Tarrant and Somerville crouched in the darkness among the trees and watched the quiet scene. They had spent the latter part of the afternoon and the early evening in obtaining supplies and loading them on to The Rose of York. As darkness had approached they had come up the hill by separate routes, only to find a middle-aged couple and two boys of about ten sitting in the garden opposite the door of the vault. The man was peacefully smoking a cigarette, the woman was talking to him with quiet concentration, and the boys were playing a game with white pebbles.
“They look like being there all night,” Tarrant said in a low voice. “What are we going to do?”
Somerville raised his shoulders. “We might have to kill them.”
Tarrant shook his head. “I thought of that, but the bodies could be found at any time—and we can’t afford to be at the centre of a manhunt.”
“We could put them in the vault.”
Tarrant evaluated the situation and calculated that several days were likely to elapse before anybody went near the door of the vault. “That seems all right. We’ll need to go for the kids first, because they can run faster—then I’ll take the man and you can deal with the woman.”
He took his knife from its sheath and signalled for Somerville to follow him as he moved off through the foliage to get nearer the family.
“Wait a minute,” Somerville said. “I think they’re. …” He parted the wall of shrubs with his hand and they watched as the man stubbed out his cigarette and got to his feet. The woman stood up with him and they walked towards the garden’s west gate, leaving the boys still absorbed in their game. At the gate the man turned and called the children. They gathered up the pebbles and ran to him, laughing, each trying to hold the other back.
“Just as well,” Tarrant said, putting his knife away. “There might have been too much noise.”
The two men waited in concealment for another minute before crossing the garden. Both had crowbars hidden beneath their jackets, and under their combined assault the panelled wooden door of the tomb opened almost at once. They went inside and dosed the door behind them. Somerville switched on a small flashlight and its beam picked out a simple sarcophagus in the middle of the circular building. The air was dry and faintly spicy, a smell which Tarrant found evocative of death and the slow-gathering dust of eternity. He was grateful for the reassuring presence within his ribcage, the reminder that he was no longer alone, no longer subject to the mortality of the individual.
The wavering spot of light jumped to a wooden partition which cut off a segment of the room. Attempts had been made to have the partition blend with the architecture, but the effect was spoiled by an incongruous bolt and padlock on the central door. Tarrant prised the lock off and opened the door to reveal the squat shape of a 500-millimetre mortar beneath a plastic cover. Behind it, resting in low cradles, were three red-and-white striped cylinders with built-in carrying handles.
“That’s handy—they’re still in the ready-use canisters,” Tarrant said. “I was afraid they might be already hooked up to propellent charges.”
“I don’t think there are any propellents. They would have become unstable a long time ago, and nobody has bothered to get new stuff.” Somerville shone his light around the equipment shelves and lifted a pouch of specialised tools and crammed it into his jacket pocket. “That’s all—let’s go.”
They picked up one of the heavy plastic canisters between them and carried it out of the vault. Tarrant closed the doors and pressed the splintered wood of the edges back into place. The night sky was opulent with stars, and Venus was burning low in the west, a steel-white flare so bright that it scribed a line of silver on the ocean. Somerville took off his jacket and draped it over the canister to hide the garish markings, and they set off walking down the hill. They met nobody in the quiet, sloping avenues, there being no sign of life on the island but for the windows which glowed lemon and white and amber among the trees.
The bomb was heavier than Tarrant had anticipated, but in spite of frequent pauses they got it to the boat in less than an hour. They stowed it in a rope locker, and Somerville went below to tend to the five castaways and prepare a meal, entrusting Tarrant with the job of taking them out to sea by way of the north channel. The boat rode quietly between the twin lines of marker globes, with Tarrant’s boat on tow, breasting the scented and oxygen-rich air which lay over the farm in an invisible blanket. About halfway to the rim Somerville emerged from below deck with a tray of food which he handed to Tarrant before taking over the wheel.
“How is it down there?” Tarrant said, sipping some of the rum which his host dispensed in the same way that others poured coffee.
“Hot.” Somerville opened his white shirt to the waist. “Young Geean seems a lot better already, though. First exposure to antibiotics and all that”
“Can they move around?”
“Not much. Ideally they should be in something like a shallow pool—out of the water it’s quite a strain for them even to move their arms. I’d say that if they hadn’t been very active up there, wherever it is, they couldn’t have made it in our gravity at all.”
Tarrant stared into the night sky for a moment. “Is it worth all the trouble to keep them alive?”
“We’ll have to see,” Somerville replied. “Perhaps for recruiting other help.”
“Okay.” Tarrant ate sparingly from the bread, fruit and nuts on his tray, and finished off the beaker of rum. “I think I’ll get a few hours of sleep up here.”
He lay down on the bench seat at the side of the upper deck. It had been a long and tiring day, and he expected to fall asleep almost at once, but the spirit he had drunk was curling warmly in his veins, triggering responses in his autonomic nerve system. All the heat of his body, all the strength and all the blood, seemed to migrate to his genitals, producing a painful, insistent tumescence. After ten restless minutes he sat up.
“It’s no use,” he said. “I won’t be able to sleep until I get rid of this.”
Somerville kept his gaze straight ahead. “You know where the women are, old son.”
Tarrant nodded. He stood up and went towards the head of the companionway, unbuttoning his pants as he walked. The hot air rising from the cabin carried with it the mingled odours of hair, perspiration and human flesh, further stimulating his physical craving. He entered the cabin without speaking. Somerville had left a small globe burning, and the first person Tarrant saw by its faint light was the older woman, Treece, lying in the starboard bunk.
“You’ll do,” he said unemotionally, casually, going straight to her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Rose of York was fitted with a satellite navigation system which had been guaranteed by its manufacturers to be an exact duplicate of a type perfected three centuries earlier. Their literature had stated that the quality and reliability were as good as in the original hardware, but Somerville had never been able to check on that claim because the most vulnerable part of the system—the satellites themselves—had begun functioning erratically soon after he acquired the boat. He had been forced to devise a hybrid technique for getting around the South Pacific, a method using traditional dead reckoning, radio beacons where available, and the occasional flash of lucidity from his satnav equipment.
Tarrant had become accustomed to similar makeshifts on a more sophisticated level in his flying days, and he quickly learned all that was necessary to navigate the boat. Somerville and he took four-hour spells at the wheel throughout the first night and the following day, mainly to monitor the self-steering gear. Between daytime watches Tarrant sat at the stern with his rifle cradled in his lap. His own boat was following the larger one, duckling fashion, and he kept a close watch on the water all around it, hoping to see a familiar mottled shape come to the surface. He could not say if he was going by instinct, or receiving guidance from the friend he carried within his chest, but he was certain the big squid was not far away. And he would be unable to work comfortably in the water until he had seen the huge body ripped into streamers and drifting with the tide.