Knowing it would take him at least twenty minutes to close with us, and having got no reply from the Gabriello, Cornish came back to me, asking who was on board beside myself. Then he wanted to know about Tom Halliday, and when I told him he had been killed and his wife had been held prisoner in a lakeside hut high in the mountains above High Stand, he didn’t waste time asking for details but began a series of calls, first to the lighthouse, then to any other vessel that might be close to us. As it happened a fisherman out of Friendly Cove was just clearing Yuquot Point heading south-west out of Nootka Sound. Cornish asked him to close us at all possible speed and monitor our drift. All this came out on the loudspeaker of our VHP set. What we didn’t know was that at the same time he was in radio-telephone communication with the RC Centre at Victoria and that, despite the fog, a helicopter was being scrambled.
It was at this point that the lights of the tug suddenly loomed out of the fog, her blunt bows thrusting towards us, her superstructure a dim outline. By then the barge was virtually stationary, wallowing in the wind with the waves slapping noisily at her rusty sides. The tug struck us amidships, thumping and scraping as the bows rose and fell, men scrambling for’ard to leap aboard us. Brian had retrieved the rifle and was standing in the open doorway of the wheelhouse so that they could see he was armed.
They paused. A voice shouted to them over a loudhailer and at the same instant a klaxon sounded very loud and just astern of us. A searchlight beam stabbed the shifting grey banks of fog, white bows and a wheelhouse with rods like antennae either side of a short mast festooned with aerials. It was the fishing vessel out of Friendly Cove. The radio was suddenly full of talk as the fisherman spoke to the skipper of the tug and Captain Cornish’s voice broke in with instructions to the tug: ‘You will stand off from the barge. I repeat, stand off from the barge.’
For a moment everything seemed to freeze as though in a picture, the tug with its bows thrusting against us and three men up for’ard with another coming out of the wheelhouse with a rifle in his hand, and just off our starb’d quarter the white shadow of the fishing boat hanging there in the fog.
It was like that for a moment, then the picture shattered, everything happening at once. We fell off the back of a wave into a deep hollow, the barge rolling and Miriam flung against me. The trap door broke open and was flung back to reveal the heaving shoulders of a powerfully built man in an open shirt with black hair and staring eyes. I kicked out at him, an instinctive reaction with Miriam clinging to me, her mouth open and her face gone white in a blazing beam of light. The fog rolled clear, a gap in the swirling mist and the lighthouse staring at us, one-eyed like a Cyclops, across a welter of breaking waves.
For an instant the scene was lit like a film set, the tug’s bows buried under water as they fell against us, the three men on its deck lying in a huddle of tangled limbs and the ghostly fishing boat rolling its gunnels under, mast and rods dipping towards us. ‘Philip! I’m going. Come with me. It’s so near.’
The grip on my arm loosened. She was turning, reaching for the door. I saw the fear on her face, had the odd experience of sensing her sudden uncontrollable terror transmitted right through me. Then the beam passed on. Twilight for an instant, then blackness. And in that abrupt dark I felt the barge roll back as it was lifted by an incoming comber, saw the top of it curl and break in a blur of grey foam that burst against the tug, slewing it round, then hit us with a crash, spray spattering the wheelhouse and the man I had kicked in the face falling back down the ladder with a cry, the trapdoor banging shut over his head.
Then we were sliding down the surf-flecked back of the wave, falling into the hollow of it to end up with a jarring crash that jabbed right through my body and shook every part of the barge. We were on rock, and until we lifted to the next breaker, we were grinding our bottom plates against its surface, the din appalling.
I don’t know whether it was because he realized the barge had struck, and that he was in shoaling water among the rocks, or whether it was the sense of being so abruptly exposed, a gap torn in the fog and all three vessels made visible to the shore by the beam of the lighthouse … Whatever it was, there was a sudden rumbling sound as the skipper of the tug put his engines full astern and backed off. Another crash, a splatter of breaking water and then we were lifting, the tug below us and ourselves looking down on it. The lighthouse beam was back, everything lit with blinding clarity, and the tug turning broadside-on to us. And as the beam passed on another light flashed out, this time from seaward.
The cutter was actually in sight. I think I went slightly mad at the sight of the tug hauling off from us and the cutter closing in; I was shouting my head off and doing a little dance. Brian, too — he was making strange war-whoop sounds deep in his throat. And Miriam suddenly burst into tears, clutching hold of me and sobbing, her head bent down as though in prayer, and I heard her say something about stars, and then quite distinctly, ‘If only he hadn’t taken that last snort — his luck was turning.’ Her head was up then and she was looking at Brian with an expression I didn’t understand. It wasn’t exactly hatred, more an accusation … I think if she had had the means she would have killed him then.
PART VI
1
It was dawn before we were taken off that barge. By then the fog had disappeared and as the sun rose above the tree-clad mountains of Vancouver Island we were able to see how close we had come to disaster, for in the six hours since we had hit that first rock tide and wind had bumped the barge along the iron-hard coast of Maquinna Point and the southern extremity of Nootka Island until it had found deeper water between Maquinna and Yuquot. By then police and customs had boarded the tug by winch from a helicopter and it was the Gabriello herself that towed the leaking barge clear of the rocks past Friendly Cove and the entrance to Cook’s Channel and into the quiet of the Zuciarte Channel. This took us south and west of Bligh Island to the grey rock of Muchalat Inlet and so up to the pulp mill some eight miles south of Gold River.
That was where we stayed the night, in a motel, and in the morning Cornish came to tell us the customs officers had found no drugs. They had had every log lifted out and been over the barge inch by inch — no trace of cocaine or any other contraband. We were interviewed then, each of us separately, by the police and the customs, and most of the time there was a member of the Federal Drug Enforcement Bureau present. This was at the motel. Statements were taken, not just from us, but also from the captain and crew of the tug, and while the police were chiefly concerned with Tom’s death and Miriam’s account of her kidnapping and long incarceration in the lakeside hut, the customs officers concentrated on our rendezvous with the South American vessel among the islands of the Spider. After hours of searching, then more time interrogating the crew of the tug, I think they found it very frustrating that we hadn’t been able to poke our heads out and see what was going on. What they wanted was confirmation of the nature of the cargo being transferred to the barge and where it had been hidden. ‘You state there was a lot of hammering?’ The question was addressed to me, and when I nodded, the officer asked me where the hammering had been coming from. ‘For’ard, aft, amidships — where?’