Charles Williams - Aground

“Do you suppose they’ll try to come aboard right now?” Rae asked.

“I don’t know,” Ingram said. “They might wait till dark if they know for sure we can’t get the telephone working. . . .” His voice trailed off then as he stared out at the raft. Ruiz had picked up the oars, but he wasn’t pulling toward Morrison. He was headed due south, away from both the schooner and the sand spit.

“What is it?” Rae Osborne asked, puzzled. “Where’s he going?”

“Over the hill,” Ingram said softly. He shook his head. A hundred miles—with no compass, and no water.

Morrison was plunging ahead, beckoning violently with his arm. Then he stopped and leveled the BAR. Ruiz kept right on rowing. They saw the burst chew up the surface behind him and come upward across the raft, and then his body shook and jumped under the impact and he fell sideways and rolled over with his head and shoulders in the water. The collapsing raft spun slowly around in spreading pink and drifted away to the eastward on the tide. Rae Osborne made a retching sound and turned away.

9

Morrison had turned and was wading back to the sand spit.

Rae Osborne sank down unsteadily on the cockpit cushions. “Why do you suppose he did it? Ruiz, I mean.”

Ingram shook his head. “Whatever his reasons were, he took ‘em with him. I think he’d finally just had all of this thing he could stomach. He wasn’t Morrison’s type of goon.”

“I think Morrison’s a psychopath.”

“Ruiz was probably beginning to have the same idea.”

“At least Morrison didn’t get the raft. But how will losing it affect us?”

“Not a great deal,” Ingram replied. “I was going to use it to carry out the kedge anchor, but I can still swing it. We’d better get started, though. It’ll be high tide in around three hours.”

“Rut what about the radio?”

“We’ll try that first. But don’t bet on it.”

They went down the ladder. The air was stifling below decks, with a sodden and lifeless heat that seemed to press in on them with almost physical weight. There were still some thirty or forty wooden cases stacked along the sides of the large after cabin, and the deck was littered with discarded rope lashings. He turned to the radiotelephone on its shelf aft on the port side. He loosened the knurled thumbscrews and slid out the drawer containing the transmitter section. Four of the tubes were gone from the sockets. Rae Osborne looked at him questioningly.

“Ruiz told me they threw them overboard,” Ingram said. “He could have been lying, of course, but I’m not so sure. They wouldn’t have let you wander around on here so freely if there’d been any chance of getting this thing operating again.”

“That’s right, too. But at least we can try.”

He nodded. “And another thing. While you’re searching, keep an eye open for a diving mask. I could use one, and most boats have a few kicking around somewhere. You start up in the crew’s quarters and work back through the galley. I’ll start here and go forward. But first I’d better check Morrison.”

There was a pair of big 7-X-50 glasses in a bracket above the navigator’s table on the starboard side. He grabbed these and went on deck. Crouching in the cockpit, he focused them on the sand spit. At first he couldn’t see the man, and began to feel uneasy. Then he swept the area around the piled boxes again and caught a momentary glimpse of the broad back just behind them. He was bent over, working on something on the ground. Ingram nodded. Trying to chew his way into those boxes, he thought; he’s got six hundred rifles over there and enough ammunition for two or three small wars. He’ll try his best to keep us pinned down here till he can make it back aboard.

He returned below and began the search for the tubes. He went over every inch of the after cabin, moving the crated guns around to get at things. He searched the drawers under the bunks, and the spaces beneath the drawers, the chart stowage, medicine locker, inside the RDF and the all-wave radio, book racks, clothing lockers, and even in the bilge. He found a carton of radiotelephone spare parts which contained several tubes, but they were apparently all for the receiver; at any rate, none matched the type numbers stamped beside the empty sockets. He moved into the two double staterooms that faced each other across the narrow passageway connecting the main cabin and the galley, but found nothing except the suitcase which had apparently belonged to Ives.

By this time Rae Osborne had been through everything in the galley. “No tubes,” she said. “But here’s a diving mask I found in a locker up forward.” They went aft. Ingram looked at his watch; it was 2:20 p.m.

“Scratch the radiotelephone,” he said. “So we either refloat the schooner or stay here.”

“Can we do it?” she asked.

“I think so—” He broke off suddenly and listened. She had heard it too, and looked at him with some alarm. It was a rifle shot, coming to them faintly across the water. There was another. She waited tensely, and then shook her head with a rueful smile. “Makes me nervous, waiting for it to hit.”

“Don’t give it a thought,” he said. “If it’s going to hit anything, it already has before you hear the shot. The bullet travels about twice as fast as the sound. I think he’s sighting in one of those rifles. Keep listening.”

He had hardly finished speaking when something struck the hull just forward of them with a sharp thaaack, followed a fraction of a second later by the sound of the shot. She nodded.

There were four or five more shots, and then the firing ceased. “He’s warning us to stay off the deck, so we can’t do anything about getting her afloat,” Ingram explained.

She looked worried. “What do we have to do? And can we do it?”

“I think so. The first thing is to finish lightening ship. I’ll need the mattresses off all those bunks.”

She gave him a burlesque salute, and a lopsided smile that was inhibited on one side by the grandfather of all shiners. “One order of mattresses coming up. I wouldn’t know what for, but you seem to know what you’re doing.”

He grinned briefly. “Let’s just hope you still think so twenty-four hours from now.”

While she was bringing the mattresses, he picked out three of the long wooden boxes that apparently contained disassembled machine guns, and shoved them up the ladder. After going into the cockpit himself but staying down to keep out of sight, he laboriously worked them up onto the deck and lined them up end-to-end along the starboard side of the cockpit. When he was putting the second one in place, Morrison began shooting again. Two bullets struck the hull, one directly below him. She was pushing the mattresses up the ladder now. There were ten altogether. He propped six up along the outside of the machine-gun boxes and laid four in a pile atop the deckhouse just forward of the hatch. They should shield the cockpit against direct gunfire and the danger of flying splinters. They knelt for a moment behind them, resting in the shade of the awning. “Cozy,” she said appreciatively. Just then Morrison opened fire again with a string of three shots. All three of them struck the same spot, the outer mattress propped against the forward machine-gun box.

Ingram frowned. “With iron sights, at three hundred yards? He’s bragging.” Two more slapped against the same mattress; they could see the upper edge kick as they hit. He grabbed the glasses and peered cautiously over the ones atop the deckhouse. Morrison was firing from a prone position, using a rest made up of one of the cases and what appeared to be a rolled blanket, the one they’d left over there. But it was the rifle that caught his eye and caused him to whistle softly; it had a telescopic sight.