Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

I stepped down into her cockpit. She might have been a scabby little boat, hardly fit to cross a park pond, but she was still a yacht and it felt good to be afloat again. I tried the companionway and found it unlocked. The interior of the boat had been stripped bare; there were no bunks, no galley, not even a cockpit sole. The bilges were exposed and, I noted, dry. They had been swept bare and clean; evidence that whoever had provided this boat had been intent on leaving no traces.

Yet, strangely out of place in such a bare boat, some high-tech aids had been put aboard. A Decca set was screwed to the after bulkhead and, to power it, a twelve-volt car battery rested on the ribs beside the centreboard case. There was also a hand-held VHF radio, and the existence of that radio cheered me up for it seemed to be the first mistake my enemies had made. Doubtless they had provided the radio so they could communicate with me, but it also meant that I could talk to Harry.

I crouched inside the empty cabin and stowed the thin case of bearer bonds beside the battery, then lowered the centreboard. I noticed the Decca was already switched on, registering the latitude and longitude of St Peter Port. I left it on and picked up the radio. It was the size of a telephone handset with a short rubber-sheathed aerial and powered by internal batteries. I carried the radio up to the cockpit and ostentatiously waved it so Harry could see it. I turned it on, tuned it to Channel 16, and laid it on the back cockpit thwart.

I opened the petrol tank of the outboard and saw I had a full tank. It was only a three-and-a-half horsepower engine, so it wouldn’t drive me more than six knots, but I guessed it would run for a long time on a full tank. The engine started on the first pull of the rope. I left it in neutral while I went forward to cast off the bow line. Marianne had not been given any springs, nor any fenders, just two warps. I cast off aft. We drifted backwards till I put the engine into gear.

Marianne and I puttered out of the marina into the harbour. I followed the buoys round the outer perimeter, past the fuel stage, and out to the lighthouse which marks the harbour entrance. A fast patrol boat of the Navy’s Fisheries Protection Squadron was moored close to the harbour entrance. An officer stared down from the grey-painted bridge with more than usual interest as Marianne passed, and I wondered whether Harry had succeeded in co-opting the patrol boat. It had huge speed, a splendid radar and a wicked-looking gun. It would be nice to have such a vessel on my side, but its presence would clearly upset the careful ransom arrangements, so I didn’t expect to see it again.

I gave the officer a wave, then Marianne was out of the harbour and in the Little Russel. We had no choice of which way to turn. The tide goes through the Little Russel with the force of a steam train so Marianne and I would go north, for we didn’t have the power to fight our way southwards.

I turned north, slowed the engine, and went forward to hoist the jib. It was a rough piece of sailcloth, but I guessed it had some life left in it. I pulled up the main. Even Sunflower , after crossing the Pacific and rounding the Horn, had not had a sail so dirty, but this one drew well enough, so I went back aft and switched off the motor to save fuel. I tilted the motor up so the propeller wouldn’t drag, then sat at the tiller. The wind was a light southwesterly. It wouldn’t have moved Sunflower very far, but the small light Marianne seemed to like it. She didn’t sail badly. She chopped a bit, and she could fall off the wind very fast, but her helm eased when I trimmed her sails. I opened the cockpit lockers to find them empty. There was nothing on board except the Decca, its battery, me, a compass, a radio and four million pounds. And, I remembered, the two mooring warps. I used one to lash the tiller and coiled the other on the cockpit sole. My enemies had taken care to leave me without weapons, but I had the two ropes and perhaps they would be useful.

A small plane was flying above St Peter Port towards Herm. It banked halfway across the Little Russel and swooped down low. The sun flashed harsh off its windscreen, then the plane was past me and climbing away. It seemed I had friends. I glanced at the radio, half expecting Harry to make contact, but it was silent. A fishing boat thumped past me. There were at least a dozen yachts in sight, one of the big hydroplane ferries was coming up from the south and a small coaster was moored off St Sampson’s. The coaster had just fired her boilers and I saw how the smoke from her funnel drooped in a sagging plume to drift low above the water. I wondered who watched me. I wondered what they had in store for me.

Then the radio startled me. It hissed suddenly, then a woman’s stilted voice sounded loud. “Fourteen,” the voice said.

I didn’t respond. I was tuned to Channel 16, the emergency and contact channel, so I could expect to hear a lot of stray traffic. The single word I’d heard seemed to have been broken from a longer transmission and I wondered if the radio was working properly. Then, perhaps a minute later, the voice sounded again. “Fourteen.”

Still I didn’t react. Another minute or so passed, then the single word was patiently transmitted again. “Fourteen.” The intonation was bland, not at all insistent, almost robotic.

It occurred to me that I’d heard no other traffic, and clearly the word meant something, so I picked up the radio and pressed the transmit button. “Station calling Marianne , station calling Marianne , identify yourself and say again. Over.” I suspected Harry would already have arranged for direction-finding gear to track down the source of any mysterious transmissions, and I wanted to make the caller speak longer to give that gear a chance. At least, I thought, the woman had used Channel 16, the emergency and calling channel, and the obvious wavelength for Harry to monitor, so all I had to do now was persuade the woman to speak for the two or three seconds it would need for the DF to spot her. “Station calling Marianne ,” I transmitted again, “identify yourself and say again your message, over.”

The radio was silent, and I began to suspect that my enemies were not so foolish as I’d thought. I tested that assumption by pressing the transmitter button again. “St Peter Port Radio, St Peter Port Radio, this is yacht Marianne , yacht Marianne . Radio check please. Over.”

There was no answer. I switched to Channel 62, St Peter Port Radio’s working channel, and asked for a radio check again.

Nothing. Which meant the radio wasn’t transmitting. It could receive, but it wouldn’t transmit. The clever bastards, I thought, the clever, clever bastards, and I began to turn the dial back to Channel 16 when the radio, ignoring the fact that I was flicking the tuner across the channels, sounded once more. “Fourteen,” said the toneless voice.

So not only had the enemy made sure that I couldn’t transmit, but they had by-passed the tuner so that the radio was permanently fixed on an unidentifiable channel. It could have been any one of the fifty-five public channels, or one of a dozen private channels, or they might even have installed an American channel into the radio. Doubtless Harry was combing the VHF bands to find any transmissions that sounded suspect, but I was beginning to have a great respect for the people who had designed this voyage and I did not see Harry succeeding quickly.

“Fourteen,” the woman’s voice said a moment later.

So what the hell did that mean? It clearly wasn’t a course. A buoy perhaps? I looked around to see if there were any numbered buoys in sight, and then the solution struck me. Marianne had been stripped to functional bareness, yet someone had thought fit to install a very expensive Decca set. That wasn’t there for decoration. Whoever was transmitting to me was providing me with a waypoint. These people were not just clever; they were very clever. They had doubtless programmed the Decca with ninety-nine waypoints scattered randomly throughout the Channel Islands and they could use the waypoints to send me skittering about the sea while they made sure I was not being followed. Finally, when they were certain that I was alone, they would use the Decca to point me towards the rendezvous. Instead of public telephones, they were using invisible points in a vast sea.