Peter May - The Chessmen

He stood beside Donnie, holding on to the black tubular superstructure above the cockpit, and tried to see through the spray and mist in the direction that Kenny had taken his boat. He caught only flashes of orange through the spume and surge of the waves. The wind whipped at his hair and his clothes, the noise of it deafening him, seawater soaking him. And he suddenly felt vulnerable without a life jacket, clutching black tubing with quickly numbing fingers as the boat pitched and rolled with increasingly violent frequency.

George Gunn still squatted on the floor, his back to the engine cowling now, his phone returned to his pocket and his face the colour of ash. He glanced up at Fin with troubled dark eyes that he quickly closed, taking long, deep gulps of air, and Fin wondered how long he was going to last without throwing up.

The shore lifted up in black jagged layers on either side as they sped out across Uig bay, the tiny islands of Tom and Tolm and Triassamol passing in a dark-grey blur. Once out of the shelter of the bay itself the swell increased, an almost translucent emerald green lifting them out of deep troughs through breaking, bubbling foam, to drop them just as suddenly into the next. It felt as if they were being swallowed whole by the sea, then spat out again. Fin wondered how much of this the Delta could take as they swung north, Kenny’s boat a good five hundred yards ahead of them and barely visible.

They hugged a coastline that rose sheer out of the water now. The tide had turned and was breaking angrily over black gneiss in a frothing fury, driven in by wind increasing in strength and chill. Fin felt the cold seeping into his bones, and began to wonder if there was any point in this. If it had been Kenny on his own, perhaps not. He would have come ashore somewhere and was bound to have been picked up. But he had Anna with him, and in his present state of mind it was impossible to predict what he might do.

‘We’re not getting any closer,’ Fin shouted above the roar of the motor.

‘I can’t go any faster than he is,’ Donnie shouted back. It was a constant battle for him just to keep the boat from being driven against the rocks as waves slammed into them side on and threatened to tip them over. Fin cast his eyes towards the cliffs and the deep fissures that cracked them open, seawater boiling all around the reefs at each entrance, throwing spray thirty feet and more into the air.

It was fully twenty minutes before they reached the tip of the peninsula at Gallan Head where for a moment they were fully exposed to the anger of the incoming ocean. Kenny’s boat had vanished two minutes ahead of them. A distraught George Gunn crawled on his hands and knees to the back of the boat, where he saw his vomit whipped away on the wind.

But once they had rounded the headland they were sheltered from the wind, and the ocean calmed to a deep, steady swell. The water was impenetrably green, and there was no sign of Kenny’s boat.

Fin frowned and peered along the line of the shore ahead of them. In the very far distance he could see a stretch of empty beach, and off to their left, beyond the next headland, the islands of Pabaigh Beag and Pabaigh Mor lifting themselves in a rise of glistening blue cliffs out of the heaving waters of An Caolas.

‘Where the hell are they?’

Donnie eased off on the throttle, and they reduced speed to a gentle cruise. ‘There are inlets and caves all along the coastline here, Fin. He could be anywhere.’

Gunn stumbled unsteadily back to the cockpit. He was the same colour as the sea. ‘The helicopter’s on its way,’ he said. ‘They might be able to spot him.’

For the next ten minutes they cruised slowly along the ragged line of high cliffs that cast their shadow on the water. They could hear the sea sucking and growling as it snapped around the rocky openings to caves and chasms. Fin looked up as he heard the rotors of the helicopter, which just half an hour before had been taking joyriders on flights over the mountains. Gunn’s phone rang and he pressed it to his ear. He nodded and his eyes flashed towards Fin.

‘They can see his wake. It seems to disappear right into the cliffs. He’s either gone down or he’s gone into a cave.’

‘How much further on?’ Donnie called over his shoulder.

‘About half a kilometre, they say.’

Donnie accelerated forward then, and they picked up speed over the next several hundred yards, their bow rising into the waves, sending yet more spray back in their faces. Fin was shivering almost uncontrollably now.

‘There,’ Donnie said, and they slowed again. Fin saw the pale wash left by the wake of Kenny John’s boat, clearly visible in the deep, dark green. It turned in towards stacks of rock rising out of swirling froth, and they saw the treacherous teeth of granite and gneiss that would rip their inflatable open if they were to deviate even fractionally from the course that Kenny had taken before them. Either he knew these waters like the back of his hand, or he was being driven by God knew what emotional turbulence into taking insane risks.

Donnie slowed to one or two knots. They drifted gently forward between the rocks into a deep natural arch that curved darkly over their heads. It had been chiselled by the elements out of the oldest rock on the planet over millions of years, and daylight reflected off every salt-soaked face of it. Now, in the shelter of the cliffs, the wind dropped to a murmur and the sound of the Yamaha engine clattered back at them off the walls of the tunnel. The helicopter overhead vanished from sight and the sound of its rotors was lost. The water sighed and sloshed and echoed around them, until they emerged into a tiny bay, completely encircled by cliffs, rock white-streaked with guano. The roar of the rotors returned, reverberating off every hard surface of the confined space. Gulls turned and screamed above their heads, scattering in the downdraught.

Fin turned to Gunn. ‘For God’s sake, George, tell them to stand off. We can’t hear a thing.’

Gunn barked into his phone and the chopper wheeled away out of sight. An eerie silence fell. Only the sea whispered to them in the gloom, beneath the dull, repetitive idle of their motor.

The pale wake of Kenny’s boat crossed the short stretch of enclosed water and vanished into a deep cleft in the cliff face. Sharply cut seams of vividly coloured rock folded themselves over the entrance to what appeared to be a cave. Layers of lucent blue and yellow, orange, green and red. Foam gathered in an eddying circle at its entrance, and deep inside the darkness of the cave itself the sea moaned like some distressed sea mammal.

Donnie inched them forward, daylight fading behind them, the way ahead obscure and uncertain.

‘Cut the motor,’ Fin said, and in the silence that followed they could hear the idling of Kenny’s engine somewhere further on, and the shrill sound of querulous voices echoing around the dark of this naturally vaulted cathedral cave. Fin reached above his head and found one of several spotlights bolted to the crossbar. He fumbled for a switch to turn it on, and suddenly the cave was flooded with light, the colours of the rock startling and lurid.

Kenny’s Delta rose and fell on the gentle interior swell about thirty feet deeper into the cave. He and Anna were standing up in the bow of the boat arguing, her voice rising higher than his in anger and confusion. Both turned wide eyes towards the light, then screwed them up in the glare of it. Kenny raised an open palm to cast a shadow across his face, like someone caught unawares by the flash of a camera. In the darkness, it was a face burned out by the light. Mouth, nostrils and eyes black holes configured only to convey his fear.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ It was Anna Bheag’s voice that echoed around the cave.