Driftwood

by Harper Fox

  Tom flinched. Victor had been there when David Reay had died, but the difference in rank between them, and the fact that no one was meant to know, had prevented him from offering Tom a single word of comfort. Not military etiquette. Tom knew, to his shame, that he was still trammelled by some of it now. To hear Victor name Flynn as someone he might care about was hard.

  “Look,” Victor said harshly. “We’re civilians now. And it’s the twenty-first century—even in Cornwall. That lad sat by your bed round the clock, Tom. If you’re not bloody worried about him, you should be.”

  A day of revelations. Tom sat listening to the storm rock the van. He could not work out if he had woken up into a new world or had unexpectedly learned to see the real nature of the old one. Friends and neighbours scouring the country for him. Mike Findlay’s expression when he opened the door to find him awake. Victor, whom Tom had always thought of as the essence of British soldiery, blunt and tough, straight as a die, watching him now in a painful mix of annoyance and compassion.

  “Yeah,” he said, voice helplessly cracking on the word. “I am. But what do I do with it, Vic? He’s out there, and I’m here. Grounded. What do I do?”

  Victor sighed. “You promise me you’re not gonna drop down dead on me if I don’t take you back to Doc Findlay?” After a moment Tom nodded, meaning it as far as he could. “All right. The lifeboat’s out. Florrie’s making tea for the wives and other halves. Come down to Porth Bay with me. They’ll show you what you do.”

  The RNLI station in Porth was brightly lit up, a brave neon box in the wild night. As Victor helped him out of the van on the harbourside, Tom saw that the waves were crashing almost to the top of the lifeboat’s vacant launch ramp. “How long has she been out?”

  “Nearly three hours now. We’ve lost radio contact with them. And there’s nobody to back them up tonight.”

  No. Tom could see that it was not easy. He knew almost all of the dozen or so people gathered in the station office—by sight, at least, or as patients. He hadn’t permitted himself anything else. Most of them looked tired, a few pale and sick, as if the three hours had been very long. They looked up as he and Victor entered. A few smiles of recognition, surprise. One or two nodded and greeted him by name. Florence Travers, busy with a tea urn in the corner, looked up and broke into a wide grin. “Tom! Thank God you’re on your feet again.”

  Vic put a hand to his back. “You okay?”

  “Yes. Just about.”

  “Good. Florrie, he’s come to make himself useful.”

  She nodded, gave him a look of unsentimental understanding. “That’s right. Better than sitting at home, isn’t it?”

  So Tom helped serve tea to the wives and other halves. What struck him—apart from his sense of utter unreality, handing over plastic cups, asking who wanted sugar, while the gale screamed so hard outside that the little concrete building seemed to rock—was that he was not the only man in the gathering. One of the others was a father, granted, widowed Bill Hughes whose only son was one of the lifeboat volunteers, but he could not account for Christopher Poldue, who as far as Tom had known lived a bachelor life in the flat above his antiques shop. Poldue was a standoffish type—but, then, to all appearances, so was he.

  When next he limped past the plastic chair where Poldue was sitting, he paused. “It’s Christopher, isn’t it?” The other man nodded, and he cautiously sat beside him. “Got somebody out there?” he asked, half expecting to be told to mind his own business, but Poldue’s expression suddenly altered, and he said quietly, “Yes. Gavin Wilkes. Do you know him?”

  “Of course.” Tom did. Wilkes taught at the village primary school in Tremethick Cross. He reflected that, while Vic might think it was the twenty-first century, Poldue and Wilkes must have had a hard time of it. No wonder he lived quietly. “God, Christopher,” he heard himself saying, to his own surprise. “How do you stand it? Nights like this?”

  Poldue regarded him with calm grey eyes. He looked very tired, but serene. “It’s what they do. All you can do is accept it. Make the best of every second you can spend with them, and then…you let them fly.”

  Tom waited, doing his best to accept. He was not sure for how long. Desultory conversation rose and died, then dropped away with a cold finality when the beeping of someone’s watch announced that the fourth hour was up. The Morvah postman’s wife, heavily pregnant, broke into helpless tears and immediately began apologising for it. There was a code of behaviour, Tom had already gathered, to which everyone would adhere for as long as they could. But Florence went and put an arm around the girl. She looked across at Tom, who was unconsciously cracking a plastic cup to shreds between his hands. “It’s all right, Evie. Been a long shift tonight, eh? And you’re getting tired. Tom, why don’t you come and have a look at her?”

  In checking her pulse, laying a hand to her belly and gently joking with her about the chaos that would ensue with the arrival of her twins, Tom briefly lost his own concerns, and he supposed that this too was part of how the waiting was done.

  He barely heard Vic’s mobile beep, and was still crouching in front of Evie when he came back from the adjacent room. The phone was still open in his hand. “All right, everyone,” he said. “Long Rock Point just heard from them. They waterlogged their radio, but your James remembered his torch Morse, Evie, and signalled to the lighthouse crew. It’ll take a good two hours, but they’re on their way home.”

  Tom stood back, out of the way of their celebrations. He thought that, if he switched the lights off, he would still be able to see them, each one haloed in the electricity of human joy. The air in the storm-rocked little room was ablaze. Christopher Poldue very stiffly and courteously kissed Evie, then to Tom’s surprise turned to him and took his hand. “There. Good news, eh? Which one were you waiting for?”

  “Me? Er… No one on the lifeboat. One of the air-sea rescue crew.”

  “Oh. That’s harder still.” He shook Tom’s hand warmly. “Good luck, Dr. Penrose.”

  Tom thanked him, smiled as best he could and turned to go. Where, he wasn’t sure. His just-woken brain kept trying to tell him he had a Land Rover parked somewhere nearby and could choose. The idea of his own empty home was repulsive to him. Back to the hospital, he supposed. His own reluctance to go there had to be secondary to Mike Findlay’s anxiety and the amount of trouble Vic would get into for colluding in his escape. Vic was still standing in the doorway—maybe he would give him a lift.

  “Tom,” he said. “Come here a second.” He drew him into the next room. “Listen. Florrie’s sister works on the phones up at Hawke Lake. I gave her a ring to see if I could get some news about Flynn. She says the rescue chopper was forced down by high winds off Padstow. They’re all okay, but…Flynn wasn’t rostered on their shift tonight. She thinks he went out with the enforcement team on some weapons-trafficking op, and now they’re out of contact too.” He put out a hand to catch Tom’s arm. “Here. Don’t you pass out on me, Doc. Does that mean something to you? Is something going on?”

  Tom leaned on the wall. It did not stop the nauseating heave of the room’s floor beneath him, but it kept him upright. He had to do better than—or at least as well as—the pregnant girl waiting to hear she’d lost her husband. He said dryly, “I don’t know for sure. Just…trouble. Christ, Vic! There’s nobody to help them.”

  “Well, they’ve called the Devon and Exeter coastguards, but it’ll take them a while to…” He tailed off, looking at Tom assessingly. “Doc. In your honest medical opinion, how are you?”

  Tom frowned at the dead-serious note of the question. “What? I’m okay. Does it matter?”

  “Believe me, it does.”

  “Well…” Bewildered, Tom tried to take a professional inward glance. “Nothing broken but my collarbone, and that’s strapped. My legs are bruised and lacerated. Vitals are low, but that’s because I’ve been on a drip-feed for five days, apart from Florrie’s biscuits.”

  “Functional, then?”

 
; “Just about.”

  “Right. Come with me.”

  Tom stood in Vic Travers’ boathouse, his sense of unreality increasing by the second. The building was the size of a light-aircraft hangar. At one time, he remembered, Vic’s father had employed half of Porth Harbour in here. The smell of paint and pitch, and the dim light from the few remaining bulbs, hung solemnly in the air, a stillness made deeper by the roar of the storm outside.

  Only three of the twelve building berths were occupied. Two looked like simple jobs, such as he’d known had been all poor Vic was capable of on his return from his last tour of duty. He recognised the upturned hull of the Reeves’ fishing smack, getting her seams recaulked, and a canoe Vic had told him he was making for his nephew’s birthday. The third berth’s occupant was much larger and cloaked in a massive tarpaulin that Vic was now briskly unbuckling and pulling back.

  “Here,” he said. “I’ve had to keep her wrapped. You know how Florrie talks, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get her finished. But apart from her colours, she is.”

  The boat was a replica, down to the last measurement, of the RNLI lifeboat that had gone out on its mission that night. However, unlike that well-used lady, her paint was glossy and intact, her powerful lines unbroken by wear and tear. Further, as Vic smilingly explained, helping Tom down off the berth side and onto her deck, she had a one hundred and fifty horsepower Mercury outboard motor twice the size of the current boat’s, a top speed of forty knots, and state-of-the-art radar.

  Tom looked around him wonderingly. “God almighty, Vic. Did they commission you?”

  “No. I’m sure I was meant to spend my army payout on food for the kiddies and visits to the shrink, but this seemed better.” He crouched by the motor housing and gave the starter a brief, expert yank. Immediately a purring roar filled the boathouse. Belatedly Tom realised that this berth, with its ramp and double doors at the end, was for launching.

  Vic straightened, grinning. “Lived here all my life, Doc!” he yelled over the noise. “Watched the lifeboats going in and out, bringing people home. This is my contribution. She’s called the Shell shock. I’m gonna donate her, if we don’t sink the bitch tonight.”

  Tom looked at him. For a moment, the gale found a voice even louder than the throbbing Mercury, but he did not hear it. He was feeling the beginnings of a bright, prickling heat, in his chest and his belly, at once strange and utterly familiar. The pain in his limbs seemed to drop from him. Yes, he remembered this. It was the pure joy of action, most of it lost back in boyhood, the dregs of it spilled out across the dust of Afghanistan. Of not thinking but doing. He said, “I’ll get the doors.”

  “You’ll wait a bloody second,” Vic corrected him. He opened a locker in the cabin and handed Tom a life vest. When he looked up from fastening it, his friend was holding out to him what he took for one second to be a flare gun—then recognised for a Browning 9mm service revolver, from the weight of it loaded and ready.

  “Vic… What the fuck?”

  “There’s something not right about Bobby Tremaine, isn’t there? That’s why you’re so worried.”

  Bobby Tremaine. You know him too. Tom swallowed dryly. “Yeah. I’m not sure whose side he’s on. And he’s got Flynn.”

  “Right. So whatever he’s up to, I doubt we’re gonna talk him out of it. Take the gun. I know you can shoot—can you operate radar and navigate?”

  In helicopters, military convoy planes when he was doubling up for injured crew. The principle was, he prayed, the same on water. “Just about. Yes.”

  “Good lad. I’ll pilot. Their last point of contact was ten miles out from Trewellard. We can be there in half an hour.”

  Chapter Nine: The Ninth Wave

  Forty-five degrees of pitch and yaw—up, down, port or starboard. Tom knew that, had his whole focus not lain thirty miles ahead of the boat, he would have lapsed into seasick terror within five minutes of launch. He had been out on some wild nights, but never with a maniac like Vic, riding sole shotgun on a craft that really required a six-man crew to keep her stable and operational.

  The first few jolts from wave crest to trough went through his spine like a pile driver. And shotgun was generous—Vic’s top-line replica had her navigator and GPS station out front in the prow, while the pilot manned the wheel from behind his right shoulder. The sense of being catapulted forward from the rear increased the sense of helplessness, absolute lack of control, to a pitch that would have done for Tom before the advent of Flynn into his world had set the whole thing flying off its axis anyway.

  And if he had to be shot blindly into the dark, who better to trust with the task than Vic? Shell-shocked nutcase he might be, but centuries of wrestling the ocean ran in his blood. Tom soon saw a pattern to his madness, began to pick up how he raced the lifeboat in zigzag lines from crest to crest, angling her back and forth to increase speed and lessen the swell’s drag on the hull. No one could have driven her faster. Knowing this—watching the lights of Porth Bay recede on either side of him—a great elation seized Tom, so warm and bright it felt like inner wings unfurling, felt as if it would crack his ribs from the inside. They were going out to find Flynn. The next wave which burst up over the prow soaked him to the skin, and his own laughter joined with Vic’s wild roar of amusement. All fear died. He had one task. He turned his attention to the GPS and radar and hung on.

  They were at the Trewellard coordinates within twenty-five minutes of launch. Victor eased off the engine when they drew near to target, allowing Tom the time and steady deck he needed to make a thorough radar sweep. A downed chopper would show up fine, but Tom knew—thought Victor did too—that they were not searching for an intact craft in the water. Not by now. If the SAR helicopter had been afloat, they would have signalled home. All they could hope for was wreckage.

  Inside himself, Tom was running another countdown too. Half an hour since last contact. A bailed-out crew would be nearing the end of the time they could expect to survive in Atlantic water in June. The rules were fairly strict. People usually followed them, with the exception of the occasional child who dropped into a deathlike hypothermia and came back like Lazarus when warmed up hours later.

  Victor yelled his name over the wind, calling him back from a chilly distraction. “We should be right on top of them. Anything?”

  “Not a bloody thing.” Not looking up from the screen, Tom felt Victor lock the helm and come to stand beside him. Without her forward momentum, the boat was a cork on the waves. Slap after drenching, blinding slap of salt water cracked against her hull, exploding spray into his face and across the instrumentation. “Look, Vic,” he said hoarsely, dragging a cloth across the panel for the fiftieth time. “Nothing. Christ, they must have gone under.”

  Victor didn’t reply. He reached across Tom, steadying both of them with his grip on the rail, shielding him from some of the gale’s ferocity while Tom reset the unit and began another sweep. “No, wait. There. Look!”

  “Okay, yes. That size, though, could be a porpoise or a fish school.”

  Tom understood. Victor, the good soldier, would offer neither empty words of comfort nor of hope, not until they were sure. He swung away from the radar, and a moment later Tom heard the engines snarl as he turned her in the direction of the screen’s pale ghost.

  The rigid-inflatable life raft, low in the water from the weight of her crew. The lights of the Shellshock picked out her RNAS colours and insignia, a match for her mother-ship chopper, as she became more than an echo on the scanner, and Victor steered close, bringing her round in a sweeping arc to protect her from the swell.

  Tom remained at his station. The navigator’s job was done, he supposed. In a moment, he would get up and help Vic throw out a cable, make sure it was caught, and haul the raft, with its waving, gesticulating cargo of lives, towards the relative safety of the larger craft. He would overcome the aching lassitude that had slowed his heartbeat, weighted his limbs with cold lead. He could not see Flynn, in the strobing, shifti
ng light. The faces of the rescued men were sombre, even while they yelled their greetings and thanks across the diminishing gap. Tom knew the look, from a hundred returned mission-flights into Bastion—they had lost someone.

  The sight of Victor fighting to unhitch the heavy tow-cable brought him round. Mechanically he shoved himself upright, the pain he had forgotten boiling up from his legs and broken ribs. Two of the ASaC crew, soaked and shivering in their flight suits, were reaching out, the others moving automatically to balance the raft’s far side. Tom went to join Vic, and between them they rolled out enough of the wire that the survivors could grab it, locking it tight to the RIB’s rail. There was more to be done. Tom took it on himself, a last buffer between now and the moment when he would have to speak, to ask. Hitching the two boats together on one wire would soon damage both as the waves slammed them together, and he struggled against the Shellshock’s pitch to secure the stern too, lashing both craft to one movement on the swell.

  “Tom Penrose? Is that you?”

  He jerked his head up. A third ASaC man had made his way to the back of the raft and was helping him, pulling the tow through his numb hands. Tom’s cognitive process came slowly, but at last he recognised him—Charlie Mitchell, who regularly brought one or another of his increasing brood of kids to the surgery. He opened his mouth to answer him, but the cold seemed to have entered his throat and lungs, and he could only nod. “What are you doing out here, Doc? Is that Vic Travers? God… What’s happened to the RNLI lads?”

  Tom tried to put the question together with his reason for asking it, but Victor came to his rescue. “We’re not the lifeboat, mate. A poor substitute, but at least we’ve got you. Or most of you, anyway. Where’s…”