Crackdown

by Bernard Cornwell

  “At least he has a comb and makes an effort,” Ellen said pointedly. “No, but you have to start somewhere. He’s fascinated by the boat’s electronics, so why don’t you praise him for that? He spent two hours experimenting with the radios today, and perhaps he’d like to hear you say how clever he is for having mastered the equipment?” She smiled encouragingly at me. “The journey might be a thousand miles, Nick, but it begins with a single step.”

  I said a few very rude words to show what I thought of such sententious rubbish. Ellen, for all her sour wit, had moments when she tried to swamp the boat in American niceness.

  She sighed. “Just give him a chance, Nick.”

  “Sod him.”

  “So eloquent, you English, so very eloquent.” She stared briefly into the sky as though seeking inspiration, then looked back to me. “You shouldn’t have hit him.”

  “Why not? He deserved it.”

  “No one deserves to be hit. Violence has never solved anything, it merely suppresses and disguises truth. Your father, whatever else he might or might not be, is surely right in his hatred of militarists.”

  “My father”—I wearily leaned my head against the cockpit’s coaming—”would march to support the Movement to Burn Babies if he thought it was fashionable. I didn’t rebel against his beliefs, because he doesn’t have any. I rebelled against his lack of truth.”

  Ellen sighed. “How very strict you are, Nick. That’s probably why Robin-Anne is so besotted with you.”

  That made me snap my head upright. “Besotted?”

  “She’s in love with you,” Ellen saw my astonishment and laughed at it. “She thinks you’re the strong man who’ll protect her from the demon drug. You’ve become her solution now, her magic potion.” Ellen mocked me with a smile. “Congratulations, Nick, you can marry six million bucks! You can be son-in-law to the President! Wow! You can invite me to the White House for a plastic chicken dinner! All you need do is pop the question.”

  “It isn’t like that,” I said feelingly. “Robin-Anne talks to me about cocaine, but not about anything else. If she’s in love with anyone, it’s Thessy! They’re inseparable. She’s certainly not in love with me!”

  “Oh, but she is. What do you think she talks about with Thessy?”

  “Jesus and cocaine. He told me.”

  “Jesus, cocaine and you,” Ellen corrected me with a smile. “Ask Thessy if you don’t believe me. She pumps him for information about you; what your star sign is, your favourite colour, what you like to eat, that sort of thing.” Ellen grinned, but I could see she was being deadly serious.

  “Oh God.” I leaned my head back again to let the spitting rain strike my face. “Then that’s all the more reason,” I said softly, “to abandon the cruise. Robin-Anne has to learn to beat drugs without me.”

  “Oh, that’s very pious!” Ellen poured me more whiskey. “But very callous, too. This kid is trusting you, Nick!”

  “Oh, shit.” I did not want the responsibility.

  Ellen laughed. “Three months, Nick, that’s all you have to give them, and at the end of three months we’ll pick up our big fat cheques and we’ll sail your boat across the Pacific. Is it a deal?”

  I turned my head and smiled at her. Somehow, after the last few days, that dream of the South Seas had faded almost to unreality. “Are you really going to sail with me?” Ellen had already said as much, but I wanted to hear her say it again.

  She pretended to think about it, then nodded. “I like you, Nick Breakspear, because you reinforce my convictions about men.”

  I smiled. “I take it that isn’t a compliment?”

  “No,” she returned the smile. “They say a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, but I guess I’m just the odd fish out, and I have a hankering for bicycles, and especially for old-fashioned, upright and honest bicycles.” She paused. “And do you want me to be really honest?”

  “Of course.”

  “Your father was the most handsome Hamlet that ever was.” She let that one sink in, then laughed, blew me a kiss, and was gone.

  Ellen had made me feel better, and she had also left me the Irish whiskey, though I did not drink any more that night. Instead I waited till I was completely certain our three anchors were holding, then I went to bed, but via the forward hatchway so that I need not see either Rickie or Robin-Anne who were slumped in front of the television in the main stateroom.

  I took one last look through the cabin port. The wind had slackened, so that the anchor rodes were no longer thrumming like harp strings. The rain seemed to have stopped altogether. A rift opened in the clouds beyond Sea Rat Cay and a weak shaft of moonlight touched the island so that the nearest pines looked as though they had been dipped in molten silver. “The worst of the storm’s gone,” I told Thessy, “so we’ll be off first thing in the morning.”

  “God villing.” He looked up from reading his gloomy minor prophet.

  “Tell me”—I tried to make my voice very casual—”but does Robin-Anne talk about me to you?”

  The poor boy had obviously not wanted to tell me before, and now looked horribly embarrassed, but he could not tell a lie so he nodded. “All the time, Nick. She says you say poetry in the dark.”

  I laughed, then shook my head to show Thessy that he should not take Robin-Anne seriously. “Ellen says we should persevere for the full three months.” I wanted to know how Thessy would react to such a prospect.

  He frowned in serious thought, then nodded. “I think if God vanted us to give up, Nick, he vould not have let us begin.”

  I supposed that made sense. “Thank you, Thessy.”

  “Sleep vell, Nick.”

  And, surprisingly, I did. To dream of Masquerade, and cleanness, and of far-off northern seas as cold as steel. I dreamed of home.

  I woke early to hear the wind sighing in Wavebreaker’s shrouds and clattering the palm fronds on Sea Rat Cay, but I could tell, even without looking at the wind-gauge, that the storm was dying. Thessy was snoring gently in the other bed, so I rolled quietly out from under the sheet, pulled on a pair of shorts and went on deck. It was the break of day and a wan watery light was leaching into a sky that was ragged with clouds touched leprous yellow by the rising sun. Wavebreaker fretted to her anchor rodes, but with no great force. The foetid stink of wet vegetation was wafting from the island on a wind that was still blowing the open sea ragged, yet the barometer was rising and I saw no reason why we should not be under way within a couple of hours.

  I went below and made myself an instant coffee and used the rest of the hot water to fill a shaving bowl that I carried back to the deck. I propped a mirror against the binnacle, and scraped happily away. I tunelessly sang myself some cheerful song as the wind snatched the foam off the razor’s edge and whirled it quivering into the scuppers. The same wind was thrashing the trees ashore and crashing the seas against the outer coral so that the waves shredded white into airborne foam, yet, and despite the wind’s remaining strength and my own rendition of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,’ the dawn suddenly struck me as strangely quiet. That thought made me pause, razor poised by my throat, so that for an instant I must have looked uncannily like a man contemplating suicide.

  Why was the morning so quiet?

  I straightened up as I realised what was missing from Wavebreaker’s usual dawn chorus; it was the hollow clatter of the wire halliards tapping against our metal masts. For a second or two I wondered whether Ellen or Thessy had woken in the night to stretch the halliards away from the masts to silence their insistent racket, but that was not the answer. Instead, when I looked, I saw that we had no halliards any more.

  There had been halliards the night before, now there were none.

  I stared stupidly into the rigging, the cut-throat razor forgotten in my hand. There were no halliards left, none. Not on either mast. I went to the foot of the mainmast and worked the sailcover back from the gooseneck and found a stub of wire protruding from the sail’s peak. The wire had b
een sheared clean so that its severed end shone with the brightness of newly exposed metal.

  I turned, still gaping. All the halliards were gone, every single one. The halliards were the lines used to hoist the sails and, once hoisted, to hold the sails aloft, and they had all disappeared. At the bows, where I had left the jib, staysail and storm jib halliards sna-phooked on to the pulpit rail, there was now nothing except a pair of bolt-cutters that were a part of Wavebreaker’s rigging kit and which had no business lying abandoned by the hawse hole. I picked up the bolt-cutters, reasoning that Rickie must have used them in the dark as he worked his way round the deck to cripple Wavebreaker. It had to be Rickie.

  I swore. None of the other rigging seemed to have been touched; only the halliards. It was a piece of mindless stupid vandalism. I had hurt Rickie, so he had hurt the boat to gain his puerile revenge. Playing the Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band too loud was not enough, now he had to creep about in the night, cutting the wire halliards from the sails then casting the bitter ends off their winches before, presumably, dropping them overboard. I imagined him laughing at the chaos he knew he would cause.

  Then damn him, I thought, because if his desire was to stay in the lagoon and wait for the sun, then I would disappoint him by taking Wavebreaker out to sea on her twin motors. Before leaving the lagoon I would thread lightweight lines through the masthead sheeves so that we could easily haul replacement halliards through the blocks. I knew we had coils of spare wire stowed away below so that, even though Rickie’s vandalism was a nuisance, it was not fatal to the boat. By the day’s end, I thought, we should have made good all the damage and be once again safely under sail.

  I went forward and started the diesel generator which not only powered the ship’s heavy electrical equipment like the air conditioners, anchor windlass, sail-furlers and bow thrusters, but also performed the daily chore of charging the ship’s batteries. My anger at Rickie had settled into a grim determination that he would not beat me. Instead I would give him an uncomfortable day at sea by driving Wavebreaker hard into the wind and waves, and I would threaten him with ten kinds of horror if he dared lay a harmful finger on the boat again.

  Thessy, woken by the throbbing of the generator, came yawning from the companionway. “I need you,” I startled him by the sudden energy in my voice. “I want messenger lines put through every halliard block. You find some lightweight line and I’ll dig out the spare halliard wires. We’ve got work to do!” Poor Thessy stared at me as though I was mad. “We should look on the bright side, Thessy,” I went on, “and be grateful for a chance to replace all the halliards before we take this tub across the ocean.”

  “Halliards?” He looked at the mainmast, then back to me. “Vot happened?”

  I showed him one of the cut stubs. “I suspect it’s our friend Rickie. But if he thinks he can beat me, Thessy, then he will have to think again!”

  Thessy frowned. “You think Mr. Crowninshield did this?”

  “Can you think of anyone else?”

  Thessy looked sad at such evidence of human sinfulness, then glanced up at the ragged clouds that scudded over the lagoon. “It’ll be brisk out there today!” He spoke with relish.

  “The brisker the better!” I wanted to take Rickie out into my element; out into the great heaping wilderness of an ocean after storm, and once there I would keep him on deck and make him work. He might not be fit for the intricate jobs like splicing the rope tails on to the new wire halliards, but he could do his share of hauling and lifting, and I did not care how sick he might feel or how much his nose bled. I would make him do some real work for a change. I would sweat him. “That’s where I’ve been wrong,” I told a bemused Thessy, “I’ve let the twins laze about as though this was a holiday cruise. It isn’t. They should be working! They’ve got to take some responsibility for their own lives instead of flopping around like lap-dogs. We’ll give Rickie a proper watch to keep as a deckhand, and Robin-Anne can help Ellen with the cooking, and...” My voice tailed away to nothing because the generator had missed a beat, then it missed another, and I turned and stared forrard as the small engine gave a horrible groaning sound, then seized to a dead halt. It suddenly seemed very quiet on Wavebreaker’s deck. “Oh, no!” I walked forrard.

  “The fuel?” Thessy suggested.

  I prayed he was right, but I doubted that a mere fuel blockage would have created that terrible groan. I opened the hatch and dropped down into the steel-walled generator compartment. The fuel came from the main tanks which were deep amidships and the feed-line was equipped with a glass-bowl trap designed to float out any water that might have contaminated the diesel fuel. The trap was full of the reddish oil, showing that there was no blockage upstream of the glass bowl, yet, strangely, I could see some odd whitish specks suspended in the fuel.

  I unscrewed the trap, dipped my finger into the diesel oil and brought out one of the specks. It had a white crystalline appearance, not unlike the cocaine I had scattered to the winds the previous night, and for a mad second I wondered if Rickie had hidden yet more of his drug in the fuel tanks, but then I tasted the speck and knew this was not cocaine. I fished another crystal speck out of the bowl and offered it on my fingertip to Thessy whose anxious face peered down from the hatchway. “Taste that,” I suggested.

  He gingerly licked my finger, then instinctively screwed up his face until he realised what he had just tasted. “Sugar?”

  “The bastard,” I said. “Oh, the bastard.”

  The generator was useless now. Rickie had poured sugar into our main tanks, and the engine, sucking the sugar down the fuel lines, had super-heated the sweet granules into a burnt and sticky treacle that was now blocking the engine solid. Wavebreaker needed to be taken to a dockyard where the generator could be stripped and cleaned, and her fuel tanks and lines scoured of the last traces of sugar.

  “Oh, hell,” I said bitterly and unhelpfully.

  “At least it isn’t the main engines.” Thessy was trying to look on the bright side.

  “I’ll kill him!” I hauled myself out of the hatch and gave an entirely useless and somewhat painful kick to a ventilator hood.

  Thessy was holding out my cup of cold coffee, as though that would placate me. “But the main engines are all right,” Thessy insisted, and of course he was right, but the main engines were useless without fuel and all of our fuel, so far as I could tell, was fouled with the sugar. I could probably siphon some clean diesel off the top of the tanks, filter it, then rig up a jury supply to run the main engines, but it would all take time, as would re-rigging the halliards. I swore again, knowing that we were stuck in Sea Rat Cay’s lagoon for at least the next twenty-four hours.

  “There’s only one thing that consoles me,” I told Thessy as I stumped down the deck and pulled open a locker. “We’re stuck here now, and he’ll have to go cold turkey, and I hope he suffers the pains of hell. I hope it hurts!” I had taken a length of one inch rope from the locker. It was one of the lines we sometimes used as a spring when mooring alongside a dock, and now, to Thessy’s puzzlement, I quickly tied an intricate and rarely used knot at one end of the line. I tossed the rope to Thessy. “Hang that from the lower spreaders, Thessy, then we’ll make ourselves a proper breakfast before we start work.”

  Thessy stared dubiously at the rope I’d thrown him, but climbed the ratlines to the mainmast’s lower crosstrees where he obediently suspended the hangman’s noose. It lifted to the now useless wind and I half wished that I dared to use it.

  But instead I fried myself some eggs, and I fried Thessy his favourite breakfast which was a mash of bread and bananas, after which, much fortified, we both got down to work.

  We did not see Rickie all day. Robin-Anne took him some sandwiches late in the afternoon, and he must have eaten them, for later on I saw the empty plate in the stateroom, but we had no other evidence of his continued existence—except from Jackson Chatterton who offered to drag Rickie on deck so that I could make use of the hangman’s noose. Chattert
on confirmed that Rickie had admitted the vandalism, but had offered no reason for it other than a general complaint that shipboard life sucked, and that I sucked in particular. I let the little swine suffer in the uncooled humidity of his dark cabin, for, in an effort to save electricity on a boat that now had no means of recharging its batteries, I had played merry hell with the fuse locker. I had disconnected everything except the VHF radio. We had no television, no hair dryers, no electric razors, no cabin lights, no air conditioners, no refrigerator, and, most blessed of all, no Pinkoe Dirt-Box Band.

  Robin-Anne was embarrassed by her brother’s actions and even offered me an apology. She asked me what would happen now, and I told her we would have to sail Wavebreaker back to her home port to have her fuel lines cleaned and generator repaired.

  Robin-Anne frowned. “So you’re abandoning the cruise?”

  “I don’t have much choice.”

  “So Rickie will go to jail?” she asked me, as though that decision was in my gift, but I could offer her no answer other than a shrug. “But what about me?” she wailed.

  “You’re doing just fine,” I tried to reassure her. “You don’t need us or this boat, you’re doing wonderfully!”

  “I’m only succeeding because of the boat! Because of you!” Her solemn face threatened tears. I saw Ellen watching us, and I did not know what to say, so I just turned away and muttered that I had to get on with the repairs.

  I might not be able to offer Robin-Anne what she wanted, but at least I could take refuge in hard work. By mid-afternoon all the halliards were replaced, and each was properly equipped with a neatly spliced rope tail, and I celebrated that achievement by hoisting the mainsail and letting it flap impotently in the wind that had become little more than a strong breeze.

  Thessy had done most of the work on the halliards, while I had fitfully made progress on rigging a new fuel supply system. The spare fuel tanks I had installed while docked in McIllvanney’s yard were a godsend, and I succeeded in siphoning the best part of sixty gallons of filtered diesel oil out of the contaminated tanks and into the new tanks before the first traces of sugar appeared. Thessy and I then spent the rest of the afternoon and the best part of the early evening rigging new feed lines through Wavebreaker’s bilges. The last connection had to be made under the engine room, and Thessy held a flashlight while I wriggled under the gratings to manoeuvre the final jubilee clip into place. Ellen, standing in the engine-room door, was pleading with me to restore power to the microwave so she could heat up some defrosted lasagne. She had to shout at me because the bilge was surprisingly noisy with the sound of waves throbbing beyond the steel hull.