Off to port I could see, sharply illuminated by a couple of powerful lights from the boats deck, the reef where we’d crashed. We were about forty yards away and, relative to the reefs, stationary in the water, the engines .turning just enough to maintain the boat’s position against the effect of wind and tide. Now and again a searchlight patrolled the dark waters all around. I couldn’t see anything of the men on deck, but I didn’t have to be told what they were doing, they were waiting and watching and the safety catches would be off. Nor could I see anything of the boat itself but I made up my mind that, even though I couldn’t recognise it, I’d know it if I ever came across it again. I took out the knife from the sheath behind my neck and cut a deep vee notch in the trailing edge of the rudder.
For the first time, I heard voices. I heard four voices and I had no difficulty in the world in identifying any of them. If I lived to make Methuselah look a teenager I’d never forget any one of them,
“Nothing on your side, Quinn?” Captain Imrie, the man who had organised the manhunt for me aboard the Nantesville.
“Nothing on my side, Captain.” I could feel the hairs rise on the nape of my neck. Quinn. Durran. The bogus customs officer. The man who had almost, but not quite, strangled me to death.
“Your side, Jacques?” Captain Imrie again.
“Nothing., sir.” The machine-pistol specialist. “Eight minutes since we’ve been here, fifteen since they went under. A man would require pretty good lungs to stay down that long, Captain.”
“Enough,” Imrie said. “There’ll be a bonus for all of us for this night’s work. Kramer?”
“Captain Imrie?” A voice as guttural as Imrie’s own.
“Full ahead. Up the Sound.”
I thrust myself backwards and dived deep. The waters above my head boiled into turbulent, phosphorescent life. I stayed deep, maybe ten feet down, heading for the reef.
How long I swam like that, I don’t know. Certainly less than a minute, my lungs weren’t what they used to be, not even what they had been fifteen minutes ago: but when I was forced to the surface, I’d my dark oilskin over my head.
I needn’t have bothered. I could see the faintly shimmering outline of the disappearing wake, no more. The searchlights were extinguished; when Captain Imrie decided a job was finished, then that job was finished. Predictably, the boat was in complete darkness with neither interior nor navigation lights showing.
I turned and swam slowly towards the reef. I reached a rock and clung to it until a measure of strength returned to my aching muscles, to my exhausted body. I would not have believed that fifteen minutes could have taken so much out of a man. I stayed there for five minutes. I could have stayed there for an hour. But time was not on my side. I slipped into deep water again and made for the shore.
Three times I tried and three times I failed to pull myself up from the rubber dinghy over the gunwale of the Firecrest, Four feet, no more. Just four feet. A Matterhorn. A ten-year-old could have done it. But not Calvert. Calvert was an old, old man.
I called out for Hunslett, but Hunslett did not come. Three times I called, but he did not come. The Firecrest was dark and still and lifeless. Where the hell was he? Asleep? Ashore? No, not ashore, he’d promised to stay aboard in case word came through, at any time from Uncle Arthur. Asleep, then, asleep in his cabin. I felt the blind unreasoning anger rise. This was too much, after what I had been through this was too much. Asleep. I shouted at the top of my voice and hammered feebly on the steel hull with the butt of my Luger. But he didn’t come.
The fourth time I made it. It was touch and go, but I made it. For a few seconds, dinghy painter in hand, I teetered on my stomach on the edge of the gunwale then managed to drag myself aboard. I secured the painter and went in search of Hunslett. There were words I wished to have with Hunslett.
I never used them. He wasn’t aboard. I searched the Firecrest from forepeak to the after storage locker, but no Hunslett. No signs of a hasty departure, no remnants of a meal on the saloon table or unwashed dishes in the galley, no signs of any struggle, everything neat and in good order.
Everything as it ought to have been. Except that there was no Hunslett.
For a minute or two I sat slumped in the saloon settee trying to figure out a reason for his absence, but only for a minute or two. I was in no condition to figure out anything. Wearily I made my way out to the upper deck and brought dinghy and outboard over the side. No fancy tricks about securing them to the anchor chain this time: apart from the fact that it was, the way I felt, physically impossible, the time for that was past, I deflated the dinghy and stowed it, along with the outboard, in the after locker. And if someone came aboard and started looking? If someone came aboard and started looking he’d get a bullet through him. I didn’t care if he claimed to be a police superintendent or an assistant commissioner or the top customs official in the country, he’d get a bullet through him, in the arm or leg, say, and I’d listen to his explanations afterwards. If it was one of my friends, one of my friends from Nantesville or the reef back there, he got it through the head.
I went below. I felt sick. The helicopter was at the bottom of the sea. The pilot was down there with it, half his chest shot away by machine-gun bullets. I’d every right to feel sick. I stripped off my clothes and towelled myself dry and the very action of towelling seemed to drain away what little strength was left to me. Sure I’d had a hard time in the last hour, all this running and slipping and stumbling through the dark woods, locating and blowing up the dinghy and dragging it over those damned seaweed covered boulders had taken it out of me, but I was supposed to be fit, it shouldn’t have left me like this. I was sick, but the sickness was in .the heart and mind, not in the body.
I went into my cabin and laboriously dressed myself in fresh clothes, not forgetting the Paisley scarf. The rainbow coloured bruises that Quinn had kft on my neck had now swollen and spread to such an extent that I had to bring the scarf right up to the lobes of my ears to hide them. I looked in the mirror. It might have been my grandfather staring back at me. My grandfather on his deathbed. My face had that drawn and waxy look that one normally associates with approaching dissolution. Not an all-over waxiness though, there was no blood on my face now but the pine needles had left their mark, I looked like someone with galloping impetigo. I felt like someone with galloping bubonic plague.
I checked that the Luger and the little Lilliput – I’d put them both back in their waterproof covering after leaving Dubh Sgeir – were still in working order. They were. In the saloon I poured myself a stiff three fingers of whisky. It went down my throat like a ferret down a burrow after a rabbit, one moment there, the next vanished in the depths. The weary old red corpuscles hoisted themselves to their feet and started trudging around again. It seemed a reasonable assumption that if I encouraged them with some more of the same treatment they might even break into a slow gallop and I had just closed my hand around the bottle when I heard the sound of an approaching engine. I put the bottle back in the rack, switched out the saloon lights – although they would have been invisible from outside through the velvet curtains – and took up position behind the open saloon door.
I was pretty sure the precautions were unnecessary, ten to one this was Hunslett coming back from shore, but why hadn’t he taken the dinghy, still slung on the davits aft? Probably someone, for what Hunslett had regarded as an excellent reason, had persuaded him to go ashore and was now bringing him back.
The motor-boat’s engine slowed, went into neutral, astern, then neutral again. A slight bump, the murmur of voices, the sound of someone clambering aboard and then the engine opening up again.
The footfalls passed over my head as the visitor – there was only one set of footfalls – made his way towards the wheelhouse door. The springy confident step of a man who knew what he was about. There was only one thing wrong with that springy confident step. It didn’t belong to Hunslett. I flattened myself against the bulkhead, took out the Luger, slid off the safety catch and prepared to receive my visitor in what I had now come to regard as the best traditions of the Highlands.