round my waist, it needed all the strength of both my hands just to hang
on to the life line without being swept away. With all the strength and
desperation that was in me I tried to edge forward an inch. But I
couldn’t even make that inch. And I knew I couldn’t hang on much
longer. Salvation came by sheer chance, no credit to me. One
particularly heavy wave had twisted me round till I was on my back, and
in this position I fell into the next trough and hit the following wave
with back and shoulders. Followed the inevitable explosive release of
air from my lungs, the just as inevitable sucking in of fresh air-and
this time I found I could breathe! air rushed into my lungs, not water:
I could breathe! lying on my back like this, half lifted out of the
water by my grip on the life line, and with my head bent forward almost
to my chest between my overhead arms, my face remained clear of the
water and I could breathe.
I wasted no time but went hand over hand down the life line as fast
as macdonald paid out the rope about my waist. I was still swallowing
some water but not enough to matter. After about fifteen seconds I took
my left hand off the life line and started scraping it along the side of
the ship, feeling for the rope i’d left dangling over the side of the
afterdeck last night. The life line was now sliding through my right
hand and, wet though it was, it was burning the skin of my palm. But I
hardly noticed it. I had to find that manilla i’d left tied to the
guardrail stanchion; if I didn’t, then it was curtains. Not only would
the hopes of my carrying out my plan be at an end; it would be the end
for me also. Macdonald and I had had to act on the assumption that the
rope would be there and no attempt would be made to pull me back until
he got the clear prearranged signal that it was time to begin just that.
And to make any such clear signal while in the water, I had discovered,
was impossible. If the manilla wasn’t there i’d just be towed along at
the end of that nylon rope until I was drowned. Nor would that take
long. The salt water i’d swallowed, the violent buffeting of the waves,
the blows i’d suffered from being flung a score of times against the
iron walls of the campari, the loss of blood and my injured leg-all
those had taken their frightening toll and I was dangerously weak. It
would not be long.
my left hand brushed against the manilla: I grabbed it, a drowning
man seizing the last straw in the wide, endless expanse of the ocean.
tucking the life line through the rope round my waist, I over armed
myself up the manilla till I was all but clear of the water, wrapped my
one good leg round the rope and hung there, gasping like an exhausted
dog, shivering and then being violently sick as I brought up all the sea
water that had collected in my stomach. After that I felt better but
weaker than ever. I started to climb.
I hadn’t far to go, twenty feet and i’d be there, but I hadn’t gone
two feet before I was bitterly regretting the fact that I hadn’t
followed my impulse of the previous night and knotted the manilla. The
manilla was soaking wet and slippery and I had to clasp tight with all
the strength of my hands to get any purchase at all. And there was
little enough strength left in my hands, my aching forearm muscles were
exhausted from clinging so long and so desperately to the life line, my
shoulders were just as far gone; even when I could get a good purchase,
even when my weakening hands didn’t slide down the rope when I put all
my weight on them, I could till pull myself up only two or three inches
at a time. Three inches, no more: that was all I could manage at one
time.
I couldn’t make it; reasons, instinct, logic, common sense il told
me that I couldn’t make it, but I made it. The last two feet of the
climb was something out of a dark nightmare, hauling myself up two
inches, slipping back an inch, hauling myself up again and always
creeping nearer the top. Three feet from the top I stopped: I knew I
was only that distance way from safety, but to climb another inch on
that rope was something I knew I could never do. Arms shaking from the
strain, shoulders on fire with agony, I hauled my body up until my eyes
were level with knotted hands: even in that almost pitchy darkness I
could see the faint white blur of my gleaming knuckles. For a second I
hung there, then flung my right hand desperately upwards. If I missed
the coaming of the scuppers… But I couldn’t miss it. I had no more
strength in me, I could never make such an effort again.
I didn’t miss it. The top joint of my middle finger hooked over
the coaming and locked there, then my other hand was beside it, I was
scrabbling desperately for the lowermost bar in the guardrails; I had to
get it over, and over at once, or i’d fall back into the sea. I found
the bar, had both hands on it, swung my body convulsively to the right
till my sound foot caught the coaming, reached up to the next bar,
reached the teak rail, half dragged, half slid my body over the top, and
fell heavily on the deck on the other side.
how long I lay there, trembling violently in every weary muscle in
my body, whooping hoarsely for the breath my tortured lungs were
craving, gritting my teeth against the fire in my shoulders and arms,
and trying not to let the red mist before my eyes envelop me completely,
I do not know. It may have been two minutes, it may have been ten.
Somewhere during that time I was violently ill again. And then slowly,
ever so slowly, the pain eased a little, my breathing slowed, and the
mists before my eyes cleared away, but I still couldn’t stop trembling.
It was well for me that no five-year-old happened along the deck that
night: he could have had me over the side without taking his hands out
of his pockets.
I untied the ropes from my waist with numbed and fumbling and all
but useless hands, tied them both to the stanchion just above the
manilla, pulled the life line till it was almost taut, then gave three
sharp, deliberate tugs. A couple of minutes passed, then came three
clearly defined answering tugs. They knew now I had made it. I hoped
they felt better about it than I did. Not that that would be hard.
I sat there for at least another five minutes till some measure
of strength came back to me, rose shakily to my feet, and padded
across the deck to number four hold. The tarpaulin on the starboard
forward corner was still secured. That meant there was no one down
below. But I really hadn’t expected them to be there yet.
I straightened, looked all round me, then stood very still, the
driving rain streaming down my sodden mask and soaking clothes. Not
fifteen yards away from me, right aft, I had seen a red glow come and
vanish in the darkness. Ten seconds passed, then the glow again. I’d
heard of waterproof cigarettes, but not all that waterproof. But
someone was smoking a cigarette, no question about that.
like falling thistledown, only quieter, I drifted down in the
direction of the glow. I was still trembling, but you can’t hear
trembling. Twice I stopped to line up direction and distance by that
glowing cigarette and finally stopped less than ten feet away from it.
My mind was hardly working at all or i’d never have dared to do it: a
carless flick of a torch beam, say, and it would have been all over.
But no one flicked a torch.
the red glow came again and I could now just make out that the
smoker wasn’t standing in the rain. He was in the v-shaped entrance of
a tarpaulin, a big tarpaulin draped over some big object. The gun, of
course, the gun that carreras had mounted on the afterdeck, with the
tarpaulin serving the dual purpose of protecting the mechanism from the
rain and concealing it from any other vessel they might have passed
during the day.
I heard the murmur of voices. Not the smoker, but another two
crouched somewhere inside the shelter of the tarpaulin.
that meant three people there. Three people guarding the gun.