And I was beginning to wonder if the helicopter could make it either. There was no doubt in my mind that it could land — that eastern cove was perfectly sheltered — but whether it could get there at all was another question. I had a vague idea that helicopters were unmanageable above certain wind speeds but had no idea what those wind speeds were. And if the helicopter didn’t turn up, then I was faced with the long cold wet trudge back to where I had hidden the dinghy and then an even longer, colder and hungry wait until darkness fell at night and I could get out to the Firecrest unseen. Even now, I had only twenty-four hours left. By nightfall I would have only twelve, I began to run.
Fifteen minutes and God knows how many iron-hard tree trunks later I heard it, faint and intermittent at first, then gradually swelling in strength — the clattering roar of a helicopter engine. He was early, damn him, he was far too early, he’d land there, find the place deserted and take off for base again. It says much for my sudden desperate state of mind that it never occurred to me how he could even begin to locate, far less land in, that sandy cove in a condition of darkness that was still only a degree less than total. For a moment I even contemplated lighting a flare to let the pilot know that I was at least there or thereabouts and had the flare half-way out of my pocket before I shoved it back again. The arrangement had been that the flare would be lit only to show the landing strip in the sand: if I lit one there and then he might head for it, strike the tops of the pine trees and that would be the end of that.
I ran even faster. It had been years since I’d run more than a couple of hundred yards and my lungs were already wheezing and gasping like a fractured bellows in a blacksmith’s shop. But I ran as hard as I could. I cannoned into trees, I tripped over roots, fell into gullies, had my face whipped time and again by low-spreading branches, but above all I cannoned into those damned trees, I stretched my arms before me but it did no good, I ran into them all the same. I picked up a broken branch I’d tripped over and [held it in front of me but no matter how I pointed h the trees always seemed to come at me from another direction. I hit every tree in die Island of Torbay. I felt the way a bowling ball must feel after a hard season in a bowling alley, the only difference, and a notable one, being that whereas the ball knocked the skittles down, the trees knocked me down. Once, twice, three times I heard the sound of the helicopter engine disappearing away to the east, and the third time I was sure be was gone for good. But each time it came back. The sky was lightening to the east now, but still I couldn’t see the helicopter: for the pilot, everything below would still be as black as night.
The ground gave way beneath my feet and I fell. I braced myself, arms outstretched, for the impact as I struck the other side of the gully. But my reaching hands found nothing. No impact. I kept on falling, rolling and twisting down a heathery slope, and for the first time that night I would have welcomed the appearance of a pine tree, ‘any kind of tree, to stop my progress. I don’t know how many trees there were on that slope, I missed the lot. If it was a gully, it was the biggest gully on the Island of Torbay. But it wasn’t a gully at all, it was the end of Torbay, I rolled and bumped over a sudden horizontal grassy bank and landed on my back in soft wet sand. Even white I was whooping and gasping and trying to get my knocked-out breath back into my lungs I still had time to appreciate the fortunate fact that kindly providence arid a few million years had changed the jagged rocks that must once have fringed that shore into a nice soft yielding sandy beach.
I got to my feet. This was the place, all right. There was only one such sandy bay, I’d been told, in the east of the Isle of Torbay and there was now enough light for me to see that this was indeed just that, though a lot smaller than it appeared on the chart. The helicopter was coming in again from the east, not, as far as I could judge, more than three or four hundred feet up. I ran half-way down to the water’s edge, pulled a hand flare from my pocket, slid away the waterproof covering and tore off the ignition strip. It flared into life at once, a dazzling blue-white magnesium light so blinding that I had to clap my free hand over my eyes. It lasted for only thirty seconds, but that was enough. Even as it fizzled and sputtered its acrid and nostril-wrinkling way to extinction the helicopter was almost directly overhead. Two vertically-downward pointing searchlights, mounted fore and aft on the helicopter, switched on simultaneously, interlocking pools of brilliance on the pale white sand. Twenty seconds later the skids sank into the soft sand, the rackety clangour of the motor died away and the blades idled slowly to a stop. I’d never been in a helicopter in my life but I’d seen plenty: in the half-darkness this looked like the biggest one I’d ever seen.
The right-hand door opened and a torch shone in my face as I approached. A voice, Welsh as the Rhondda Valley, said: “Morning. You Calvert?”
“Me. Can I come aboard?”
“How do I know you’re Calvert?”
“I’m telling you. Don’t come the hard man, laddie. You’ve no authority to make an identification check.”
“Have you no proof? No papers?”
“Have you no sense? Haven’t you enough sense -to know that there are some people who never carry any means of identification? Do you think I just happened to be standing here, five miles from nowhere, and that I just happened to be carrying flares in my pocket? You want to join the ranks of the unemployed before sunset?” A very auspicious beginning to our association.
“I was told to be careful.” He was as worried and upset as a cat snoozing on a sun-warmed wall. Still a marked lack of cordiality. “Lieutenant Scott Williams, Fleet Air Arm. Takes an admiral to sack me. Step up.”
I stepped up, closed the door and sat. He didn’t offer to shake hands. He flicked on an overhead light and said: “What the hell’s happened to your face?”
“What’s the matter with my face?”
“Blood. Hundreds of little scratches.”
“Pine needles.” I told him what had happened. “Why a machine this size? You could ferry a battalion in this one.”
“Fourteen men, to be precise. I do lots of crazy things, Calvert, but I don’t fly itsy-bitsy two-bit choppers in this kind of weather. Be blown out of the sky. With only two of us, the long-range tanks are full.”
“You can fly all day?”
“More or less. Depends how fast we go. What do you want from me?”
“Civility, for a start. Or don’t you like early morning rising?”
“Tm an Air-Sea Rescue pilot, Calvert. This is .the only machine on the base big enough to go out looking in this kind -of weather. And I should be out looking, not out on some cloak-and-dagger joy-ride. I don’t care how important it is, there’s people maybe clinging to a life-raft fifty miles out in the Atlantic. That’s my job. But I’ve got my orders. What do you want?”
“The Moray Reset”
“You heard? Yes, that’s her.”
“She doesn’t exist. She never has existed.”
“What are you talking about? The news broadcasts—–”
“I’ll tell you as much as you need to know, Lieutenant. It’s essential that I be able to search this area without arousing suspicion. The only way that can be done is by inventing an ironclad reason. The foundering Moray Rose is that reason. So we tell the tale,”
“Phoney?”
“Phoney.”
“You can fix it?” he said slowly. “You can fix a news broadcast?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you could get me fired at that.” He smiled for the first time. “Sorry, sir. Lieutenant Williams – Scotty to you – is now his normal cheerful willing self. What’s on?”
“Know the coast-lines and islands of this area well?”
“Prom the air?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been here twenty months now. Air-Sea Rescue and in between army and navy exercises and hunting for lost climbers. Most of my work is with the Marine Commandos. I know this area at least as well as any man alive.”