I picked up the fallen ax. “Where’s Nicole!” I demanded of all and any of the green-dressed men.
“Go away.” The man with the black beard sounded scared. The man I had kicked was sobbing and whimpering on the ground. David, who could now see me again from Stormchild’s cockpit, was insistently demanding to be told what was happening, but the only answer I offered him was a cheerful wave.
Then, because the men were evidently defeated, I tossed the ax into the mud and walked toward the gray-dressed group. “I’m Nicole Blackburn’s father,” I told them again, and in as comforting a voice as I could manage, but before I could say another word one of the green-dressed men ordered them to run.
“Go!” he shouted. “Run! Quick! Go!” He flapped his hands at them as though he drove a flock of hens, and the women, with one last look at me, obeyed. They fled toward the southern hills, the children clinging to their mothers and screaming as they ran.
I turned back to the men. “Are you all mad?”
“Go away,” one of them said.
“I’ll search your house first,” I said, and began walking toward the big sprawl of buildings.
A rifle fired. It was not David on board Stormchild who had opened fire, but rather the gunman who was hidden at the crest of the western escarpment. The sound of his gun echoed and re-echoed around the wide bay, while his bullet thudded into the ground just five paces in front of me. At that range it was horribly good shooting and I hoped it had only been intended as a warning shot, calculated to stop me in my tracks.
If so, it worked. I stopped.
“Tim!” David’s voice squawked from the radio.
“Listen.” I was not replying to David, but rather turning to appeal to the bearded men, but my words were interrupted by a second rifle shot, and this time the bullet whacked into the damp earth even closer to me.
“Go,” the man with the black beard said.
“Where’s my daughter!” I shouted at him, and I took a threatening pace forward, but immediately the gunman on the hill fired a third round, and this bullet hissed menacingly close to my head. I froze.
“For God’s sake, what is happening?” David asked plaintively over the radio.
I thumbed the transmit button. “They won’t talk, they won’t say where Nicole is, and the gunfire is calculated to make me leave.”
“I think that might be a very good idea,” David said in a dispassionate voice, “because I’ve spotted another gunman in the house itself. He’s on the top floor, left-hand window. I suggest you withdraw, Tim. We’ve done what we could, now let’s do as we agreed.”
“Like hell.” I was feeling stubborn, stupidly stubborn. I put the radio back into my pocket and looked defiantly at the black-bearded man. “I have sailed ten thousand bloody miles to see my daughter, and I’m not leaving without speaking to her. Where is she?”
The man’s only answer was to raise a hand in an evident appeal to the gunman hidden on the escarpment’s crest, who now switched his gun to automatic fire and loosed a whole clip of bullets at me. The sound of the shots crackled in the still air as the bullets churned a patch of nearby ground into a morass. The rounds came so close that I instinctively twisted away and half fell.
David, thinking that my fall was evidence that I had been shot, fired back.
The old British army rifle made a much louder report than the gunman’s assault rifle, and, long before the echo of his first shot had faded from the bay, David fired again.
The effect was extraordinary. The three men who had been confronting me turned and fled. Even the man with the ginger beard limped away, still sobbing and gasping. The gunman on the hill began placing single shots very close to me. It was impossible to see where that gunman was hiding because the top of the escarpment was an horrific tangle of rocks and crevices. I decided he was not trying to kill me, but only to drive me away. The Genesis community just wanted to expel me, and, under the encouragement of their marksman’s wicked aim, I turned and walked toward the beach. The hidden gunman, seeing my retreat, instantly ceased fire. David, after his first two warning shots, had also ceased fire. I took out the radio as I walked. “It’s been a bloody washout,” I reported to David.
“Just get back here,” he said, and I could hear the nervousness in his voice.
I reached the bluff above the beach. I hesitated there for a few seconds. One part of me, desperate for news of Nicole, wanted to go back and hammer at the door of the house, but when I turned to stare at the ugly building I saw that David was right and that there was indeed a gunman on the upper floor. The man had opened a window and was mutely watching me. The message of his unmoving menace was very clear: that I should go away.
I went away. I climbed down the steps and started hauling the dinghy toward the water and as I did, one of the gunmen opened a furious fire.
David responded.
I stared in horror at Stormchild, expecting to see the bullets chewing up her hull and deck, but Stormchild was untouched, the water around her unscarred by bullets. David, standing in the cockpit, was working the Lee-Enfield’s bolt furiously. His shots echoed flat and hard from the far hills.
I left the dinghy and ran halfway up the wooden steps to see what had caused this sudden firefight. Then, crouching so that I was hidden from both Genesis gunmen, I very cautiously peered over the bluff’s edge.
A single figure dressed in one of the drab gray boiler suits was running frantically toward the beach. It was a young woman who had run from the woodcutting group and now struggled with extraordinary clumsiness toward the sea. For a second I dared to hope it was Nicole, but then I saw this girl had hair as black as night, while Nicole was fair. The fleeing girl tripped and fell, and I was sure she must have been hit, but then she struggled up again. David kept firing, then the second Genesis gunman, the one in the house, saw the girl and opened fire.
He had seen her too late, and the range was too great. The girl was already close to the concealing bluff. She took one panicked look behind her, then half jumped and half fell over the earthen cliff. For a second I thought she had knocked herself unconscious, but then she struggled up and ran toward me.
I shoved the dinghy into the water. David was now firing at the house and his shots dissuaded the gunman in the upper window. The farther gunman, the one on the high ridge, had also ceased fire, but only, I suspected, because he was reloading. “Anchor!” I yelled at David. “Get the bloody hook up!”
The girl, her eyes huge and terrified, swerved into the shallow waves toward the dinghy. She stumbled and fell full-length into the cold sea. She was gasping as she struggled up and scrambled clumsily over the dinghy’s bows. I clambered after her, grabbed the oars, and rowed hard toward Stormchild. The girl, sensibly, was curled on the dinghy’s floor and hidden from the Genesis gunmen. The one on the ridge had opened fire again, but the range was too great and his bullets went wide. The man in the house could have shredded the dinghy with his fire, and I flinched as I saw his gun’s muzzle appear at the windowsill, but then it jerked back as a bullet from David’s gun slapped a puff of stone dust and chips from the wall near the window. Stormchild’s anchor windlass was thumping away, clattering the pawl-dragged chain over the fairlead. David, who was now standing in Stormchild’s bows, fired again at the house. I knew he was not firing to kill, but only to scare, and his tactic seemed to be working.
I rowed to Stormchild’s far side. “Over you go!” I told the girl. She obediently tipped herself into Stormchild’s scuppers, then slithered into the cockpit. As she wriggled under cover I heard a curious clinking noise and I at last understood why her escape had been so clumsy. She was wearing leg chains.