by Peter Tonkin
Robin loved this place almost as much as she loved the Lakes. She had spent her youthful summers moving between one and the other. She learned to swim here and to sail on Ullswater. She got her C helm on her little Mirror off the sandy point of Skinburness and steered her first diesel-powered boat on Derwentwater itself. With the exception of Ashenden, which was a haven she had created herself, this was the place in all the world she felt most at home. Even Summersend, Richard’s parents’ house, would be a slight anticlimax for her after this. But it would be better for the twins, for they loved the great old house on the Lincolnshire fens even more than they loved Cold Fell.
They came into the one or two cottages which gloried in the name Abbeytown and Sir William swung on to the B5302. The road — hardly more than a track, the tarmac liberally bestrewn with sand now — heaved itself over a slight rise and there was the sea. Only a low field or two away, it stretched apparently inimitably into a greyish heat haze to the south and the west. The twins felt Robin stir and opened their sleepy eyes. Things became less somnolent after that.
Just before they came into Silloth itself, Sir William turned down an old, familiar cart track which separated the fields and led down to the beach. At the base of this path, where the flat green of the farmer’s property gave up any attempt to remain level pasture and heaved itself up into a fringe of low dunes, Sir William parked. Robin rushed surfwards with the twins, leaving her father and Helen to get out the rugs and the picnic hamper.
The twins went straight into the water — thank heaven she had forced them to put their swimming togs on as soon as they got up; Robin halted when the white bubbles bit at her toes. She hadn’t bothered to check the tide tables before they set out and her wise seafarer’s eyes told her at once this was a bit of a mistake. It was ebb tide now. She looked at her watch. Low water at two. No high tide to swim in today, then. Well, there were sandcastles to be built and massive horse mushrooms to be picked up in the fields and cockles to be gathered at low tide — though they would have to be careful of the quicksands out towards the centre of the Solway.
All in all, if they timed things carefully, a fine day was in prospect. Robin turned and began to trudge back up the beach. The twins could come to no harm in the sea unguarded; they could both swim like eels and the water did not get deep enough to be dangerous until Dumbill Point five miles or so away.
Sir William and Helen had set up the picnic between the side of the Bentley and the flank of a dune well out of the wind and overlooking the whole of the beach so that the twins were in plain sight. As Robin approached, Helen was just lifting out the first of the folding chairs. Within five minutes, the grown-ups were settled and they remained that way for the rest of that idyllic day. Lunch was a great success. The twins ate food cold which they would never have considered hot — chicken, sausages, pies, eggs. They spent the better part of an hour beachcombing and worrying at the receding surf line with shrimp nets. At low water, Robin bestirred herself to go mushroom picking with them. At about four, with the westering sun pouring fiercely down upon them, she took them out looking for cockles along the flat, firm, golden sands. Such was the idyllic unreality of the day that she lost track of time. Such was her simple joy at being Robin Mariner, Mummy on holiday, that she closed down completely Robin Mariner, seafarer. If she had a worry at all, it was merely for the areas of quicksand. And even that was a distant thing, for the twins were readily intelligent and wilful, not foolhardy. ‘Look,’ she said, crouching between them, certain of their unwavering attention. ‘Those areas which look as though they’re in shadow. Do you see them? Slightly darker than the rest. You must avoid going anywhere near them. The darkness is because they are full of water. They are called quicksand. Do you remember we had this little talk last year?’
‘Yes, Mummy,’ they chorused. And she didn’t worry any more.
By five they were fairly well out, and they had collected quite a large number of cockles. She had shown them how to check the good ones and only to take the ones that opened and closed — she was proposing to introduce them to cockles and horse mushrooms on toast tonight, the greatest treat she could remember from her own childhood. With warmly indulgent motherliness she watched their golden heads — seemingly bleached by the sun today alone — as they bent with serious concentration over another unfortunate shellfish, deciding whether or not to add it to their buckets. She straightened, stretching the long muscles in her back, thoughtlessly massaging her hips and clenching her bottom. Too much bending over, she decided. Again, with no real thought, she glanced at her watch. It was well after five. Time to go. Still, it was turning into a fabulous evening. She looked around the acre after acre of mottled golden sand. She looked south to where Sir William’s Bentley was a green toy against the swell of the dune. She looked east up towards Gretna. She looked north to the Priestside and Blackshaw banks and into the mouth of the Nith. And she looked away west. She could just make out the two distant lights astride the mouth of the firth, Southerness to the north and Blitterlees to the south. And, between them, at the foot of the afternoon haze, there was a hard black line.
The sand beneath her bare feet trembled ever so slightly. Under the whisper of the gentle breeze, as that black line lay under the mist, there was a distant rumbling. As though a squadron of cavalry was practising charging in the distance.
She remembered then, and her whole body went icy cold. It was the thought of the cavalry that prompted the realisation.
Trying to keep her voice steady, fighting not to let her panic show, she said, ‘Right, you two, that’s enough. Back to the Bentley now.’
‘Aw, Mummy,’ said William, gearing up for an argument while he continued to do what he wanted.
‘What’s the matter, Mummy?’ asked Mary, overriding her brother’s automatic whine.
‘Nothing, darling, but we must run along now.’
Robin suited the word to the action. She caught a hand in each of hers and pulled them into motion. They dragged a little at first because they each held a pail full of cockles in the other hand, but she managed to make it a game and they soon discovered that if they really ran, the water would slop all over the place and make an awful mess of their clothes. So of course they ran as fast as they could.
The one thing Robin could remember her mother telling her was, ‘Don’t look back.’
‘If you ever get caught out on the sands when the tide turns, darling,’ her mother had told her the better part of forty years ago when she had been no older than Mary herself, ‘whatever you do, don’t look back. Pick a point on the shore and run towards it. Keep running towards it as fast as you can. Don’t look down unless you have to — there shouldn’t be anything on the sands to trip you up. Just look straight ahead and run as fast as you can.’
‘I’m tired, Mummy,’ whinged William, and Robin’s worries began to multiply.
‘Mummy,’ gasped Mary, ‘what’s that funny thundering sound?’
It’s a wall of water, my darling, and when the time and tide are right, it comes up the Firth of Solway at the speed of a galloping horse.
‘It’s nothing, Mary. Keep running now. Do keep up, William darling.’
Only about a quarter of a mile to go, she thought. But the thundering sound was increasing with terrifying rapidity. The twins were getting worried now. She could feel William beginning to twist his hand. He wanted to slow down, look around, think things through. Normally these were strengths of character Robin admired in the boy and worked hard to foster in balance to the occasionally dazzling intuitions of his apparently cleverer sister.
‘Mummy … ’ he said. And with a fatal certainty, she knew that tone. Here comes Mr Stubborn.
‘Oh look,’ said Mary with forced brightness. ‘Auntie Helen’s waving to us!’
That’s the least of what she must be doing, thought Robin grimly. She had seen the tide come up the Solway like this only twice in her life, and only a day such as today could have pushed the chilling memory of it so
far into her subconscious. A black wall of water. Not all that high, in fact little more than a metre, but the better part of ten miles long and coming over the sands at forty-five miles an hour. Little claws of water would sweep out in front of it, shallow but moving even more swiftly. Inches deep but appearing in the blink of an eye, covering hundreds of square yards with vicious little millraces strong enough to trip unwary toes, disguising the quicksand in a flash.
‘Stop!’ yelled William. ‘I’ve dropped my bucket.’ His hand tore out of Robin’s grip and he turned to retrieve his treasures.
‘Run!’ said Robin to Mary. ‘Run to Helen!’
And then she turned to her errant son. He was frozen, looking at the water. There was no crest to it, merely a brutal black heave, webbed with yellow foam. It was sweeping up from the warm sunset-golden west, and behind it rippled the Irish Sea seemingly infinitely deep within the metre or so of transition which the one wave represented. It was so close that Robin screamed aloud. The sound jerked William out of his stasis. He turned to her, his face white, and she caught him up, swinging him off his feet as she started to run once more. Already she could feel the little feathers of water licking at her toes. Any moment now the icy water would gather itself into a stream deep enough to trip her up and sweep them both away.
But then she saw that Mary was almost at the dunes and she realised that although Helen might be standing waving, her father was taking slightly more decisive action. Even as that first chill lick of water whispered round her toes, the Bentley leaped down off the crest of the sandbank and began to race across the flats towards them. Spewing sand sideways from under its fat tyres it swung towards them, giving the fleeing form of Mary a wide berth, passenger door flapping open as the massive car jumped and bucked over the sand. For the first time in its history, its engine really roared at full power, a full-throated mechanical bellow which drowned out even the thunder of the wave behind them.
Then it was there. Robin heaved William on to the back seat and dived in after him. Sir William was testing the acceleration, the automatic gearing and the power steering to their utmost as he swung the big car back. The shoreline rise in front of them was a suddenly daunting sand cliff nearly two metres high, with a slight overhang at its crest. Even as they came on line, Mary threw herself up this into the grip of Helen DuFour who hauled her bodily to safety.
The back end of the Bentley began to swing away out of control. Robin craned round. Everywhere behind the car was water. A thin skim, moving with uncanny rapidity, was spreading right across the firth and the black wave was riding up it like an express train. Sir William swore. Great fountains of sand and water geysered up from behind the Bentley and it leaped forward once again. In its headlong lurch down on to the sands, the massive car had broken the edge of the sandy cliff and up this slope it barrelled now as the wall of water swept in, hissing and sucking at the departing wheels as they rolled up on to the safety of dry land. Then Helen and Mary were there beside the car and Sir William was huffing and puffing, testing the efficacy of his heart bypass as fully as he had tested the great car he loved so much.
Where there had been sand scant seconds ago, now there was sea, blue and calm, sitting sedately in the early evening with little wavelets running across it, as somnolent as a sleeping tiger.
‘Wow!’ said William suddenly. ‘That was brilliant! Can we do it again tomorrow? Please, Mummy! Oh please!’
All the way back up to Cold Fell, William bubbled with excitement. Robin had never seen him in a mood like this before. It was as though the danger of their little adventure had released something within him she had never suspected was there. Not even the loss of his cockle pail could dash his spirits. Mary still had hers and that contained plenty for everybody. She, too, though more lazily, was full of cheerfulness which her guilt-stricken mother was very far from feeling.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Sir William said, as Robin unpacked her sandy little family from his mud-spattered, salt-caked, well-scratched pride and joy. ‘All’s well that ends well you know.’
Even Helen was quite cheerful, though she came closest to understanding how angry with herself Robin was. ‘Forget it,’ she advised with Gallic pragmatism. ‘No harm done. It will never happen again. You have been very lucky. Be happy!’
After a light supper of cockles and horse mushrooms, the twins went down like angels, completely exhausted. The adults did not want to linger much longer. By nine, Sir William was dozing over his Glenmorangie. Robin’s eyelids, too, were beginning to droop. Helen looked at the pair of them with an indulgent smile and rose. She had a little more work to do. A tape had come in which she wanted to watch tonight. It was the rough cut of a programme to be broadcast in the autumn. She had been interviewed on it and so had been sent an early copy. The programme was about the work of a Russian journalist who specialised in investigating gangsterism. It tried to trace the journalist’s last investigation which had been about the Russian Mafia’s attempts to smuggle illegal nuclear weapons systems due for destruction under the SALT agreements. Helen had been interviewed because it was her responsibility within the Heritage Mariner organisation to get such equipment out of the hands of the Mafia and on to their specialist waste disposal ships Atropos and Clotho. She had never met the journalist who was the subject of the programme. She never would, now.
*
Midnight in Magadan. The track of a gibbous moon sinking slowly southward into the Sea of Okhotsk lay fat and pearl-bright across the oil-black surface of the water between the dark bulks of the ships. One or two of them showed the required harbour lights. Most of them just relied on the metallic yellow of the sodium security lighting. The dockside gathered itself up into broad handling yards with massive warehouses behind them on the landward side. Astride the handling yards stood huge cranes with long, strong booms designed to swing all manner of goods out of the warehouses and across into the holds of the massive ships. Down the middle of the handling area, under the massive legs of the cranes which stood astride to accommodate them, lay patterns of railway tracks, and up and down these laboured the great freight trains whose journeys had begun in Yakutsk, Bratsk, Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Noizhny Novgorod and Moskva, nearly six thousand kilometres distant. From Arkhangelsk, St Petersburg, Tashkent, Irkutsk. Relentlessly, day and night during the summer months, while the Zaliv Shelikhova remained free of ice, the port worked and the great trains came and went. Came laden and went less so — Magadan was a net importer.
Anna Tatianova faced the videocam and automatically touched the golden waves of her hair. In fact, her popularity rested a little lower. As the station boss in Moscow never tired of telling her, it was not the intelligence in her head, reflected in her wise brown eyes, that the viewers wanted to see. It was the cleavage of her forty-inch breasts.
‘OK for light, Sergei?’ she asked a little nervously.
‘Da!’
‘OK for sound?’
‘Having trouble filtering out the background … ’ Andrei the sound man was a perfectionist. The level was fine. It would register the distant clanking of the handling yards, the puffing of the trains, the squealing of their wheels and bogies, the thunder of activity. But that would only add authenticity to the piece.
‘Katerina?’
Anna’s assistant put her clipboard down and came forward with the big brush. Swiftly and expertly she dusted away the gleam of nervous perspiration from Anna’s forehead, cheekbones, chin and cleavage. Then she picked up the clipboard, angled the torch so that Anna could see the idiot board cribsheet written there and nodded.
‘Running,’ said Sergei.
‘Tape at speed,’ confirmed Andrei.
‘Go!’ said Katerina.
‘This is Anna Tatianova reporting from the dockside at Magadan. It is … ’ she consulted her watch artlessly, adding immediacy to the piece and throwing the upward swell of her breasts into profile. Sergei adjusted the focus slightly to pick up just the hint of black lace. For
the fans. ‘Four minutes past midnight local time, Friday the twenty-seventh of July, nineteen ninety-nine. This is the final section of this report, because this is the final destination of the cargo we have been following. Well, not its final destination, as you can see, but the last place we can actually follow it to.
‘We saw the contents of our marked container start out in an atomic silo near Rybinsk, overlooking the quiet waters of the Rybinskoye Vdkhr. Here we talked to General Volkhov about the precise nature of these multiple-warhead, wide-dispersal, air-detonated nuclear devices. We saw the warheads crated up under military supervision and despatched to the nuclear facility at Rostov-na-Donu for official decommissioning. Here you will remember we interviewed Professor Shalakhin about the care required in handling the warheads and the even greater care needed in removing and disposing of the nuclear triggers and the explosives themselves.
‘We did not see the professor remove the items mentioned because they never were removed. We lost track of the container, as did the authorities, and we were only able to catch up with it again because we had placed a tracking device aboard it. Still with no evidence that the warheads had been disarmed, we followed the container, now one among many, apparently indistinguishable from the others, through the hands of this man [insert one], a businessman in Saratov who apparently specialises in the shipping of second-hand Lada and Skoda motorcars to and from the West. From there we followed it to Sverdlovsk where it became the property of this man [insert two], who runs a business exporting specialist timber from Siberia.
‘We interviewed the officials who stamped the documents of passage produced by the timber exporter, and they assured us that the contents of the container were now what it said on the manifest pasted to its side.