Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

I crouched in the low cabin. The instruction book for the Decca was jammed behind the power-lead, but it was the same brand of set as the one I’d possessed for such a brief time on Sunflower , and that made me remember Jennifer’s childish delight in the machine. I said a brief prayer that I would one day share that childish delight with her again, then punched the buttons for waypoint fourteen. The machine blinked, then ordered a course of 089 to reach a point 12.4 nautical miles away.

I went back to the cockpit. If I went more than a half-mile on a heading of 089 I’d pile Marianne on to the rocks of Herm, but I turned nevertheless. I let out the main sheet and Marianne picked up her dowdy skirts and fairly flew in front of the wind. I watched the shore approach.

“Twenty-five,” the girl’s voice said a few minutes before I would have struck rock.

I rammed the tiller hard over to bring Marianne swivelling round into the wind. I left her hove-to while I went down to the cabin and asked the Decca where to go. Waypoint twenty-five was ten miles due north. I wondered whether to compensate for magnetic north. The Decca could have been giving me a true course, pointing me at the North Pole, or perhaps it had the magnetic correction programmed in so that its instructions would match my compass. I decided my enemies had thought of everything else, so why should I guess the compass correction for them. I’d trust their machinery and see where it took me.

I eased Marianne ’s head round, and settled back on a reach. The tide was with me, sweeping us north towards the open sea. I looked up and saw my attendant plane circling high above. And where, I wondered, was the girl who was transmitting the waypoint numbers? She had to be within my view, for a VHF will only work within line of sight, but it was hopeless to look, for she could have been on any of the score of boats within view, or on Guernsey, or on the smaller islands of Herm and Sark that lie to the east of the Little Russel.

I sailed on. The radio had gone silent, and I guessed that I had passed the first test by following the first instructions. I cleared the Platte Fougere light at the northern end of the Little Russel and felt the western swell lifting Marianne’s frail hull. The wind was light but steady, the air was warm.

“Thirty-six,” the voice said from the radio, and there was something oddly familiar and annoyingly complacent about that voice. I was feeling rebellious, so I didn’t obey, and a moment later the number was repeated, and this time I noticed that the intonation of the repeated message was exactly the same as when the number had first been transmitted. I also recognised the voice; it belonged to a girl who read out the marine forecasts on Radio Four. My opponents had taped her, chopped the numbers from her forecasts, and were now playing me those numbers over the air.

Damn their cleverness.

Waypoint thirty-six took me on a course fine into the southwesterly wind. Marianne was too light to head up into wind so I started the engine and let the sails hang while the propeller plugged me into the sea’s small chop. The new course would take me plumb through a score of boats which fished for bass off the island’s northern reefs. Any one of those boats could contain my enemies, yet I was helpless to determine which, if any, it might be. I deliberately steered close to some of the boats, yet all looked innocent. A woman waved to me from one boat, while a man on another called out that it was a fine day.

“Twenty-five,” the voice said.

I’d been given that waypoint before and knew it lay due north. I let Marianne’s head fall off the wind, hardened her into a reach, then stopped the engine. The waypoint number wasn’t repeated which meant they must have been watching me, for they only repeated the transmissions when I failed to obey. And that annoyed me. They were training me, programming me. I had become a rat in a maze of invisible electronic commands that spanned the sea, and their game was to spin me round the maze till I was tired, hungry and ready to be slaughtered.

“Six,” said the voice, which took me northwest.

“Eighteen.” Which took me a few points north of east.

“Thirteen.” An unlucky number, but which merely took me west.

“Eighty-four.” A brief curtsey to the southeast, then they gave me twenty-five again to send me reaching northwards once more.

They played with me for two hours. At first I could divine no pattern in the commands. I sailed towards every point of the compass, but was never given enough time to reach the invisible waypoint which lay at the end of the required course. Always, and usually within a mile of the last command, I would be made to change my heading. Gradually, though, I was being pushed northwards, zigzagging away from the fading coast. I was being sent into the empty sea, far from any help. My mouth was dry, but at least the humid air was warm on my naked skin.

“Forty-four.” The voice broke into my thoughts.

Well practised now, I pressed the Decca buttons. Waypoint forty-four lay fifty miles off on a bearing of 100, virtually due east, which would place it somewhere on the Cherbourg Peninsula, so clearly waypoint forty-four was not my rendezvous. Yet, for the first time since I had cleared the Little Russel, my controllers let me sail on undisturbed. By now they must have been confident that I presented no danger to their careful plans. They had made me sail in a random pattern, and they must have watched till they were satisfied that no ships followed my intricate manoeuvres, so now the real business of the day could begin. They must, I thought, be unaware of my shepherding plane which was far off to the west.

The radio stayed silent as Marianne held her eastwards course. To the north I could see the sails of two yachts running away from me towards the Alderney Race, while to the south the islands of Sark and Guernsey were a dark blur on a hazed horizon. Behind me, in the west, a plane droned aimlessly about the sky, while to the east was nothing but the game’s ending, death or revenge, and the waiting night.

I lost track of time, except for a rough estimate gained from the sun’s decline. I was thirsty as hell.

The tide was ebbing from the east. There had been a time when these waters had been a playground for Charlie and me, and, in those happy days, we’d learned the vagaries of the notorious Channel Island tides. Marianne and I were fighting a neap tide, the weakest, but it was still like trying to run up a down escalator. I knew I’d have a couple more hours of contrary tide before a period of slack, after which the set would come strong from the north.

So we just plugged on. Marianne wasn’t quick, and she wasn’t elegant, but I was beginning to feel fond of her. She was, after all, my boat, if only for this one day. We received no more waypoints, but just stemmed the tide, always heading east. By low water, when the tidal force subsided, we were quite alone. We had crossed the passage line for boats coming from Cherbourg down to Guernsey. We were also well out of sight of land, which suggested there would be no more radio transmissions for a while.

The wind was light, but the long western swell was carrying the spiteful remnants of an Atlantic storm. Sunflower would not have noticed such small waves, but Marianne was light and short enough to suffer. She slapped her way across the crests and plunged hard down into shallow troughs. I had lifted her centreboard to add a half-knot to her speed, but the higher centre of gravity also made her roll like a blue-water yacht running before the trade winds. After living on Sunflower so long it seemed odd to be in such a cramped and low cockpit. I’d never thought of Sunflower as a big yacht, but compared to Marianne she had been a leviathan.