The Action

by Peter Tonkin

  The waves themselves were the tips of huge wheels of underwater movement rolling south at this great speed. In deep water the wheels of movement sank so that the waves on the surface only rose 10 ft from trough to crest. A ship would hardly notice their passing if it was well prepared. A submarine would be destroyed in an undersea hurricane of unimaginable currents. But as the ocean bed sloped upwards into the Socotra-Chagos ridge, so the wheels of motion, pushed up by the bottom, in turn forced the surface into huge combers five, eight, ten times their original height.

  Their leading surfaces steepened, for their impulse was all forward. The steady wind gave them some sort of a prop on which to lean as they gained a few more dizzy feet. And the sound began as they caught the lower air against their towering surfaces and tore it into invisible inverted echoes of themselves. The friction between a sky that tried to remain static, the seabed which also tried to be inert, and millions of tons of water hurling across the face of the globe at these fantastic speeds set up notes, resonances, harmonics of incredible power. The sky heaved and the earth quaked anew.

  But it was when they met land that the waters’ true fury was unleashed.

  Gant crawled to his feet, brought to movement by the strength of his fixation. Through the continuous explosion of thunder on the air, so powerful it hurt his lungs and was like an unceasing series of punches to his diaphragm, across the trembling semi-liquid ground, he began to run towards the inert forms of his enemies.

  As he was the only person on his feet, he was the only person to see what happened next. The second wave, slowed by the friction as it gathered itself up the submarine ridge until it gained its final peak of 80 ft, was further slowed and steepened here by the backwash of the first. Up the massive black, spume-laced wall of its leading edge laboured a merchant-ship. It seemed to be sailing up the mountain of water at an incredible angle.

  The sharp bow of the ship cleft the crest of the wave, seemingly almost level with the cliff edge, but obviously going to make it to safety, when an incredible thing happened. The third wave caught up. Briefly the great wheel of motion in the water rode up, not upon the rocky ridge in the seabed, but upon the slower wheel of the wave in front. What had been 80 ft magically became 150 ft. The ship began to slide back. The top half of the new wave was still travelling faster than the bottom. It crested, like surf on a beach, and millions of tons of water began to cascade forward down the liquid slope. A boiling wall of white smothered the ship as a mill-race smothers a twig.

  Gant was utterly stunned. He had seen the Niagara Falls many times and frankly this was not of the same height. But then Niagara did not stretch from horizon to horizon. He had never seen it from as close as this. And the Falls had never come roaring towards him at 400 mph, brandishing a full-sized freighter like a dagger at its shoulder. It was the most terrifying thing the actor had ever experienced. He threw himself full length on the soaking turf, burying his face in the salt-running grass stems and crossing his arms behind his neck, and pressing his forearms over his ears.

  The noise that the first wave made was nothing compared with this. The cliff of water exploded against the cliffs of rock with such force that the whole island rocked. The Glorious Revolution, bow first, moving as fast as the water, hit the sheer rock face at the speed of a flying aircraft and exploded through the wall into the cave itself. In the cave, the pillars toppled. Water roared down the tunnels from the caverns in the cliffs. Water sprayed at pressure through cracks in the limestone walls. A hurricane of pressurised air whirled between the crumbling columns, carrying with it the bodies of Bates and Miss Buhl like pale leaves in autumn. A jet of spray roared like the breath of a blowing whale out of the tiny hole in the slope below the men, but none of them heard it. The roof of the dome cracked, splintered, settled. Boulders fell.

  The island screamed. The water, pushed with the power of millions of tons in violent motion, plunged the wreck of the Glorious Revolution right through the cliff battering aside great slabs of limestone as though they had been a child’s bricks and followed the ruined ship itself, until a column of pure water roared up out of the island’s blowhole to meet the spray from the wave coming down.

  And then it was gone. It re-formed behind the island in a wild hectare of whirlpools and white water. The sound died a little, but did not still, for the water in the cavern was now 200 ft above sea-level and it began to roar back out of the hole in the cliff like an enormous fire-hose, and the ground continued to quake.

  Gant, monomaniac, was on his feet again, stumbling over the suddenly uneven ground towards the Hummingbird. He threw himself on the unconscious man and wrestled the body-belt from his hand. Wells was face-down. Gant turned him over, wanting in that savage moment to look into his eyes as he died. Wells’ face was black and shiny. There was no hair and seemingly little skin. It was the face of a very fat man, puffed out obscenely by burns. Around the mouth the flesh was split into vivid red gashes. The ears were almost entirely gone. The nose seemed to have melted out of shape.

  Gant staggered to his feet and began to move back, retching. On his hands lingered the sweet smell of roast meat. Wells stirred, groaned: salt water was like flames against his burns. His lips moved: “It all went wrong. All wrong…” Gant turned and began to stumble back towards the others. The roaring went on: the ground continued to tremble and heave.

  Suddenly there was a blinding light from the sky. He froze, transfixed by its powerful glare. Then he shaded his eyes and looked up. Beyond the light, the shape of the Bell helicopter. Gant couldn’t understand why it made so little noise. He began to run towards it, then something kicked his legs out from underneath him and he fell.

  “There!” screamed Rebecca into Hannegan’s ear. “I see Mr Gant.” Then she choked into silence as the runner stumbled. She could not know that the Bee had shot him. The helicopter touched down like a dragonfly on a thin lilypad. Hannegan kept the engine running, ready to leap into the air at the first sign of trouble.

  “OK,” he said, his eyes on the sea. Rebecca leaped out to search for the three men they had come to rescue. She had insisted on coming and Hannegan, quirky as ever, had insisted she should do so in spite of wiser judgements.

  Rebecca couldn’t remember the ground being so terribly uneven. She fell several times because it was still shaking so badly. They had given her ear-mufflers against the helicopter’s whine, so she missed the worst of the noise. Stone and Lydecker were lying close by, stunned and almost unconscious. Rebecca ran to them screaming, “Alec, Alec,” until he stirred. “Get into the helicopter, Alec.” Stone mumbled, still confused. “HURRY,” she screamed.

  Stone’s mind began to clear. He pulled himself to his feet. Lydecker also was stirring. Rebecca helped them up and began to support them towards the helicopter. Stone was just climbing in when a bullet whipped viciously by his head. He swung round and dived away, knocking free a rope ladder as he did so.

  Rebecca, noticing nothing of this, had gone looking for Gant and found two strangers instead. Stone could see her pulling them also to their feet. He felt a quick poignant stab of admiration for her, then he was running towards Gant. Lydecker put his head out of the helicopter’s door and a bullet burned his deafened ear. On the far side of the island a grotesque shape arose, a shape with impossibly wide shoulders and no head, shooting wildly as it staggered towards the helicopter: the Bee, carrying his beloved Hummingbird.

  Stone saw Gant getting up, waving him back, and turned to help Rebecca with the Russians. The Bee stopped shooting.

  Gant was on his feet hobbling towards them. The group of four were at the helicopter, Rebecca in first, then the Russians. Nobody had a gun. Stone swung back. Gant was stumbling towards them. The Bee still more than 300 ft away. And suddenly the whole island gave a massive lurch.

  In the cavern, what was left of the Glorious Revolution had been hurled by the last pressure of the water sideways - on through the cliff. Hannegan engaged the rotors automatically - the Bell leaped into the
air. The rope ladder began to unroll. Stone caught it feverishly and just in time was jerked off the ground.

  Behind the Bee the cliffs began to fall. Boulders of limestone began to tumble like great misshapen bricks from a wall. Immediately behind the cliffs, the first rank of rock slabs which made up the dome of the island itself, tilted and began to tumble towards the sea. And the next, tearing the turf, rearing suddenly into great steps 10 ft high as whole surfaces of the island, each, perhaps 300 ft square, slid away to tumble 200 ft into the seething ocean.

  Gant was thrown to his face, then he was up again. “Back!” yelled one of the strangers - Andropov - to Hannegan. “Go back. Closer.” His English was suddenly clear - and his tone irresistible.

  Stone swung like a pendulum on the end of the ladder. The island had twisted away beneath him as the Bell leaped into the air, and he was over the ocean now. But he could still see the figures running, the far edge of the land collapsing.

  The Bee was still going. He could not stop, he would not stop. The ground beneath his feet began to heave as though some buried giant were breaking free. The slab of rock he was running over began to tilt and fall out towards the sea. “No!” he screamed. With all his strength, the Bee swung his beloved Hummingbird off his shoulders. The ground in front of him began to rise. He went to his knees. He began to slide. Hummingbird, the beautiful Hummingbird, stirred. The Bee hurled the light wiry body of his love away towards safety with all his strength. But the strain was too much. His heart seized. “Ngha!” he cried and the ground smashed his face. Hummingbird fell close by. The tilt of the rock caused him to slide back until he lay beside the Bee. Together, entwined like lovers on a massive bed, they were hurled into the void.

  Gant pounded towards the helicopter, swinging the body-belt recovered from Wells: the O’Neill. He was trying to save, not himself, but his priceless signed first edition of Long Day’s Journey into Night. The slab under him began to tilt. A black mouth yawned beneath his feet. He stopped on the edge, began to slide back. The gap widened. Stone swung towards him on the rope ladder. Gant threw the belt carefully and Stone caught it with ease. Stone looked at him standing on the edge of a high cliff which was beginning to fall away.

  “Jump!” he screamed. The helicopter moved daintily, and Stone was swinging towards the actor.

  Gant looked up, helpless. The ladder was 20 ft away. Then 15, then 10. The ground lurched sickeningly. Gant staggered. The boulder began to fall.

  “Jump!” screamed Stone, and Gant hurled himself, arms outstretched, over the roaring dark.

  Part Three: Post Mortem

  Aftermath

  Guirat, July

  Indira was dying. Held unwaveringly by Ram, she had survived a night of terror and increasingly agonising cramps. She had survived the horror of aftershocks which had rumbled across the stricken province in the dark before the dawn. She had survived - miraculously - the soul-deep shame of the creeping daylight which revealed all too starkly their plight. But the sun was killing her inevitably and agonisingly with the unremitting weight of its terrible, furnace heat.

  There had been no chance for them to turn and present Ram’s back to the public scrutiny and the equally burning kiss of the sun. The tiny corner of flooring left beneath their feet was slippery and splintery. They had tried to move once, and only the strength of Ram’s young shoulders wedged in the comer behind, the force of his arms and the power of his love had held them in place as they fought to regain their footing.

  In the gathering dawn, with the suspicion of organised intelligence far below in the wreckage of Rajkot beginning to stir into audible life, they had called for aid; poor Indira torn agonisingly between desire to be rescued and horror at the thought of anyone seeing her in this state. But all they had done was to exhaust themselves and add thirst to the other agonies with which they were clothed as their gasping cries sucked dust and smoke into their crying throats.

  Increasingly hoarsely, between bouts of shouting, they had whispered endearments to each other - each one willing strength and fortitude into the other, hanging on grimly against all the odds. As the light gathered out of the east, however, and smote down like molten gold upon her head, shoulders and the outwards swell of her hips, Indira fell silent and concentrated on simply hanging on. She entered a kind of dream-world where it soon became impossible to distinguish vivid hope from distant reality. Sirens screamed in the distance like the voices of strange legendary creatures. Ram’s hoarse breathing and increasingly monosyllabic endearments also retreated into the distance of her childhood dreams. All that was real was the discomfort in her twisted muscles, the pain in her feet, the blistering power of the sun, the piercing agony of her headache and the desert burning of her throat.

  “I can’t hang on any more,” Indira whispered, vividly aware that her swollen tongue and lips were slurring words already reduced to a ghostly croak by the state of her dusty throat. “I’m sorry...”

  As Indira’s body began to slump outwards, Ram pulled back with the last of his strength so that he could fasten his dry, swollen lips to hers. The enormity of his love for her filled his chest to bursting and left no room for regrets or recriminations. At no time in any of the whispered words exchanged during their ordeal had there been any hint of bitterness. They might have blamed the ill fortune that had brought them to this place at this time. She might well have blamed him that they had not met a sudden but decorous end when their bed fell into whatever wreckage lay below and behind them. He certainly might have blamed himself for the fact that his desires and actions had brought them to this end. But there was no bitterness between them - only a loving strength which lasted for as long as it could and now had reached its end.

  “I love you,” he said as she slipped out of his arms. Since sunrise he had been saving the phrase for this moment, knowing in his heart of hearts that it would come.

  He had wanted his protestation of love to be the first thing she heard on the first day of their new life - then he had wished it to be the last thing she ever heard him say. So, tearing his brick-kiln throat with the power of the force imprisoned in his cramp-wracked chest, he bellowed again “I love you!” and he flung himself wildly down after her.

  And for a moment which seemed to linger eternally, he saw her spread like a falling star below him, her eyes wide, seeming to beckon him, her lips parted, calling something which the wild wind spreading her hair like a black web whipped away from her ears; arms reaching yearningly: all the pale loveliness of his beloved young wife, framed against the bright yellow circle of the emergency services’ inflatable safety equipment which stood waiting to hold them safe.

  Washington, November

  Parmilee was tired to death. The Secretary of State took the top comer of the last page of the last file and slid it under the perfectly manicured nail of his right thumb. His eyes were on the dark-typed flimsy but he did not see it. His mind was elsewhere. Parmilee sat beside him, stunned with fatigue, numb from neck to knees. “I like the way you have sketched in the probable behaviour of other agencies at important points. Is that standard practice?”

  “Depends,” said Parmilee. He had stopped saying “Mr Secretary” after everything a little before midnight.

  “ You were lucky no one minded being de-briefed,” said the Secretary. “So many foreign nationals were involved.”

  “Yes,” temporized the big agent, “but Ed Lydecker is an expert in that sort of thing, and we had just saved their lives.”

  The Secretary said, “Even so. The two Englishmen, Stone, and Nash when he healed up a bit. And the two Russians. We got away with one hell of a lot.”

  “No doubt of that, sir.”

  “Still. That’s not what we’re here about. That’s not the central question at all. The central question is why?”

  Taking the disparate files, interviews, case notes, prognostications, weather reports, ships’ logs, they had welded the Action into a story. Now they began to break the story apart, looking at its
heart: trying to discover what made it beat. And of course the first pulse, which began everything and then died itself, was Feng.

  Feng had come out of China with something important which he wanted to use as a bargaining counter. He had not passed this to anyone in Hong Kong, of course: in a game of poker one does not open the bidding by saying, “I have four aces.” This information, this bargaining counter, would have been revealed in due course to Lydecker or to Parmilee.

  Feng still had it, therefore, when he realized that Hong Kong Local Station was not capable of protecting him. He kept it with him on his panicked run to Kai Tak and his flight to Singapore. He didn’t run to Singapore for any reason other than that this had been the destination of the first flight he could get on. Nevertheless, perhaps in Singapore, perhaps on the aeroplane, he began to think. Therefore, some if not all of his actions in Singapore were dictated by reason.

  He went to the Wanderer for a reason. He went aboard, spoke with no one, came a shore. And yet it was logical to assume that he had left his bargaining counter somewhere on the ship. The Chinese assumed he had done so, or Hummingbird would not have gone aboard. Hummingbird could not have found it, or he would not have tried to disable the engine. He had had weeks in which to search, and he was an outstanding agent so they could assume it was nothing obvious or easily accessible.

  But they had more information than Hummingbird had: they had, for instance, an exhaustive list of Feng’s purchases in Singapore, for each transaction in which he had used his credit card had been carefully recorded. With dull eyes they went down the list, comparing it with the case notes supplied by the three agents from Singapore Local Station. Bank, food shop, clothes shop, book shop, shoe shop, another food shop and so forth, and so on.