Wyatt's Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

by Desmond Bagley

  Causton raised his eyebrows. ‘It’ll look a pretty shabby gesture,’ he said. ‘The Americans come in to bring you unstinting aid, and you reciprocate by taking the Base.’

  ‘The Americans will bring us nothing they do not owe already,’ said Favel drily. ‘They have rented eight square miles of valuable real estate for sixty years at a pittance, on a lease forced at a time when they occupied San Fernandez as though it were an enemy country.’ He shook his head seriously. ‘I do not want to take the Base away from them, Mr Causton. But I think I will be in a position to negotiate another, more equitable lease.’

  Causton took a notebook from his pocket and refreshed his memory. ‘One thousand, six hundred and ninety-three dollars a year. I think it’s worth more than that, and I think you ought to get it.’

  Favel grinned cheerfully. ‘You forgot the twelve cents, Mr Causton. I think the International Court at The Hague will give us just judgement. I would like you to be at the Base as an independent witness to the fact that the San Fernandan government has assumed control of Cap Sarrat.’

  So now he was watching the first helicopter touch down on the territory of the sovereign government of San Fernandez. He watched men climb out and saw the gleam of gold on a flat cap. ‘My God, I wonder if that’s Brooks,’ he murmured, and began to walk across the apron. He saw Favel move forward and watched the two men meet.

  ‘Welcome back to Cap Sarrat,’ said Favel, offering his hand. ‘I am Julio Favel.’

  ‘Brooks—Commodore in the United States Navy.’

  The two men shook hands and Causton wondered if Brooks knew about the flaw in the treaty. If he did, he showed no awareness of his changed position, nor did he evince any surprise as he flicked his eyes upwards at the sodden green and gold flag of San Fernandez which hung limply from an improvised mast on the control tower. He said, ‘What do you need most, Mr Favel, and where do you need it? Anything we’ve got, you just have to ask for it.’

  Favel shook his head sadly. ‘We need everything—but first, doctors, medical supplies, food and blankets. After that we would like some kind of large-scale temporary housing—even tents would do.’

  Brooks indicated the helicopters landing on the runways. ‘These boys are going to check the airfield to see if it’s safe for operation. We’ll set up a temporary control tower over there. When that’s done the big planes can start to move in—they’re already waiting for a signal in Miami and Puerto Rico. In the meantime, we have five choppers full of medics. Where do you want them to go?’

  ‘Up the Negrito. They will have plenty of work.’

  Brooks raised his eyebrows. ‘The Negrito? Then you got your people out of St Pierre.’

  ‘With the help of your Mr Wyatt. That is a very forceful and persuasive young man.’

  They began to move away. ‘Yes,’ said Brooks. ‘I wish I had…’ His voice was lost to Causton as they walked up the runway.

  III

  Dawson caught up with Wyatt when he was nearly at the top of the hill. ‘Take it easy,’ he gasped. ‘You’ll bust a gut.’

  Wyatt kept silent, reserving his breath to power his legs which were working like pistons. They reached the crest and he looked around, his chest heaving and the muscles of his legs sore with the effort he had made. ‘I don’t…see…a gully.’

  Dawson looked over the other side towards the sea and saw a line of welcome blue sky on the horizon. He turned back. ‘Suppose they had come up from the coast—where would they go from here?’

  Wyatt shook his head in irritation. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘My inclination would be to edge in towards St Pierre,’ said Dawson. ‘So I wouldn’t have so far to go home when it was all over.’ He pointed to the left. ‘That way. Let’s have a look.’

  They walked a little way along the crest of the hill, and Wyatt said, ‘That’s it—I suppose you’d call that a gully.’

  Dawson looked down at the cleft cut into the hillside. ‘It’s our best bet so far,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down.’

  They climbed down into the ravine and looked about. Pools of water lay trapped among the rocks, and Wyatt said, ‘There’d be quite a bit of water coming down here during the hurricane. That’s what Mrs Warmington meant when she talked of a river on the top of a hill.’ He filled his lungs with air. ‘Julie!’ he shouted. ‘Julie! Rawsthorne!’

  There was no answer. Everything was silent save for the distant roar of a helicopter landing at the bottom of the valley.

  ‘We’ll go a bit further,’ said Dawson. ‘Perhaps they’re lower down. Perhaps they’ve left already—gone down to the valley.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do that,’ objected Wyatt. ‘Rawsthorne knows that the St Michel road is easier.’

  ‘Okay, perhaps they’ve gone that way.’

  ‘We’ll look down here first,’ said Wyatt. He began to climb among the tumbled rocks at the bottom of the ravine, wading through pools, heedless of the water. Dawson followed him, and kept a careful watch all round. From time to time Wyatt shouted, and then they paused to listen but heard no answering cry.

  After a while Dawson said, ‘That Warmington cow said something about a waterfall. You see anything that could have been a waterfall?’

  ‘No,’ said Wyatt shortly.

  They went further down the ravine and found themselves enclosed within its sheer walls. ‘This would be as good a place to sit out a hurricane as any,’ commented Dawson. ‘Better than the goddam holes we had.’

  ‘Then where the hell are they?’ demanded Wyatt, losing his temper.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Dawson. ‘We’ll find them if they’re here. I’ll tell you what; you carry on down the ravine, and I’ll get up on the hillside. I can move faster up there and still see most of what there is to be seen down here.’

  He climbed up the ravine wall and regained the open hillside, and as he thought, he was immediately able to keep up a better speed. Even though he was hampered by fallen trees, they were easier to negotiate than the jumble of rocks in the ravine. He carried on down the hill, outstripping Wyatt, and returned to the lip of the ravine frequently to scan the bottom very carefully. It was quite a while before he found anything.

  At first he thought it was some kind of animal moving very slowly, and then his breath hissed as he saw it was a man crawling painfully on his belly. He climbed down to the bottom and stumbled across the rocks to where the crawling figure had stopped. When he turned the man over he lifted his head and yelled, ‘Wyatt, come here—I’ve found Rawsthorne!’

  Rawsthorne was in a bad way. His face was deathly pale, accentuating the blood streaks on the side of his head. His right side appeared to be completely paralysed and he made ineffectual pawing movements with his left arm as Dawson gently cradled him. His eyes flickered open and his lips moved but he made no sound.

  ‘Take it easy,’ said Dawson. ‘You’re safe now.’

  Rawsthorne’s breath rasped and he whispered, ‘Heart…heart…attack.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Dawson. ‘Relax.’

  Small stones clattered as Wyatt came up, and Dawson turned his head. ‘The poor guy’s had a heart attack. He’s not too good.’

  Wyatt took Rawsthorne’s wrist and felt the faint thread of pulse and then looked into the glazing eyes which seemed focused an infinity away. The grey lips moved again. ‘Waterfall…tree…tree…’

  Rawsthorne suddenly sagged and lay in Dawson’s arms, gazing vacantly at the sky, his jaw dropped open.

  Dawson eased him down on to the rocks. ‘He’s dead.’

  Wyatt stared down at the body and his face looked haggard. ‘Was he crawling?’ he whispered.

  Dawson nodded. ‘He was going down the ravine. I don’t know how he expected to make it.’

  ‘Julie would never have left him,’ said Wyatt in an overcontrolled voice. ‘Not if he was sick. Something must have happened to her.’

  ‘He said something about a waterfall, too—just like Warmington.’

  ‘It must be hig
her up,’ said Wyatt. ‘And I think I know where it is.’ He rose to his feet and stumbled away, moving much too fast for the broken ground and reckless of twisted or broken ankles. Dawson followed him more cautiously and found him beneath an outcrop of rock too hard and stubborn to be worn away. He stooped and picked up something from the cleft in the base of the rock. It was a woman’s purse.

  ‘This was Warmington’s,’ he said. ‘This is the waterfall.’ His head jerked upwards to the tangle of tree roots above his head on the edge of the ravine. ‘And that’s the tree—he said “tree”, didn’t he?’

  He scrambled up the side of the ravine and then turned to give a hand to Dawson. ‘Let’s have a closer look at this bloody tree.’

  They walked around the tree and saw nothing, and then Wyatt pushed in among the branches and suddenly gave a choked sound. ‘She’s here,’ he said brokenly.

  Dawson pushed his way through and looked over Wyatt’s shoulder, then turned away. He said heavily, ‘Well—we found her.’

  She was lying with the trunk of the tree across her legs and hips and a branch across her right arm, pinning it to the ground. The fingertips of her left hand were scraped bloodily raw where she had scrabbled at the trunk in her efforts to move it. Her face, smudged with dirt, was otherwise marble-white and drained of blood, and the only thing about her that moved was a strand of her hair that waved gently in the wind.

  Wyatt stepped back away from the tree and looked at it calculatingly. He said in a repressed voice, ‘Let’s move this tree. Let’s shift this damned tree.’

  ‘Dave,’ said Dawson quietly, ‘she’s dead.’

  Wyatt turned in a flash, his face furious. ‘We don’t know,’ he shouted. ‘We don’t know that.’

  Dawson fell back a step, intimidated by the controlled violence emanating from this man. He said, ‘All right, Dave. We’ll move the tree.’

  ‘And we’ll do it carefully, do you hear?’ said Wyatt. ‘We’ll do it very carefully.’

  Dawson looked at the tree dubiously. It was big and heavy and awkward. ‘How do we start?’

  Wyatt attacked a broken branch and wrenched it free by sheer force. He stepped back panting. ‘We take the weight off her…her body, then one of us can draw her out.’

  That did not look so easy to Dawson, but he was willing to give it a try. He took the branch which Wyatt offered and walked round the tree looking for a convenient place to wedge it under the trunk. Wyatt collected some rocks and followed him. ‘There,’ he said abruptly. ‘That’s the place.’ His face was very white. ‘We must be careful.’

  Dawson rammed the branch beneath the trunk and cautiously tested the leverage. He doubted if the trunk would move but said nothing. Wyatt pushed him out of the way and swung his weight on to the branch. There was a creak, but otherwise nothing. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You can push on this, too.’

  ‘Who is going to push the stones under?’ asked Dawson reasonably. ‘Neither of us can do it if we’re both heaving on that branch.’

  ‘I can do it with my foot,’ said Wyatt impatiently. ‘Come on.’

  Both of them leaned heavily on the branch and Dawson felt an agony of pain in his hands. The trunk of the tree moved fractionally and he set his teeth and held on. Slowly the trunk lifted, inch by inch, and Wyatt, both his feet off the ground, nudged one of the rocks with the tip of his shoe until it slid underneath. Then another, a larger one, went under, and he gasped, ‘That’s enough—for now.’

  Slowly they released the branch and the trunk settled again, but it was slightly raised on the rocks. Dawson staggered back, his hands aflame with pain, and Wyatt looked up and saw his face. ‘What’s the matter?’ Then he caught on. ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.’

  Dawson suppressed the sickness that welled up within him and grinned weakly. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘There’s nothing to it. I’m all right.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he said nonchalantly.

  Wyatt switched his attention back to the tree. ‘I’ll see if I can pull her out now.’ He crawled under the branches and was silent for some minutes, then said in a muffled voice, ‘It needs one more swing.’ He came out. ‘If you can get under there and pull her out while I lift this damned tree, I think we’ll do it.’

  He carefully chocked in the rocks he had already inserted under the trunk while Dawson got in position, and when Dawson shouted that he was ready he swung again on the lever. Nothing happened, so he swung harder, again and again, leaning his whole weight on the branch and pushing down until he thought his bones would crack. The thought entered his mind dizzily that he had gone through all this before in the prison cell. Well, he had done it before and he would do it again.

  The tree-trunk did not move.

  Dawson called a halt and came out from under the branches. He had been close to Julie’s body and was now certain that she was dead, but whatever he privately thought of the uselessness of all this did not show on his face for one moment. He said, ‘What we need here is weight—not strength. I’m sixty pounds heavier than you are—it may not be all muscle, but that doesn’t matter. You pull her out while I do the lifting.’

  ‘What about your hands?’

  ‘They’re my hands, aren’t they? Get under there.’

  He waited until Wyatt was ready, then leaned on the branch and thrust down with all his force and weight. He almost screamed at the cruel torment in his hands and sweat beaded his forehead. The trunk moved and Wyatt gave a shout. ‘Keep it up! For God’s sake, keep it up!’

  Dawson went through an eternity of purgatory and for a fraction of a second he wondered if he Would ever be able to use his hands again—say, on a typewriter. Hell! he grunted to himself, I can always dictate—and pressed down harder. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Wyatt backing out, drawing something with him, and it was with exquisite relief that he heard a faint and faraway voice say, ‘Okay, you can let it go.’

  He released the branch and flopped to the ground, thankfully feeling the flaming hell centred in his hands dying to a welcome numbness. With lacklustre eyes he watched Wyatt bend over Julie, rip open her shirt and apply his ear to her chest. And it was with something approaching shock that he heard him shout exultantly, ‘She’s alive! She’s still alive! It’s faint, but it’s there.’

  It took a long time for them to signal a helicopter, but when they did action was swift. The chopper hovered over them and swirled the dust while Wyatt lay over Julie and protected her from the blast. A man was lowered by a winch and dropped to the ground, and Dawson lurched up to him. ‘We need a doctor.’

  The man gave a brief grin. ‘You’ve found one—what’s the trouble?’

  ‘This woman.’ He led the way to where Julie was lying and the doctor dropped to one knee beside her and produced a stethoscope. After a few seconds he fumbled in a cartouche at his waist and drew forth a hypodermic syringe and an ampoule. While Wyatt watched anxiously he gave Julie an injection. Then he waved back the helicopter and, speaking through a microphone at the bottom of the dangling hoist, he gave terse instructions.

  The hoist was reeled in and presently another man came down, bearing a folded stretcher and a bundle of splints, and the helicopter retreated again to continue its circling. Julie was tenderly bound in a complex of splints and given another injection. Wyatt said, ‘How is…will she…?’

  The doctor looked up. ‘We got to her in time. She’ll be all right if we can get her off this hillside real fast.’ He waved to the helicopter which came in again, and Julie was hoisted up on the stretcher.

  The doctor surveyed them. ‘You coming?’ He looked at Dawson. ‘What’s the matter with your hands?’

  ‘What hands?’ asked Dawson with tremulous irony. He thrust bandaged claws forward. ‘Look, doc, no hands!’ He began to laugh hysterically.

  The doctor said, ‘You’d better come with us.’ He looked at Wyatt. ‘You, too; you look half beat to death.’
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  They were hoisted up by the winch one at a time, and the doctor followed and tapped the pilot once on the shoulder. Wyatt sat next to the stretcher and looked at Julie’s white face. He wondered if she would consider marrying a man who had failed her, who had let her go into the storm to die. He doubted it—but he knew he would ask her.

  He stared down blindly at the receding hillside and at the broad waters of the flooded Negrito and felt a touch on his hand. He turned quickly and saw that Julie was awake and that her hand touched his. Two tears ran down her cheeks and her lips moved, but all sound was lost in the roar of the aircraft.

  Quickly he bent down with his ear to her lips and caught the faint thread of sound. ‘Dave! Dave! You’re alive!’ Even in the thin whisper there were overtones of incredulity.

  He smiled at her. ‘Yes, we’re alive. You’ll be back in the States today.’

  Her fingers tightened weakly on his hand and she spoke again. He missed something of what she said, but caught the gist of it.’…come back. I want house…overlooking sea…St Pierre.’

  Then she closed her eyes but her fingers still held his hand and he felt half his burden taken from him. She was going to be all right and they were going to be together.

  ***

  And so he went back to Cap Sarrat Base and into fame and history. He did not know that the headlines of the world’s newspapers would blazon his name in a hundred languages as the man who saved a whole city’s people—as the man who had destroyed an army. He did not know that honours awaited him, to be bestowed by lesser men. He did not know that one day, when he was a very old man, he would be the one who was to show the way to the taming of the big wind—the hurricane.

  He knew nothing of all this. All he knew was that he was very tired and that he was a professional failure. He did not know how many soldiers had died in the trap of St Pierre—many hundreds or many thousands—but even if only one had died it would serve to proclaim to the world his failure in his work and he felt miserable.