was perhaps a lot to hope for that it would catapult both the ungodly over the side, though you never know your luck. It might separate Mackey from his gun. It might render him incapable of using it, if he needed both hands for hanging on. It might reduce him and Barry to the death-seeking misery that is sea-sickness, heaving their guts over a rail, in which case their race was run and we could take them at our leisure.

Whatever the specific consequences, the purpose of this risky manoeuvre was to create a situation in which Alex and I, sailors both, would be more effective than two men whose experience of the sea seemed derived from pedalos on the beach at Ayr. Even when they realised what we'd done, there would be nothing they could do about it: any chance
Flag
had of coming through this depended on Alex and me being fit and free to sail her.

That was the theory. The time had come to test it.

Alex in the bows, his good left hand wrapped round the forestay, his long angular body levered out over the waves, suddenly stiffened and shouted, “Starboard!” and I spun the wheel clockwise for all I was worth.

Flag
reared up like a startled horse, her port rail scraping the sky, seeming to hang over me for a moment before gravity caught her and she slid down the side of the wave, crashing at its foot and sending sheets of foam over the bows. For a dreadful half-second I waited for it to clear, with no forward vision, no knowledge of what lay around me and no certainty that Alex would still be there when it did. Then he reappeared out of the welter, drenched and streaming and with his teeth bared. He pointed with his free plastered arm and I centred the wheel.

William Mackey shoved his face, fish-belly white, between mine and the windshield. “Don't do that again!” The fear in his voice was more than audible, it was tactile.

I pretended innocence. “What? We were coming down on a rock. That's why I needed a look-out. I told you all this.”

“You said this was the safe way!”

“It is. Well, the safest.”

“Hard a-port,” yelled Alex from the bows.

From then on everything happened quickly.
Flag
rocketed from one wave-crest to another, from one beam to the other, more often on her ear than on her feet. I wrestled the wheel with all the strength and skill at my command, fully aware I hadn't enough of either. Once Mackey shoved his gun in my back, but it was gone again before I had time to worry about it. Once Barry cannoned into me, apologising automatically but still gripping me so tightly I couldn't steer the boat.

“Let me go,” I said distinctly in his ear. “Barry, let me go or you'll kill us all.”

His big face slack with fear, his eyes staring almost vacantly, he somehow transferred his grip to the trailing edge of the wheelhouse and froze there, as near immobile as he could make himself.

William stayed coherent a little longer. His face hove again into my narrow field of view as I concentrated on Alex and the mayhem about our bows. His eyes were wild, with terror and anger both, rimmed with white. A froth of spit had gathered at the corner of his mouth and his hair hung sodden in his face. I guessed, without remorse, that he'd chosen the wrong moment to throw up, or possibly the wrong rail to throw up over.

“Starboard,” yelled Alex, barely audible now over the crash of waves, and I did as bid.

I thought Mackey would be gone when we levelled out, but he was still there, still staring whitely at me and now pointing his gun at my eye. I shuddered. Interestingly enough, I was too scared already to accommodate any more fear, but knowing how unsteady he was with that cannon at the best of times, I knew how close I was to death. I said, “If that goes off, there's nothing you can do as quickly as this boat can flip over.”

He howled at me over the storm of waters, “What have you done? Where have you brought us?”

So probably he knew, and anyway it was too late to matter and I had promised myself the pleasure of telling him. “Corryvreckan. I've brought you into hell's kitchen, and by God, if you don't give me that gun right now, I'm going to wash you down the sink.”

“Damn you,” he whispered. I couldn't hear him, I read it on his lips. His eyes were tormented. Not all the salt-water on his face had come over the side: some of it was tears. “Damn you to hell. Take it, and get us the hell out of here.” And he slapped the gun onto the top of the console in front of me and turned away.

For long moments I couldn't take my eyes off the thing, even to lift them by the few inches necessary to see where we were going. We'd done it. Alex had conceived and together we had carried out a plan designed to push all our nerves to the edge. But when we got there Mackey's had broken first. For the first time in ninety minutes I thought we were going to see tomorrow.

I half turned, following the retreat of the man who had plotted my death. From somewhere I had not suspected I found a little gentleness. He was, after all, very young. “William, it's going to be all right. We'll get back now, get Galbraith seen to, get the rest of this mess sorted out. Whatever happens, it won't be as bad as you think and it'll get over. You won't spend the rest of your life running scared.”

It was rather a lengthy speech coming from someone who should have been concentrating on her steering, and when I looked forward again Alex was back on deck and waving wildly. I waved too, and lifted the gun—carefully—for him to see. He didn't seem terribly impressed. He was making his way back up the side deck, awkwardly one-handed but not nearly as awkward as I'd have been, and shouting something I couldn't hear over the roar of the water.

The roar of the water had got an awful lot louder while I was dealing with William.

Alex reached the wheelhouse, swung one-handed round the trailing edge and landed half on his knees at my side. He was so wet it was like having a water-spaniel shake itself beside me. “Put her about,” he yelled, staggering to his feet.

I looked at him. I looked ahead at the chaos of conflicting seas. I looked at the gun on the fascia. Stupidly I said, “I've got the gun.”

“Put her about
now
,” he snarled and grabbed for the wheel.

And it was only then that I saw the wall, the towering overhang of water trying to force its way eastward through Corryvreckan. It couldn't have been as high as it looked, it was a mathematical impossibility, but by God it was high enough. Boats aren't designed to jump, and that's what it would have taken to get up that solid step of sea. Ploughing through it would have taxed a destroyer, and
Flag
only looked like a destroyer, she wasn't built like one.

Someone in the wheelhouse cried out in sheer, inarticulate terror. I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was me: it was the only rational response. That, and getting
Flag
turned round, which is what my two hands and Alex Curragh's one were scrabbling to do even while that cry of despair was still echoing in our ears.

We almost made it.
Flag
answered the rudder like a cow-pony for once instead of a cow, dug her props deep in the broken water and flung her head up towards the north shore. She rolled as her flank met the overfall with a clap like thunder, and for what seemed like a long time she churned on, mostly on her side, one prop still driving her while the other raced wildly in air, her head still struggling round, adamant in her refusal to admit defeat. Water poured over both sides, from the sea below and the overfall above, but she was an old campaigner and she wasn't ready to die yet. I thought that somewhere she'd find the strength and the sea-room to right herself.

I thought that right up to the moment when she turned over.

Two or three times in my life I have come close to the ending of it. Twice, which seems excessive in view of my gentle disposition and kindly nature, people have tried to murder me. But I never got as close as my last breath before, and this time that was all the margin separating me from breakfast with St. Peter. And very hard I'd have found it to explain that, while my life was certainly at hazard due to the actions and intents of others, the thing that finally saw me off was an accident, and more my fault than anyone else's.

With the wheelhouse open to the stem, the sea came in instantly as a solid body. It hit me in the back—I was still approximately at the wheel, though my legs had gone from under me and I was clutching the thing for support rather than with any expectation of being able to steer this boat that had just become a submarine—and threw me face-first against the bulkhead. Water roared in my ears and stars exploded darkly before my eyes. The sheer cold was a physical shock that made me gasp, and half the air in my lungs went that way.

What was left wasn't enough to keep panic at bay, even for the few moments it would have taken to work out which way was up. I could have swum out if I'd kept my nerve long enough to open my eyes, take stock of my surroundings and work out which way I had to go. There was time, even on half a lungful of air. What was lacking was the cold hard mental strength it needed to sacrifice those few moments in weighing up where I was and what I needed to do.

Maybe the shock was part of it, maybe I was a little stunned from my collision with the bulkhead, but mostly I think it was that my reserves of courage, of moral stamina, had hit rock-bottom and there was nothing left to draw on. After Mackey's nerve broke, the malicious spirit of Corryvreckan that we'd tried to harness to our needs had taken its revenge by upping the ante until mine broke too. So I twisted helpless in the flood, arms and legs milling slowly and mind paralysed with fear, only a few feet and one good effort from the air I was dying for lack of.