Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

“No, I’m bloody well not ready. Come in.”

He was clearly reluctant. Things were at last moving, and the villains were being forced to show their hand, and I was being obstreperous. But Harry needed me, so he had to come into Charlie’s kitchen where the double glazing cut down the thumping noise of the helicopter’s engine.

“So tell me what they want me to do,” I said.

Harry glanced at Charlie, then realised that I would insist on Charlie listening anyway. “We don’t know yet.”

“Oh, terrific!” I said. “You mean we’re skidding about the sky like a blue-arsed fly and we don’t know why?”

“We have to go to Exeter. There’s a plane waiting there to take us to Guernsey. We meet Sir Leon at St Peter Port and wait at the outdoors café at the Victoria Marina. That’s all we know.”

“Don’t go,” Charlie said to me.

“Piss off, Charlie.” Harry had known Charlie a long time.

“Who’s we?” I asked.

“Just you, really,” Harry admitted. “The bastards insist they’ll only deal with you, but I’ve got a back-up team arranged.” To listen to him you’d have thought the SAS were on alert, but I suspected the ‘back-up team’ was an overweight squad of Harry’s usual dipsomaniacs.

“They’ve already tried to kill Johnny twice,” Charlie protested.

“I know that,” Harry said impatiently, “and of course it’s a trap. A demented four year old would know it’s a trap, but if you go slowly, Johnny, we’ll be with you all the way. You don’t have to go the whole way, not if you think it’s dangerous. We’ll be a half-step behind you, but if you lose us, then get the hell out of it. And if I think it’s becoming too risky, I’ll stop everything. The object of the exercise isn’t to give them the money, but to spot them, and once we’ve done that you can leave the rest to me.”

“Don’t do it,” Charlie said to me. “It’s only a bloody picture of some rotten flowers.”

The helicopter whined and pulsed beyond the window and Charlie’s dogs, safely kennelled, whined back. Harry waited for my decision and, when none came, tried a last appeal. “They’re showing themselves, Johnny. If we don’t respond then they might not risk it again. We’ve got to go! For God’s sake, don’t you want to know who tried to kill you?”

“I know who it is,” I said. “It’s Garrard and Peel. And if you lot were any good, Harry, you’d have had both of them wired up to a generator and singing their hearts out by now.”

“I’ll never have a chance of doing that if we don’t catch them.”

“Don’t do it,” Charlie said to me.

Except I knew Harry was right. By collecting the ransom, our enemies had to show themselves, which meant we had a chance, a very narrow chance, of trapping them. And it was Garrard, I was certain, who had condemned Jennifer to months of pain, and I had promised her to pay back that pain. I sighed, then I shrugged. “OK, Harry.”

Charlie’s face stiffened into an expression that I knew only too well. It was Charlie’s stubborn look, the face he wore when things were bad, and when the only solution lay in his own strength and abilities. He had worn that face in the Tasman Sea, and now he had it again. “If you’re going,” he said to me, “then I’m going too.”

“Hang on…” Harry began to protest, then realised it was no use. “You’ll be about as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike,” he grumbled.

“Johnny needs someone to look after him, Harry, and that’s me.” Charlie grinned. His tiredness dropped away because there was a prospect of mischief and he was involved. The two of us were back in business together. He grabbed his coat, shouted to Yvonne that she shouldn’t wait up for him, then followed us out.

The helicopter took us to Exeter airport where a small plane waited to fly us to the Channel Islands. Two plain-clothes policemen waited by the plane, but one of them had to stay on the ground because Charlie claimed his seat. Harry, unhappy at losing one of his men, could only agree for he knew how unstoppable a determined Charlie could be.

Both Harry and his man had guns. They showed the weapons to us as we climbed up from the Devon coast. The sight of the black-handled automatics made my blood run chill. It reminded me that this was a very deadly game, and not just another adventure with Charlie. Harry sensed my change of mood. “Remember, Johnny, you don’t have to go through with it. Go as far as you can, but don’t risk your life.”

“I won’t let him,” Charlie said.

“The further you go” – Harry ignored Charlie – “the more chance you give us of spotting the bastards, but I don’t want to be scraping you off the floor, Johnny, so don’t push your luck.”

“Do I get a gun?” I asked.

Harry shook his head. “Not from me, Johnny. These are police issue. It would be more than my job’s worth to let you have one.”

I shrugged off his refusal. He was probably right to turn me down. I’d never fired a handgun in anger, and would probably make a mess of it. I stared down at the sea. It looked so very calm, all its treachery smoothed out by our height. I took a cigarette from Charlie. I was nervous. I was being enticed into danger, like making a night approach to an unlit coast without any charts. I suddenly wished I had not accepted so easily, then thought of Jennifer’s pain and knew I had no choice. “Why Guernsey?” I wondered aloud.

Harry could only guess at the answer. “Perhaps they think the island police are dozy? And think of all those tight little lanes. You could get lost there very easily.”

“Is that what they want?”

“They want to know they’re safe. The danger point of a ransom is the handover, because it’s possible the police will be watching. So the usual trick is to send the bagman from public phone to public phone. The route will appear to be random, but they’ll be watching somewhere and looking out for cars following you. If they see the same cars too often, then they’ll pull out.”

The pilot turned in his seat to interrupt Harry. “Fog,” he said laconically, and I twisted round to see that a milk-white fog bank was stretching across the sea ahead. The Channel Islands were notorious for their fogs, and the recent still weather had made such fogs more likely.

“Bugger,” Harry said viciously.

The pilot was radioing ahead. He listened on his earphones, then turned to give us the news. “Guernsey’s still clear. That lot’s over Alderney and the Casquets. But they think the larger islands may get socked in later.”

“Just get us there,” Harry said, “never mind what happens later.”

Charlie was peering down at the thick white cloud blanketing the sea. “Remember that night off the Casquets?”

I nodded. We’d been seventeen or eighteen years old and had made a night crossing to Cherbourg. Except that we misread the tides and had been swept much further west and south than we knew. The wind had piped up, the sea was kicking, and we were in our open dinghy. We’d turned east on to a broad reach, expecting to see the lights on the Cap de la Hague, and instead we’d found ourselves being driven on to the rocks about the Casquets’ light. It was one of our earlier lessons in seamanship. A tough lesson, too, for we damn nearly died on the vicious Casquets’ bank, but somehow we’d scraped round to the west and had run down to Guernsey where we’d gone ashore like half-drowned rats. It seemed funny now, but at the time we’d both been scared rigid.

The fog bank slipped away behind, revealing a calm sea, though more fog lingered towards the French coast. “The forecast says there could be wind later,” the pilot volunteered.

“That’ll get rid of the fog,” the plain-clothes policeman said.