Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

I didn’t feel the pain. I lunged through the smoke to the galley compartment where I felt Jennifer rather than saw her. She was crouched down and I simply scooped her up as if she was an unwieldy sailbag and kept on moving. I hit the forecabin’s door and smashed it down with our combined weight. Jennifer screamed with pain. The air was suddenly cool, then instantly heated as the fire found the new oxygen and slashed in after us. Jennifer was moaning. Black smoke writhed round us.

I dropped her against my small workbench, reached up, and undogged the forehatch. “Get out!” I was shouting at her, but at the same time pushing her upwards. Smoke poured past us. I realised she was beyond helping herself, so shoved her out. I followed her, then slammed the hatch shut.

The main cabin looked like a blast furnace as it belched a horror of flame and smoke out of the companionway. The mainsail was on fire. There was no chance of reaching the radio now. I could already feel the heat coming through the teak planks laid over the thin steel deck. I could see no other boats. I didn’t want to look at Jennifer. I had caught glimpses of her burned skin, and I had heard her screams.

The dinghy was still chained to the coachroof so I yanked the liferaft’s lanyard. The lanyard pulled out the split pin which held the metal container to its securing bolt. The container rolled towards me. I picked it up and hurled it over the guardrails. It splashed into the calm sea, tethered to Sunflower by its line and ripcord. I yanked the ripcord which was supposed to inflate the raft, but instead it just floated like a fat white keg of beer. I jerked the cord again, achieving nothing. I swore at the bloody thing. The deck was already burning the soles of my feet, and I knew the coachroof would already be red hot so I couldn’t reach the chained dinghy. A scrap of burning sail material landed in my hair. Something exploded in the cabin below, and I assumed the fire had reached the emergency flares. The hull lurched and I knew the fire must have burned through the plastic lavatory pipes and that the sea was already flooding through the seacocks into Sunflower . She was doomed.

I had two life-jackets, but they were aft, where the fire was hottest. So was my single lifebelt which was attached to the danbuoy on the stern. I began to dance on the deck, trying to cool my feet. Jennifer was twitching and moaning. Her scalp was smoking where her hair had burned away. Her legs looked as if they’d been skinned and blackened. She was going to die because the bloody liferaft wouldn’t work and because I didn’t have a radio any more and because some bastard had broken into my boat and made it into a death trap.

Jennifer suddenly screamed again because of the heat in the deck. She reached towards me with fingers turned into stiff dark claws. Further aft the teak deck planks were lifting and smoking. Burning scraps of sail were falling around us to hiss on the sea or flame on the deck. There was no choice left now, none. I picked Jennifer up in my arms, making her scream, and I knew she would scream more in a moment because of the salt water, but I would give her a few more minutes of life because there’s always a chance of a miracle so long as you don’t give up. Never give up. Never. I carried her to the port gunwale, put one foot over the guardrail, then jumped.

The sea was blessedly cold, but the salt must have been like acid on her burned skin. I held her body above mine so that her grotesquely blackened head was out of the water. I had one arm round her neck, the other about her waist, while I kicked with my legs to force us away from the burning boat. I could smell her roasted flesh. She was babbling, moaning, screaming, choking. I was talking to her; telling her she would live, that everything would be all right, that she mustn’t give in. Every few seconds the water would slop into my mouth, choking me.

I twisted my head to catch a glimpse of Sunflower . The fire had reached the aft locker where the spare gas bottle was kept. At first the fire merely melted the regulator valve so that a white spear of flame seared across the smoke in the cockpit, then the gas bottle exploded. The diesel fuel was making the flames deep red and the smoke even blacker. Her red ensign disappeared in a single flare of fire.

She was settling by the bows. Her mainsail was gone and her genoa was burning into ash. Somehow the mast stayed up. I could see the liferaft container bobbing merrily and uselessly alongside the blistering hull.

The bows dropped further. Everything flammable in the cabin must have been well aflame by now; lockers, foam, bedding, papers, clothes, cooking oil, table, chart table, my money, my passport, everything in the world I owned, all now an inferno that pumped flame and smoke out of the open companionway. Sunflower suddenly lurched sideways and I feared the mast would fall on us so I kicked with my feet again and the motion pushed my head underwater.

When I surfaced again I saw she had dipped her bows under. The sea reached the hawse-hole and filled the chain locker. She sank further. I was treading water desperately. I was tiring. I was beginning to feel the pain where my legs had been burned, and the moment I began to feel it, so the pain suddenly became excruciating and I knew that the anaesthetic effect of adrenalin was wearing off. It must have been worse for Jennifer, except she was only half conscious.

The sea reached Sunflower ’s forehatch which, undogged, fell open and let the water surge in. The stern swung further up so that I could see her rudder and propeller. Steam was hissing and mingling with the smoke as the fire fought the sea. The sea would win, because it always does, and slowly, slowly, I saw my boat begin her long slide down to the sea bed. She’d taken me to far, far places. We’d sailed the blood-red sea off Cape Non and hove to off the cliffs at Cape Bojador, which the old navigators had thought was the place the world ended. We’d sailed the Whitsunday Islands, and dared the pirates in the Philippines. We’d anchored in mangrove swamps in Florida, and sailed the harbours of Maine. We’d rounded the Horn twice, but we’d never sail together again for now she was sinking and it seemed as if the fire was compressed, or else the steam was superheated for the jet of vapour and flames and smoke became a solid roaring plume that was being pumped three hundred feet into the summer sky. It seemed extraordinary that one small boat could make so much filth.

Then she went. The mast-tip went under, the cockpit reared up, then, with one last puff of flame and dark smoke, Sunflower dragged herself down. Something hissed on the sea’s bubbling surface. There was a pause, then the liferaft, still tied by its rope to the sinking hull, was pulled down and out of sight. Floating burnt wreckage was all that was left; that and a dirty smear of smoke that lingered in the summer air.

Jennifer was moaning and I knew she was dying. I also knew I was tiring and that soon I would be forced to let her go and she would roll over, her mouth would fill with water and she would drown. That realisation made me angry, so I cursed her for dying. I told her she would live. I told her she would bloody well live. I told her to stop her pathetic whimpering and to start kicking with her legs. I told her she was a spoilt damned rich bloody bitch who deserved to die if she didn’t wake up and swim. I cursed her in three languages and four letters, and I might as well have saved my breath for she did not recover consciousness and I was tiring and every swear word drained another scrap of precious energy.

In the end I stopped cursing her. I remember telling her that I loved her, but then I had no more energy to talk for all my strength was needed to keep us afloat. My legs were agony, and felt like lead. More and more often the water would slop into my mouth. I would choke and spit and struggle to gain an extra inch of airspace. I held Jennifer with one arm and paddled with the other.