Stormchild

by Bernard Cornwell

  Except it was not this little creep, but Nicole. It had always been Nicole. I had tried to persuade myself that she had been duped by von Rellsteb, while in truth she had been the instigator of all the evil. Why was I so surprised? Fletcher had told me that the vast majority of murders were committed inside the family, and that money and inheritance were motives for murder as old as man, and, from the first moment when I had suspected inheritance as the motive of Joanna’s murder, I must have known it was Nicole and no one else. Von Rellsteb could not have profited from my death unless Nicole wished him to. I had tried to convince myself that von Rellsteb had manipulated Nicole, but I should have known better. Nicole had never been manipulated by anybody. It had been Nicole all along; Nicole had killed her own mother and tried to kill me.

  “I didn’t plant the bomb!” Stephen said in a low, pleading voice.

  “Of course not,” I said tiredly. It had been Nicole, probably with her lover, who had stolen up the river in that rain-slatted darkness. It did not matter how, only who, and it could only have been Nicole, for only Nicole would have known that Joanna and I sailed to Guernsey every Easter, and only Nicole would have known just where to find Slip-Slider, and only Nicole would have remembered exactly how to get inside the boat to plant the bomb. Had she heard my voice that night? Had she heard her mother and I talking? Had she seen us at that moment when I switched on the yard’s floodlamps?

  “It wasn’t me! It wasn’t!” Stephen whimpered.

  And, as I thought about Nicole crouching on my boatyard’s pontoons, my imagination balked. How could she have done it? Did she think that by saving seals and staunching oil spills and harassing nuclear tests she could atone for murdering her parents? What ungoverned engine of hatred or envy or passion had driven her to such an act? Was it just for money? If Nicole had asked us, we would have helped her, but she had wanted to take all there was and without strings. So she had killed, and if I had not stayed behind to sell Stormchild Nicole would be leading her own environmental crusade from my boatyard.

  “Tim?” Jackie said very tentatively.

  “It wasn’t me!” Stephen cried.

  “Oh, shut the fuck up,” I told him. He had been there. He had been on the boat that had crept up the river to commit murder. This green creep, this self-righteous rapist, had helped sail the boat that took my daughter to kill my wife. “Fuck you,” I said tiredly, then pulled the rigging knife away and folded its blade. Hurting Stephen would achieve nothing.

  Instead I listened as Jackie questioned him about Genesis. She had a journalist’s curiosity and a dogged patience, and elicited a sad, but oddly familiar tale of idealism soured and high hopes broken. Most of the Genesis activists, like Stephen himself, had joined von Rellsteb in Canada or on America’s west coast, where, convinced that emotional indignation was a valid replacement for informed thinking, and fired by the chorus of environmental doom-sayers, they had been attracted to von Rellsteb’s venomous gospel that only by the most ruthless measures could a polluted world be restored. For a time, fueled by youthful enthusiasm, von Rellsteb’s disciples were convinced their efforts were making a difference. Every press-cutting that described a drift net sabotaged or a tree saved encouraged them, yet, as they came to realize they were only doing what a hundred or a thousand other such groups were doing, von Rellsteb easily persuaded his followers that their unique contribution to the environmental crusade should be a paradigm wilderness community that would be a forerunner of a new and ecologically sound world. The Genesis community would show the way to a better planet. They would live in peace and organic harmony, hurting not a tree nor a beast, and loving each other freely.

  Patagonia had been the setting for this new Eden, but, under the environment’s hammer blows of cold, rain, wind, and scarcity, the community’s passionate idealism had first decayed into petty jealousies and afterward into an authoritarian hell. Peace was enforced with punishment, the trees were cut for fuel and beasts killed for fur, and free love had turned to institutionalized rape, yet none of the community’s leaders, and not even the majority of its members, would confess to failure, for to do so would have been to admit that they were as fallible as other humans. Instead they had persevered in their losing battle, clawing small victories from decaying morale. They harassed the drift netters, and Nicole, Stephen told us, was even now patrolling the southern seas to discover which tuna fishermen still killed dolphins. “Nicole will never give up,” Stephen added with a grudging admiration, and he confessed that he had proved too feeble to join her crew; Nicole wanted only the hardest and most fanatical people on her boat. Genesis Four, Stephen told us, was crewed by the community’s hard-liners, who, almost alone now, were still fulfilling some of von Rellsteb’s original aims.

  The other members of the community had given up the fight. Some had weakened and died, to be buried at the foot of the escarpment, while a very few had tried to escape, only to discover that their paradise was too remote and too far from other human traffic to make such escape possible.

  I listened to the hopeless tale and, when Jackie was finished and Stephen had no more answers to give, I cut a strip of cloth from his jerkin and gagged him once again.

  Then we lay in silence and stared down at the world von Rellsteb had made. This was his green dream. This was the harbinger of the new, pure, unindustrialized, unpolluted, clean, and lovely world, where man would live in loving tune with primal nature. Except nature had other ideas, and so Jackie and I were staring down at a rain-pounded, shit-stinking failure of flooded vegetable plots and broken hopes. This, then, was the eco-paradise—a place of misery and filth with my daughter at its evil heart. This was Caspar von Rellsteb’s fiefdom, his achievement, and tonight, under the cloak of darkness, I would destroy it.

  The rain smashed down, flooding every hollow in the uplands and spilling a myriad of rivulets across the escarpment’s edge. This was an earth-drowning rain, a cataclysm of water, a planet-drenching misery. We waited as the wan, wet light faded. Jackie, huddling close beside me for warmth, told me about her vain attempt to find a newspaper that would send her south to explore the Genesis story. Three major papers had been interested, but each had insisted that a more experienced reporter be assigned to the story. So, she and Molly Tetterman had decided to go south themselves. They had flown to Santiago, then, already worried that their money would run out, they had bought second-class rail tickets to Puerto Montt. “The train tickets only cost nine eighty-five U.S.,” Jackie explained, “and the airfare would have been seventy-two dollars each! So we went by train, and then we went to the steamship company and they agreed to bring us here and collect us on their way back from Puerto Natales. They were really great. I thought they were going to charge us a fortune, because the San Rafael had to steam miles out of its way to get us here, but they really seemed to want to help us. They’re kind of curious about what goes on here.”

  I asked when the San Rafael was arriving to collect them, and Jackie said in ten or eleven days, depending on the weather, and then I thought to ask if, by any chance, she was carrying a watch, and she was, and she was sure it was accurate, and it showed us that the time was just three minutes short of the hour.

  I climbed to the very top of the rock where, under the guyed mast and in the wind-whipping lash of the rain, I took out my handheld radio. I knew that the higher I was the more chance David had of hearing me. I switched the radio on and tried to ignore the ominous message of its blinking battery light. I tuned the set to channel 37 then pressed the transmit button. “Stormchild, Stormchild,” I said, “this is Tim, this is Tim. Over.”

  I waited. The red light seemed to be blinking more feebly and I assumed that each wretched blink was draining yet more power from the already weak battery. Rain was seeping inside my collar. “For fuck’s sake, David”—I let my tension show—”talk to me!”

  A very offended voice suddenly answered. “This is Stormchild, this is Stormchild. There’s no need to use offensive language, Tim. We’ve
been keeping a radio watch for you, but we’ve had to stand well offshore because of the weather, and there’s a bit of westerly in the wind, as you must have noticed, so I didn’t dare come too close to the coast.” David wittered on, giving me his news, telling me how risky it had been leaving Almagro Channel, and I could not interrupt him, because, so long as he had his transmit button pressed he could not hear my transmissions, so all I could do was wait until he shut up. The small red light on my radio winked tiredly, and still David explained why it had taken him so long to hear my transmissions, but at last he handed the airwave back to me.

  “David! I need you at the settlement. David, I say again, I need you at the Genesis settlement. Not at the mine, but at the settlement. Come here now. This radio is on the blink, I can’t transmit much longer. Just come here! Do you read me? Over.”

  All I heard in reply was a hiss and a broken jumble of David’s voice, and when the jumble ended I pressed my transmit button. “David! Just come here, just come here, just come here! To the settlement!” The red light was flickering, then disappeared altogether, and, when I released the transmit button, I could hear nothing at all from the set’s small speaker. The red light’s disappearance showed the radio was dead and I could only pray that with its last weary gasp it had sent the precious message and that David would obey my summons.

  I went back to my hiding place where, as the light faded and the rain drummed on, I opened a tin of baked beans for Jackie, a can of corned beef for myself, and nothing at all for Stephen. Our enemies were ever more worried about their missing gunmen and sent two new and bedraggled search parties up into the rocks, but the new searchers still did not look right under their own noses and so discovered nothing. By now, I thought, Lisl would be getting close to panic. Stormchild was still on the loose, an unwanted visitor was prowling the island, and she had lost a man and his rifle. I hoped her nerves were shredding.

  Before the light faded altogether, and after the last searcher had gone back down the escarpment, I took Jackie to the sheltered lee of the rock, smiled at her, then told her it was time she learned to fire a rifle.

  Her eyes widened. “Tim,” she began in a very determined voice.

  “Shut up,” I said in an even more determined voice, then I showed her how to cock the Ml 6, where its safety catch was, and how to fire it in single shots and how to select automatic fire. “I’m surprised they didn’t teach you how to do this in Sunday School,” I said facetiously. “Doesn’t every little American girl learn how to shoot? Now,” I went on before she could answer, “the gun isn’t loaded, so pick it up and show me how you fire it.”

  “I couldn’t even touch it!” She stared with revulsion at the gun which now lay on the rock between us.

  “But you can touch it,” I said, “and fire it, and that’s exactly what you’re going to do tonight.”

  “No! I can’t!” She shuddered. Anyone would have thought I had asked her to eat a steak.

  “Listen!” I said, “I need some help tonight. I’m going down to the settlement and I want them to be looking in the wrong direction. In other words, I want you to distract them. So, show me how you select single-shot fire instead of automatic.”

  “Tim! I can’t!”

  “For Christ’s sake,” I said, “I’m not asking you to kill anyone! You don’t even have to point the gun at anyone! You just point the damn thing at the stars and shoot the sky! All I want you to do is make a noise with it. Have you got scruples about making a noise?”

  She reached out a tentative finger and touched the gun. It did not bite her. “Just make a noise?” she asked.

  “Just make a noise,” I reassured her.

  She actually succeeded in picking the gun up. “You know I won’t be able to kill anyone, Tim. I don’t mind making a noise with it, but I won’t point it at anyone!” She paused, her eyes huge in the damp dusk, and I felt a pang for the passions of youth.

  “I told you,” I said, “I just want you to make a noise.”

  “OK,” she said bravely.

  I gave her a kiss and, once I was sure she understood just how to fire the rifle, I spent the last of the seeping daylight making a weird contraption from parts of the dead radio, from the batteries of the flashlight I still had in my bag, and from five tins of baked beans. Jackie watched me with a puzzled expression. “What is it?” she asked.

  “A vegetarian, nonlethal bomb,” I told her, then I pushed the strange contraption into my bag with all but one stick of the Australian girl’s dynamite.

  The sun sank behind the clouds and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the foul murk of day became the fouler blackness of wet night until, shrouded by the darkness, I wormed my way out of the rock crevice. Jackie gave me a kiss, I promised I would be back within the hour, and then, armed and dangerous, I went to make my mischief.

  The first mischief was simply done. I climbed to the rock’s peak, where I sawed through the guy wires that held the makeshift aerial upright. I cut two of the twanging wires and the gusting wind did the rest. I heard a splintering torment, then the mast and its aerial crashed down the precipitous slope. For a few seconds the night was filled with the tumble and protest of breaking wood, then there was silence.

  “Tim?” Jackie called. “Are you all right?”

  “Never better.” The aerial’s coaxial cable was still trapped on a snag of stone and, just to make sure that the toppled aerial was useless, I slashed the cable through. Now, whatever else might happen in this night’s darkness, the settlement could-not talk to von Rellsteb. Then, after calling another farewell to Jackie, I clambered from the rocks and slithered down the escarpment’s steep face. I carried the Lee-Enfield, some of David’s waterproof matches, and one stick of dynamite. I had left Jackie with the rest of the explosives, my vegetarian bomb, the M-16, and stern instructions that, should I not be back within three hours, she was to go north, find another hiding place somewhere on the coast, then use the gun either to signal David as Stormchild sailed past or, if Stormchild failed to appear, to alert the San Rafael when that vessel returned.

  I reached the foot of the ridge and began to trudge through the waterlogged vegetable fields. My feet hurt, but I had no choice but to endure the pain. I was also soaked through. The escarpment’s steep slope cheated the wind of much of its force, but the rain still fell on these lowlands with the same malevolence with which it crashed among the high rocks. I slipped and fell a dozen times and tried not to remember the feces that were spread on these damp fields. I cursed when I stumbled into a flooding drainage ditch. I shivered, chilled to my bones. The only lights in the wet darkness were the dim, yellow gleam of candles that flickered weakly behind the settlement’s barred windows. For the moment I was keeping well clear of the house, preferring to begin my work at the stone wharf where the trawler was berthed.

  Astonishingly the fishing boat was unguarded. It seemed that after the mysterious events of the day, the community had retreated into the safe haven of their big house, so, for the moment, I had the night to myself.

  I used the heavy rigging knife to slice through all four of the trawler’s mooring lines. The last warp parted with a drumming twang to recoil viciously into the darkness where the fishing boat was already drifting away on the strong ebb tide. I could have simply let the tidal current sweep the old boat far away, but I wanted to start a campaign of fear, so I took the tin of waterproof matches from my pocket, and with it the single stick of ancient dynamite with its woven fuse and, praying that the fuse would not burn too swiftly, I knelt down, clumsily struck a match in the teeming rain and, sheltering the fluttering fire under the wing of my coat, I held the dynamite’s fuse into the red flame.

  For a second the fuse did nothing and the match, assailed by the wind’s gusting, almost went out, but then, and with an appalling swiftness, the fuse began to fizz bright sparks. The fuse was only five inches long and it seemed that three of those inches turned to instant ash as soon as the flame took hold, but I steeled myself to keep
hold of the pinkish stick as I stood, turned, estimated the distance to the drifting trawler, then threw.

  I saw the burning fuse arc through the darkness above the black water, then drop accurately down beyond the trawler’s gunwale. I heard the dynamite thump and roll on the wooden deck, then I dropped flat on the quay’s wet stones. I covered my head with my arms, closed my eyes tight, and waited.

  Nothing happened, and I supposed that the ancient dynamite had been made useless by its exposure to the weather, which was a damned shame for I had predicated much of this night’s mayhem on the efficiency of Alfred Nobel’s invention and, in my disappointment, and as I tried to work out an alternative course of action, I raised my head to watch the fishing boat’s dark shape drift away in the pouring night.

  The boat blew up.

  Give Nobel a prize, I thought, because the stick of old explosive had worked. Its blast thumped outward with an appalling, breath-stealing force, a force so great that for a few seconds it seemed as though the rain had been blown clean out of the sky, but then the circle of bright explosive light contracted and the hissing rain came back.

  The explosion, scything across the trawler’s deck, had lifted one of the huge fish-hold hatches and slammed it into the canted windows of the wheelhouse. A bright flame streaked up past the air, up past the boat’s derricks, past its aerials, up to where the rain slanted silver and sharp from the low clouds. Another and darker flame was flickering amidst the smoke that was boiling up from the trawler’s deck. That smaller flame was dark red, but suddenly it ran and spread to outline the boat’s tarred rigging in fire. The sea was illuminated for twenty yards around the burning boat, while, in a much wider circle, scraps of burning debris dropped from the sky.

  I slithered away, wriggling far beyond the light of the burning boat before I stood, wiped myself and the gun clean of mud, then began walking back toward the escarpment.