Hammond Innes - High Stand

Brian looked at me, a half smile and little shrug. ‘So we cut the tow. Agreed?’

I nodded slowly, thinking it wouldn’t take long for the men on the tug to realize the barge was no longer attached. Fog or no fog, their radar would soon pick us up, and then what? But when I tried to explain this to Miriam, she simply said, ‘You’ve still got that gun, Brian. You can hold them off for a rime, and every minute that passes, we’ll be closer to the shore. We won’t have to swim so far.’

She smiled then. She actually smiled, a look of triumph on her face as though what she had said was unanswerable. And in a way it was. Darkness and fog, with a lighthouse three miles away, or daylight in the Strait with some vessel passing us a lot nearer. You could toss a coin as to which was the best course of action. Neither was very sensible or necessarily offered much hope.

‘So we cut the tow,’ I said and Brian nodded.

‘Not much choice.’ That smile again. Then he turned to Miriam. ‘Two rifles, a walkie-talkie and VHF, but no ammunition and that tug a hawser length away. Better get out your prayer mat.’ He swung himself onto the steel rungs. ‘Okay. Let’s go.’ And he began to hoist himself up to the deck.

The wheelhouse was empty and we closed the trap door on whoever was sleeping in the cuddy down below. ‘I’ll leave you to handle things this end,’ he said to me, and he laid his rifle on the shelf in front of the wheel. ‘Start calling on the radio as soon as I’ve slipped the tow and get that Coastguard here quick. I hope to God,’ he added as he pushed out through the leeward door into the night, ‘there’s a quick release on that hawser.’

The door slammed shut, his figure swallowed instantly in the black void of the fog, and we stood there, Miriam and I, waiting. I gave him two minutes by my watch to get up for’ard and work out how the release mechanism worked, then I switched on the VHP set and, with the mike close against my mouth, began calling on channel 16: ‘Coastguard cutter Kelsey. Coastguard cutter Kelsey. This is Redfern calling Kelsey. Come in please, Kelsey.’ To my surprise the Kelsey answered immediately and it was Cornish himself, his voice loud and clear. I gave him our position. ‘We are on the barge and cutting the tow. The tug won’t take long to pick us up and to hold them off we have only two rifles. Hurry, hurry, hurry. It could be a matter of life or death.’

There was a pause, and in that pause I sensed the barge faltering. Then Cornish’s voice again, not speaking to me, but to the tug, warning the Gabriello to heave to and await the Coastguard escort into Victoria. ‘I have you clear and very close on my radar. Do not attempt to make contact with your tow. I repeat — you are not to make contact with or attempt to board that barge. Any such attempt will be resisted by force.’

Fists began pounding at the under side of the trapdoor, a man shouting to be let out. The door to the deck slid open and Brian thrust his head in. ‘Tow released,’ he said. And he added, ‘It slipped away over the bows like a whiplash. Can you feel the difference?’

I actually could. The barge seemed to have gone dead, and I thought it had turned slightly to port, broadside to the wind and the waves. The wind force I estimated at about 4, the rate of drift possibly as much as 2 knots — an hour and a half, maybe two hours before we were blown onto the coast below that lighthouse. It was ridiculous. Long before then the tug would be alongside and ourselves overwhelmed, or else swimming for it.

‘Did you raise the cutter?’

‘Yes.’

‘How far away?’

‘He was wise enough not to say.’

In fact, the cutter was then about six miles seaward of us, steaming at the same speed and on a parallel course, but keeping several miles astern. When he had failed to pick us up on his radar at Pearl Rocks, or to identify us amongst the traffic west of the Rankin Shoals, he had headed south at full speed with the intention of intercepting and identifying the tow as it entered the Queen Charlotte Strait. Only after he had wasted most of the night lying in the fairway between the BC mainland and the top of Vancouver Island watching for us on his radar did he finally come to the conclusion that the Gabriello was taking the open sea route. It had then taken him almost eight hours to catch up with us so that it was well past midday before he had finally taken station to seaward waiting for the fog to clear so that a helicopter could fly in with police and customs.

Knowing it would take him at least twenty minutes to close with us, and having got no reply from the Gabriello, Cornish came back to me, asking who was on board beside myself. Then he wanted to know about Tom Halliday, and when I told him he had been killed and his wife had been held prisoner in a lakeside hut high in the mountains above High Stand, he didn’t waste time asking for details but began a series of calls, first to the lighthouse, then to any other vessel that might be close to us. As it happened a fisherman out of Friendly Cove was just clearing Yuquot Point heading south-west out of Nootka Sound. Cornish asked him to close us at all possible speed and monitor our drift. All this came out on the loudspeaker of our VHP set. What we didn’t know was that at the same time he was in radio-telephone communication with the RC Centre at Victoria and that, despite the fog, a helicopter was being scrambled.

It was at this point that the lights of the tug suddenly loomed out of the fog, her blunt bows thrusting towards us, her superstructure a dim outline. By then the barge was virtually stationary, wallowing in the wind with the waves slapping noisily at her rusty sides. The tug struck us amidships, thumping and scraping as the bows rose and fell, men scrambling for’ard to leap aboard us. Brian had retrieved the rifle and was standing in the open doorway of the wheelhouse so that they could see he was armed.

They paused. A voice shouted to them over a loudhailer and at the same instant a klaxon sounded very loud and just astern of us. A searchlight beam stabbed the shifting grey banks of fog, white bows and a wheelhouse with rods like antennae either side of a short mast festooned with aerials. It was the fishing vessel out of Friendly Cove. The radio was suddenly full of talk as the fisherman spoke to the skipper of the tug and Captain Cornish’s voice broke in with instructions to the tug: ‘You will stand off from the barge. I repeat, stand off from the barge.’

For a moment everything seemed to freeze as though in a picture, the tug with its bows thrusting against us and three men up for’ard with another coming out of the wheelhouse with a rifle in his hand, and just off our starb’d quarter the white shadow of the fishing boat hanging there in the fog.

It was like that for a moment, then the picture shattered, everything happening at once. We fell off the back of a wave into a deep hollow, the barge rolling and Miriam flung against me. The trap door broke open and was flung back to reveal the heaving shoulders of a powerfully built man in an open shirt with black hair and staring eyes. I kicked out at him, an instinctive reaction with Miriam clinging to me, her mouth open and her face gone white in a blazing beam of light. The fog rolled clear, a gap in the swirling mist and the lighthouse staring at us, one-eyed like a Cyclops, across a welter of breaking waves.

For an instant the scene was lit like a film set, the tug’s bows buried under water as they fell against us, the three men on its deck lying in a huddle of tangled limbs and the ghostly fishing boat rolling its gunnels under, mast and rods dipping towards us. ‘Philip! I’m going. Come with me. It’s so near.’