by Peter Tonkin
With four minutes down and no wave in sight, Richard began to wonder whether Robin and he had been right after all. What other explanations were there for such a dramatic fall in water level? Maybe this was an area where really low tides happened once in a while. But he would have known if that had been the case. He had been settled here for long enough and sailing these waters off and on for nearly thirty years. If this sort of thing was common, he would at least have heard about it. The only uncommon explanation he could think of was …
Abruptly, he put on the brakes and the BTR stopped almost as efficiently as it accelerated. Like any driver under these circumstances, the slight wandering of his mind was merely a function of his absolute concentration. His hands and feet were reacting to what his eyes saw long before his conscious mind caught up. And his eyes saw something he had vaguely supposed to be a dream.
The two skeletons lay stretched out with the chest between them. They were half consumed by the coral like the cannonballs whose straight line joined the wrecks to the beach. Following that direct line, it was almost inevitable that Richard should come across them again, and perhaps deep in the darkest recesses of his subconscious he had chosen this route with that hope. ‘What are you doing?’ shrieked Robin.
‘Just stopping to pick something up if I can,’ he answered, his voice lent an edge of almost hysterical cheeriness by the simple madness of the action. He hit the quick release on his seat harness and reached upward to pull himself through the hatch above his head. ‘Lawkeeper,’ he bellowed as he moved, ‘get the drawbridge down, would you?’
Being out on the top of the BTR on top of the reef in the low-tide stillness under the falling moon was one of the strangest experiences of Richard’s long and adventurous life. The trickling tintinnabulation was settling towards whispering silence now, and what there was of it was lost beneath the grumble of the vehicle’s shuddering diesel. The air was still and cool, the timeless stench of seabed disorientatingly strong until it was subsumed beneath the sudden modern pollution of exhaust. As he swung himself over to clamber down on to the rocks, Richard was halted by a sudden movement close at hand. Robin heaved herself up out of the commander’s hatch.
‘You coming too?’ he asked, adjusting his voice automatically to the volume of sounds nearby.
‘I’ve followed you this far,’ said Robin. But somehow she did not sound like a camp follower or a rescuer to him. And as she spoke she pressed the button on the massive torch she had brought up with her and its bright beam threatened to drown the moonlight.
Side by side they dropped on to the rough rocks. One step showed how unexpectedly excellent the BTR’s suspension had been — they had to clutch each other in order to stay erect on the steep and slippery slope of the weed-covered coral. The beam of Robin’s torch struck a rainbow of varnished beauty from the treacherous surface at their feet as, slowly, carefully, they proceeded. They moved across the rough, almost lunar terrain with its garish, overbright alien vegetation towards the stark skeletons and their rounded, lead-sealed treasure chest.
It was fortunate there was no great distance to go, for the ground was extremely dangerous, but thirty seconds brought them to their goal with no mishaps. Richard went down uneasily on one knee in the golden puddle of torchlight and gingerly pulled one skeletal fist away from the nearest iron handle. Both the bone and the metal fell away at once. Richard reached forward and slid his arms round the whole chest as though he was embracing it. He heaved back convulsively and the chest reluctantly tore out of the grasp of the rocks and the weeds surrounding it. As he slowly straightened, fighting his way to his feet, the last of the water drained out of the box itself and the drawbridge of the BTR slammed down like the stroke of doom.
‘Get a move on!’ bellowed Lawkeeper over the thunderous echo.
Robin, later and for the rest of her life, would associate that fading echo with the gathering thunder which became intertwined with it like the two wrecks away behind them. The fading echo of the fall of the drawbridge and the gathering rumble of the approaching wave seemed to run into and out of each other. No sooner was the vibration on the air than it began to move through the ground as well. They felt it through the whole of their bodies as they moved. And yet neither of them thought for an instant of dropping the chest and breaking into a run. Running was out of the question in any case.
In a strange time which seemed to exist beyond the measure of any chronometer, they crossed the gap to the drawbridge, unerringly, without stumbling, following the steady beam of the torch along its alien, garish way. Up along the ridged metal tongue into the fetid womb of the vehicle. Richard lowered the weight to the floor beneath Sally’s feet and the pair of them scrambled unhandily past her into their seats.
‘What can you see?’ yelled Richard, reaching back for his harness.
‘Nothing yet. I … ’
Richard engaged first and dropped the clutch. The BTR leaped forward. The drawbridge clanged against the coral and Lawkeeper swore.
‘Sing out as soon as … ’ The drawbridge slammed shut and the rest of Richard’s redundant order was lost.
The bellow of the diesel and the crashing of the gears, the rumble of the great tyres across the rough reef were all of a part with the gathering thunder which began to batter the air even inside this all but indestructible vehicle.
Thirty seconds later, one minute and fifteen seconds after the sound had come, twenty-two minutes after they had begun their wild escape, they were back at 100 kph, and the island’s white sand beach was only two minutes away.
Sally’s eyes were glued to the rangefinder, but she was beginning to doubt the effectiveness of the instrument. The display was leaping in and out of range as the two distant wrecks seemed to tremble like drops of mercury. So violent was the movement becoming that she could only imagine that it was a failure of the machine, that the flickering was a failure of the tube.
But as she watched, her eyes streaming with the effort of reading the apparently failing signal, a line of paleness began to rear from horizon to horizon behind the wildly trembling ships. No sooner had the white line established itself on the retinas of her eyes than it became a white wall. And no sooner had she understood what she was seeing than the white wall soared and became a white wall on top of a black cliff. The black face of the cliff caught the light of the falling moon and became the face of a black mountain, and the white wall, cloud-like, was higher than the moon itself.
And when the top of it was apparently sweeping across the sky above the moon and only a very little below the stars, when the thunder of it was making the heart in her breast flutter like a bird beating against its cage of ribs, when the rangefinder finally failed, no more able than her numb mind to comprehend the enormity of what it was observing, only then did the great wave reach the dancing ships reeling on the reef edge. With a kind of inevitable majesty, the obsidian mountainside, easily topping two hundred feet in height, moving at four hundred knots, gathered the ships to itself. Okhotsk reared up the concave slope with a manic leap, and turned on the hinge of Luck Voyager so that she closed like a slamming door down on to the reef, the white block of her bridgehouse stamped out of existence in a second. And, with the magnification full on, just for that infinitesimal micron of time, probably with her imagination rather than her eyes, Sally thought she saw two figures, glowing slightly, in the blackness of the bridge.
The BTR’s front four wheels bit into the sand of Tiger Island at the instant the distant vessels vanished in a welter of foam. Richard spun the wheel and pointed the headlights and the searchlight straight at the gap Sally and he had found in the black jungle wall. His right leg was cramped from ankle to hip and the tension between his calf and thigh muscles threatened to undo a good deal of surgery pinning his knee together, but Richard noticed nothing. What Sally could see, he could feel all too clearly and, had he had time to pray, he would have prayed his calculations were correct.
They were, near enough. Having gathered its
elf to a massive climax by rolling southwards up the slope of the sunken Rifleman Reef, the great wave was collapsing now, as though punctured by the ship’s sharp stem. The enormous forward surge was being dissipated by the collapse into a mountainous welter of surf and by the sideways outwash of the water to east and west. The surf line was still chasing the BTR southwards at more than two hundred knots, however. And the foam wall was still more than fifty feet high.
The path through the jungle was narrower than Richard remembered, and the BTR was nearly three metres wide. But on the other hand it was made of 9mm armour plating, it weighed nearly twelve hundred kilos and it was being driven forward at 50 kph up a very slight incline by direct power coming to eight big wheels. The bushes, saplings and smaller trees of the undergrowth stood no chance at all and the bright tunnel of the headlight beams gave him ample warning of the big trees ahead. Richard had never belonged to the Territorial Army, but several of his friends had and he recalled a night exercise he had seen where drivers took trucks through woods at speed with no lights. He understood now the combination of fear and simple exhilaration they must have felt. The power of the BTR continued to astound him as it shrugged aside ten-metre saplings as though they were grass.
The sound was phenomenal and for the first time since the tsunami had stamped the wrecked ships out of existence, the thunder of the approaching wave was subsumed, albeit briefly. The ground beneath the agile vehicle was shaking as though this was an earthquake but the roughness of the terrain and the excellence of the suspension compensated. As the slope ahead steepened, the howling of the over-revving engine was added to the thunderous roaring of foliage smashing into the iron sides. The trees they hit simply exploded and sap rained down with the pulverised splinters so that they seemed to be in the middle of a tropical storm as well.
But as the slope steepened, so the rainforest began to thin. The crashing sound of constant impact died; the thunderous rain of wet debris eased. The ground beneath the leaping wheels began to smooth out. But the ride inside got no more quiet or comfortable. During the cataclysmic moments as they smashed upwards through the jungle, the surf wall had leaped across the reef. As they burst out of the last of the forest and on to the grassy shoulder of the island to the south-east of the great north-facing head, the wave leaped across the beach. The sound of its arrival on the land dwarfed all the other sounds so far. The trembling of the solid rock beneath the weight of its arrival made the whole of Tiger Island leap and gambol as though it was alive and startled.
Richard saw the sheer rock wall of the island’s head immediately in front of himself and trod on the brakes with all his might. His right leg, frozen on to the accelerator, was slow to move and the power surged back and forth between the massive diesel and the eight steel brake pads while the wheels danced across the jumping plateau. The BTR remained upright but it spun through ninety degrees before it came to a halt, its side actually against the rock wall.
Sally Alabaster screamed, but the sound was lost. Richard had not switched off her gun-laying equipment and so she found herself looking away to the north across the top of the canopy to where the reef had been. She saw the wail of foam, luminous white under the waning moon. She saw the massive height of the face of the thing bearing down on them. She saw the speed of it; the power. She saw it leap off the reef top into the jungle below. She saw the jungle sink in an instant beneath the overpowering white. She saw it rear and leap, coming inwards and upwards towards them as though the island had been plucked down into the depths of the sea and they were all slipping down the throat of the greatest whirlpool.
Richard was by no means idle once he had parked the BTR. With his hands leaping confidently, full of their own dream-like knowledge, from switch to switch and handle to handle, he closed down all the shutters and systems except the night vision for the gun-layer. The metal shields closed above the driver’s position and the commander’s seat. They slammed down beyond the windows. As a last hope, he switched on the NBC system designed to protect the occupants of the vehicle against nuclear, biological and chemical weapons on the battlefield. Then, as there was nothing left to do but pray, he let his hands rest and was suddenly aware of the tearing pain in his right leg.
What came at them was an alp of spray. To Sally’s eyes it looked like a ski slope suddenly bursting into avalanche. The powerful solidity the wave achieved in the middle and near distance seemed to break up as it tore through the heavy jungle. The steepening slope seemed to soak up the southward impetus of the foaming water, and the force of it exploded upwards, turned aside by the island’s slope. The surf mounted towards the stars again but this time Sally realised she could still see the moon. Through the very heart of the approaching monster, she could still see the moon.
When it struck the vehicle, the surf came down like the deluge ending Noah’s world. Out of the sky it came, not in drops but in coherent chunks of water the size of boulders. Anything less solid, less massive than the BTR must have been swept away at once. For perhaps five seconds the spray thundered down, as though the sturdy Russian vehicle was trapped beneath Niagara. Then the crest of the wave itself arrived. It had pushed up through the jungle and across the hill slope. Although the wave had been broken at the edge of the reef five miles away; although only a massive surf had leaped across to the beach below; although the shoulder of Tiger Island stood nearly one hundred and fifty metres above the sand, the power of the tsunami was such that it attained a two-metre surge which all but swamped the BTR. For an instant which filled her dreams for years, Sally saw the water level rise until the upper slopes of the iron vessel were all that stood above the seething surf. It was exactly as though the BTR was a submarine going down on a deep dive. ‘We’re afloat!’ she screamed, tearing her throat raw.
Richard heard her almost on a subliminal level. Heard her and felt the massive vehicle begin to stir. At once, grimly but determinedly, refusing as always to give up or give in, his mind raced into a last desperate gamble and his nimble fingers were busy again. By the time the surge passed and the BTR had settled on to her eight solid wheels once more, she was trimmed for sea work. Her vanes were down, the armoured cover was up and the water-jet was sucking the last of the foam.
At last there was silence and stillness. Just when it arrived and exactly how long it lasted, none of them could tell. It was partly real, mostly relative, and as much to do with shock as anything else. Robin was the first to come out of it for she was closest to the internal radio speaker which had for some time been repeating, ‘Captain Mariner, can you hear me? This is Huuk aboard Sulu Queen. We are safe. Are you there? Captain Mariner, can you hear me … ’
Spasmodically, moving like a puppet with elastic strings, she reached forward for the handset. It took her three tries to get it out of its clips. ‘Mariner here,’ she answered. ‘All well.’
Richard began to move then. His long limbs no more certain in their action than Robin’s, he stretched forward and flicked the release for the shutter on his window. The metal shield rose and he found himself looking away across a dark swell of wet hillside which fell inexorably into a wild black tangle of rainforest. Beyond the black glazed tangle of jungle, its upper branches frosted by the last of the setting moon, a wilderness of foam swept away across the seething surface of the sea towards the south-west. Everywhere from Singapore to Sarawak was in for a hard time tonight, he thought. Then simple elation hit him. Not a trace of concern for the endangered millions, not an ounce of survivor guilt. He was alive. Robin was alive.
Alive!
He reached up and hit the handle on the hatch above his head. As the metal plate swung upwards, he pressed the release on his seat harness and shrugged it off. Then, slowly, moving stiffly, like a very, very old man, he pulled himself up until he was standing on the seat with his head and shoulders poking out of the hatch. The sounds which washed into his ears were all liquid at first. Ironically, the tsunami had left behind it the same tintinnabulating orchestra of ripples, tinkles
and trickles which had filled the air above the uncovered reef and warned them of the wave less than an hour ago. But then, distantly, in the tangle of forest below, an indri called and suddenly, although it was nowhere near dawn yet, there came an overpowering chorus of life.
And, immediately behind him, the quietest of coughs. Slowly, the back of his neck prickling with atavistic awareness, Richard turned. ‘Robin,’ he whispered. ‘Robin, come up here, you have to see this. Gently. But gently.’
The commander’s hatch swung up silently on its perfectly greased hinge and Richard sensed Robin rising to stand beside him, also looking upwards and backwards. To where, comfortably at rest, as though the slopes of armour plating were sun-warmed rocks, the top of the turret a convenient eminence and the barrel of the gun a comfortable branch, a family of half a dozen tigers had taken refuge from the flood.
20
Daniel Huuk stood at the end of the bed clutching a pair of scissors, looking down at the recumbent figure, a feeling of déjà vu filling him. But the woman on the bed was not Robin Mariner; it was Sally Alabaster.
Daniel had removed Sally’s clothing by more usual methods than by cutting it off, so far. But now he was about to employ the scissors again; this time to remove not underwear but bandaging. The bandaging did not cling intimately like the white cotton which had haunted many of his dreams. It stretched across solid muscularity from hip point to hip point, round the sides and tight across the buttock until, just above the first bright swathe of gleaming red hair, it clutched as tightly as the wrappings on a living mummy to the very top of a firm, white thigh. And this woman was not helplessly asleep but very actively awake.