Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

At which point the dragon growled, or rather I heard a percussive bang and then the throaty roar of big engines, and I knew it was too late to reach Jimmy’s house. I pulled the outboard’s lever towards me and prayed that the puttering little two-stroke could outrun the gleaming monster engines on Wildtrack II ’s stern. I’d forgotten the threat of the big powerboat crouched in Bannister’s boathouse.

Jill-Beth turned as the engine noise splintered in the night. She knew immediately what the sound meant. “That bastard doesn’t give up, does he?”

“A Boer trait.” I was running for the darker western bank where more overhanging trees might hide us. I glanced behind to where the dying flares still silhouetted Sansom’s Point. They also lit the shredding remnants of my smokescreen through which, as yet, there was no sign of the big powerboat.

Jill-Beth was suddenly scared. “He knew why I’m here,” she said in astonishment.

I suspected that I knew why she was here too, but it was no time for explanations because a brilliant stab of white light suddenly slashed across the river. Mulder, if it was Mulder in Wildtrack II , had turned on the boat’s searchlight. He was still beyond Sansom’s Point and the light was far away from us, but I knew it would only be seconds before the powerboat came snarling into our reach of water.

“Come on, you bastard!” I enjoined the engine.

“Jesus!” Jill-Beth cowered as the sharp prow of Wildtrack II burst into view. There was a speed limit of six knots on the river and he must have been doing twenty already and was still accelerating.

That was his mistake, for the acceleration was throwing up his bows so he could not see straight in front. The wake was like twin curls of moonlit gossamer that spread behind him.

“Head down!” I called out. Jill-Beth ducked and the dinghy scraped under branches. I killed the engine as the dinghy’s bows jarred on some obstruction. The searchlight whipped past us as the powerboat slewed round into the main channel. She must have been doing thirty knots now and her engines could have woken the dead in village graveyards a mile away. I scrambled past Jill-Beth and tied the dinghy’s painter to a low bough. “Give me your wet trousers,” I said.

She frowned with puzzlement, but obeyed. I hung the white trousers over the dinghy’s side, looping one leg over the gunwale and hanging the other straight down into the water. “Breaking our shape,” I explained. “He’s looking for a wooden dinghy, not a brown and white pattern.” The drooping tree branches would help confuse our shape, but I knew Mulder’s searchlight was powerful enough to probe through the leaves and I hoped the white cloth would disguise us.

“He’s stopping.” Jill-Beth was down in the dinghy’s bilge and her voice was scarce above a whisper.

The power-boat was slowing and I heard its engines fade to a mutter as its bow dropped and its shining aerofoil hull settled into the current. Mulder had accelerated to where he thought we might be; now he would search. “Head down!” I crouched with Jill-Beth in the boat’s bottom.

The light skidded past us, paused, came back, then went on again.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Wildtrack II was burbling along the river now, searching. Mulder had missed us on his first pass. But he would be back.

Jill-Beth tweaked the trousers I’d hung over the gunwale. “A soldier’s trick?”

“Is it?” I said.

“Because you weren’t injured in a car crash, were you?”

“You shouldn’t listen to gossip at parties.”

“Gossip?” She laughed softly, and her face was so close to mine that I could feel her breath on my cheek. “You’re Captain Nicholas Thomas Sandman, VC. Your last annual report before the Falklands was kind of non-committal. Captain Sandman’s a fine officer, it said, and did well in Northern Ireland, but seems frustrated by the more commonplace duties of soldiering. In brief, he’s not very ambitious.

He spends too much time on his boat. The men liked you, but that wasn’t sufficient reason for the regiment to recommend you for staff college. They really wanted you to leave the regiment to make room for some younger gung-ho type, right? You lacked the motivation to excel, they said, then someone gave you a real live enemy and you proved them all wrong.”

I said nothing for a moment. The water gurgled past our fragile hull. I had pulled away from Jill-Beth, the better to see her face in the shadows. “Who are you?”

“Jill-Beth Kirov, like the ballet.” She grinned, and her teeth showed very white against her dark skin. I raised my head high enough to see Wildtrack II searching the far bank and I made out Mulder’s distinctive silhouette against the glare caused by his searchlight on the thick leaves.

“Who are you?” I asked again.

“I work for a guy called Yassir Kassouli. Heard of him?”

“Bannister’s father-in-law.”

“Ex-father-in-law,” she corrected me, then stiffened suddenly as the searchlight whipped round and seemed to shine straight at the two of us. I saw the willow leaves above our heads turn a mixture of bright silver-green and jet black as the light slashed into the branches. “Jesus!” Jill-Beth hissed.

“It’s all right.” I put an arm over her shoulder to keep her head low. The light swept on, probing another shadow, but I kept my arm where it was. She did not move.

“What do you do for Kassouli?” I whispered the question almost as if I feared Mulder might hear us over the growl of his idling engines.

“Investigator.”

“A private detective?” I asked in some astonishment. I thought private detectives only existed on television, but how else could she have discovered the details of my confidential army file?

“Insurance investigator,” she corrected me. “I work for the marine division of an insurance company that’s a subsidiary of Kassouli Enterprises.”

“What do you investigate?”

“Hell,” she shrugged, “whatever? I mean, if some guy says a million bucks’ worth of custom-built motor yacht just turned itself into a submarine off the Florida Keys, and now he wants us to fork out for a new one, we kind of become curious, right?” I tried to imagine her dealing with crooks, and couldn’t. “You don’t look like an investigator.”

“You expect the Pink Panther? Shit, Nick, of course I don’t look like a cop! Hell, if they see some chick in a bikini they don’t start reaching for their lawyer, do they? They offer me a drink, then they tell me all the things they wouldn’t tell some guy with a tape-recorder.” She peered upriver, but Mulder was now far off the scent.

“And just what are you investigating here?” I asked.

“Nadeznha Bannister’s life was insured with her father’s company for a million bucks. Guess who the beneficiary is?”

“Anthony Bannister?”

“You got it in one, soldier.” She grinned. “But if Nadeznha was murdered, then we don’t have to pay.”

There was something chilling about the calm and amused confidence with which she had spoken of murder; so chilling that I took my arm from her shoulder. “Was she murdered?”

“That’s what I’m trying to prove.” She spoke grimly, intimating that she was not having any great success.

“What else are you doing?” I asked.

She must have heard the suspicion in my voice, for her reply was very guarded. “Nothing else.”

“Dismasting Wildtrack? ” I guessed. “Cutting its warps?”

“Jesus.” She sounded disgusted with me. “You think I’m into that kind of stupidity? Just what kind of a jerk do you think I am?” Then if not her, who? Yet I believed her strenuous denial, because I wanted this girl to be straight and true. “I’m sorry I suggested it,” I said.