Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

My aerial escort stayed in fitful touch. The pilot did not stay close to me, but rather he would fly a course which crossed mine, disappear, then come back a few minutes later. It wasn’t always the same plane. Sometimes it was a single-engined high-winged model, and at other times it was a sleek machine with an engine nacelle on each wing. I imagined Harry Abbott plotting my course in the police station, the map-pins creeping east towards the French coast.

East and south, for the Decca betrayed the first twitch of the new tidal surge. From now until deep into the night the water would pour round the Cap de la Hague to fill the Channel Islands basin. I put our head to the north to compensate for the new drift, and knew that from now on I would be steering more and more northerly just to keep my easterly progress constant. Marianne’s speed over the sea bed slowed and, because we were now showing some beam to the ragged swell, we began to roll uncomfortably, so I sacrificed yet more speed by dropping the centreboard. The board damped the rolling a little, but Marianne was still tender, and every few minutes we would slam down into a trough and the water would come shattering back over the deck. If the game didn’t end soon, I thought, then I’d be in for a cold wet night.

But it wasn’t my game, it belonged to someone else, and they’d planned it well. Sometime in the early evening I saw the southern and eastern horizons misting. At first I dared to hope it was just a distant bank of cloud, but I soon knew the truth; that it was a rolling wall of fog. My enemies must have chosen today because the weather forecast had warned against fog, and it was somewhere inside that thick, shrouding, sea-hugging cloud that the game’s ending would be played out. I knew that once I was inside the fog my shepherding aircraft would be useless, and even the Navy’s radar would be fortunate to find such a tiny boat as Marianne .

Harry must have shared my fear for, when I was scarcely a mile from the fog bank, the twin-engined plane dropped out of the sky like a dive-bomber, levelled above the sea, and raced towards me. The pilot flashed bright landing lights as if I hadn’t already seen him. The machine roared so close above me that its backwash of air set Marianne’s sails aback. She was so light and tender that she threatened to heel right over, but somehow steadied herself.

He came back again, but this time he flew slower and well to one side of me. I looked up to catch a glimpse of Harry’s ugly face. He was gesturing westwards, indicating that he wanted me to turn back. The plane roared on, banked and turned again towards me. Once more Harry pointed westwards.

I looked back. A tiny grey smear broke the horizon, and I guessed that the Royal Navy patrol boat was, after all, keeping me company. The Navy must have been shadowing me from below the horizon, kept in touch by the aircraft reports, but now the fast patrol boat was accelerating towards me to make sure I obeyed Harry’s orders. He feared for my safety in that clinging, hiding fog, or perhaps, and this struck me as a more likely explanation, Sir Leon feared I’d use the fog to sail away with four million pounds’ worth of unregistered bonds.

I waved reassuringly to Harry, shoved Marianne ’s tiller hard over, brought her into wind, and started the motor. The plane flew over me, waggled its wings in approval of my obedience in turning back, then climbed away. Marianne ’s outboard pushed us west. The patrol boat seemed to come no closer. So far as Harry was concerned the day’s excitement was over and all we could do was lick our wounds and hope our enemies tried again.

Only I wasn’t buying that safe course. I had a girl to revenge and a curiosity to assuage, so I waited till I could hardly see the plane, then I turned Marianne again. I let the sails out to catch the faltering wind, and throttled the motor hard up. Now it was a race between me and the patrol boat, but I’d gained some precious time by my pretended compliance, and it would be some minutes before the Naval boat was certain that I really had turned back to the east. I pulled the centreboard up to add that precious ounce of speed and raced for the fog which was much closer now, scarcely a half-mile away, and rolling fast towards me from the south. It looked white and pretty, but I knew what waited inside.

I watched westwards rather than east. Sure enough, after a few minutes, I saw a bow wave flash beneath the distant grey dot. The race was on now: one crummy little French yacht made of plywood and glue against the turbines of a fast patrol boat. Except the crummy little yacht was already so close to the concealing fog.

The first tendrils of the fog wisped past me and I felt the instant drop in temperature. The fog had been formed by warm air over cold sea, but the vapour stole all the day’s warmth and it felt as if I had gone from summer into instant winter. I kept the motor at full throttle, banging Marianne ’s light bows across the choppy waves. I looked behind to see the fog wrapping about me. I kept on my course, but, after a minute or so, I looked up and saw my mast-tip hidden in the vapour so I turned hard to port so that I was travelling behind the moving face of the fog bank and into the tide. I was hoping that my pursuers would presume that I had turned downtide to add the water’s speed to my own. The outboard motor suddenly seemed very loud. I counted the seconds. One minute passed, two, then I turned off the engine and let Marianne drift.

Silence.

Already my sails, boom and sheets were beaded with moisture. It was a grandfather of fogs, this one, a thick grey horror that restricted visibility to less than thirty yards. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees.

Marianne rocked in the waves. There was wind in the fog, enough to slap her wet sails about, so I sheeted her in and turned her bows northeast. I let most of the power slip from the sails so I could listen for the Naval vessel.

Silence again.

Then, apparently not far off my starboard bow, I heard the sound of engines idling. I knew the apparent closeness of the sound could be deceiving for noise does strange things in fog. The Naval crew might be a hundred yards to port or a mile to starboard. The only certainty was that they would be concentrating on their radar, but, without a reflector in Marianne ’s rigging, my sails and wooden mast offered them lousy echoes that would be further confused by the water-soaked air. The wavetops were probably reflecting as much as Marianne .

It was dark, cold and dank in the fog. If it had not been for the compass I would have been lost in minutes, but I crept onwards. I was steering northeast, but the tide’s effect was to drive me almost due east. I imagined the patrol boat would be idling along on scarce-turning engines, making a box-search in the whiteness. My hope was that I’d decoyed them into going too far south, then I dared to hope that I might have escaped them altogether by crossing the invisible line which separated British waters from French. That was a happy thought which I celebrated by rubbing my hand along the underside of the boom, then licking the condensation off my palm. I was parched, and the fresh water tasted good.

The patrol boat’s engines suddenly roared, faded, roared again. I swivelled in alarm, but saw nothing. A moment later I thought I saw the patrol boat’s lean dark shape in the fog, but the dark shape was just a phantom of the fog which roiled and faded. A ship’s bell clanged, apparently from the port side. I heard a distant voice shouting and I wondered whether the game was over. Had they found Garrard and Peel? Was that it? Had Harry been cleverer than my opponents and already made his arrests? Was Elizabeth sitting in a police interview room, protesting her nobility? That thought almost tempted me to shout a reply, but there was only one way to be sure of this game’s ending, and that was to see it through, and so I kept silent and let my little boat sail on.