I followed her on board, tying the dinghy’s painter to the nearest stanchion. The girl quivered on the cockpit floor.
“Anchor’s clear!” David shouted at me.
He had already started Stormchild’s engine, so all I needed to do was ram it into gear. Bullets whiplashed overhead. One clipped the backstay, but did no apparent damage. David fired back. The anchor chain was still clanking aboard, but the anchor was hanging clear of the seabed as Stormchild gathered speed. The water at her stern churned white.
“I knew this would end badly,” David shouted at me.
“It hasn’t ended yet!” I said, then ducked as a stream of bullets whimpered overhead. It was the gunman on the escarpment’s crest who was firing, but I suspected we were in much more danger from a group of armed men who were running toward the shabby trawler. Someone must have already been aboard the trawler, because black smoke had started to pour out of its slender funnel.
“They’re going to chase us,” I warned David.
David stowed the anchor while I pushed Stormchild to her top speed. Behind us the decrepit, green-painted trawler clanked away from the quay. David came back to the cockpit and winced as someone on board the ancient fishing vessel fired a clip of bullets toward Stormchild’s stern. “Forget the trawler,” I told David, “and take our guest below. Use the hacksaw on those chains and give her something to eat.”
“Chains!” His eyes widened as he saw the leg irons. “Good Lord above!”
David took the girl into the saloon as a last hopeless clip of bullets from the hills hissed overhead. Then we were hidden from that land-based gunman as Stormchild reached the tip of the pine-topped headland where a sudden tidal surge carried her out of danger at the speed of a racing dinghy whipping round a mark. I spun the wheel amidships and, with Stormchild’s big turbo-charged engine at full throttle and with her hull borne along by that enormous tide, we traveled quickly away from the trawler. The fishing boat’s stack was spewing a filthy plume of greasy smoke, evidence that her old engine was working at maximum effort.
A rifle fired from the trawler and the bullet clanged off Stormchild’s transom. A second bullet drove a jagged splinter of teak up from the coaming. That was good marksmanship, too good, and I snatched up David’s discarded rifle and fired two quick bullets at our pursuer. The rifle’s butt slammed into my shoulder.
“For God’s sake! What’s happening?” With each rifle shot David could sense potential scandaclass="underline" a man of God caught fighting a private war in Chile.
“I’m discouraging the ungodly.” I fired again. “How’s the girl?”
“She seems to be in shock.” David went back below. The gunman on the trawler splashed a clip of bullets into Stormchild’s wake.
I fired one more time, then turned back to Stormchild’s wheel. The tide swept us on. I was tempted to escape the trawler’s laborious pursuit by turning into one of the high-twisting chasms that opened off the wide waterway, but I did not know which of the chasms were dead ends or which held shallows that might ground us, so it seemed wiser to retrace our steps and hope to outrun the trawler in our wake.
“They’re calling us on channel sixteen!” David shouted up to me.
“Saying what?”
“That we’re kidnapping this girl!”
“Then tell them to fuck off,” I told him impatiently.
David doubtless told them to desist from their transmissions, but however politely he phrased his request, its only effect was to provoke another flurry of automatic fire from the trawler. I returned the compliment. The old Lee-Enfield was a wonderfully rugged and reliable weapon, but at that moment I would have given a fair chunk of money to have been equipped with an automatic rifle. Half the trick of winning firefights is to scare the other side with as much noise and mayhem as can be created, and a single-shot, bolt-action rifle was a poor producer of mayhem and noise. But, like David, I had always been a fair shot with a rifle and my slow, deliberate fire unsettled the Genesis gunmen, whose aim was made inaccurate by the labored shuddering of the panting trawler.
“Be careful!” David kept appearing in the companionway to counsel me. “Don’t kill anyone!”
In the end it was not my marksmanship that saved us, but rather Stormchild. She was by far the faster boat. Our enemies’ shots were falling short or going desperately wide, and after a few minutes their firing became sporadic. Their shots echoed forlornly from the cliffs and bluffs that edged the channel. Those shots did no damage, and soon, as Stormchild went even farther ahead, they ceased altogether.
Our pursuers still did not abandon their attempts to reach us on the radio. I took out my handheld set and switched it to channel 16 to hear their message. “Genesis calling Stormchild,” the voice intoned, “Genesis calling Stormchild, over.” I assumed they had read our boat’s name through binoculars.
“Genesis, this is Stormchild, over,” I responded.
“We’re requesting that you heave-to.” The voice was toneless. “The girl you have on board is a member of our community and needs medical help. Do you understand me, over?”
“Where’s Nicole Blackburn?” I asked.
“We’re requesting that you heave-to,” the voice said again.
“And I’m requesting that you fuck off,” I said, “out,” and I switched off the little radio. My parting insult produced a last fusillade of rifle fire, but the bullets just plopped exhaustedly in our wake. Five minutes later the trawler’s oil-burning engine slowed to a dispirited clank and I saw the craft turn away. We had escaped. It had been a tense few moments, but, as far as I could tell, no one in Genesis had been hurt and we were also safe.
I went down to the saloon to fetch a thermos of coffee and saw that David had cut off the girl’s shackles, and that she was now wrapped in one of our blankets and sitting in front of the saloon heater. Her soaking wet gray suit was hanging over the back of the chart table’s chair. The girl, who looked to be in her mid-twenties, was glassy-eyed, pale, shivering, and terrified, like a creature dragged back from the grave. “Hello,” I said as cheerfully as I could.
She offered me a scared look, but said nothing.
David, his back to the girl, offered me a helpless shrug, as though suggesting that the girl’s wits had fled. David was a good pastor, but not a sensitive one. He offered his parishioners a robust certainty of salvation, but left Betty to deal with their emotional crises. David’s solution to a broken heart was a good brisk walk followed by a stiff whiskey, which worked with some people, but not with most, and was certainly not going to work with the waiflike creature who now shivered in Stormchild’s saloon. “Give her some hot food,” I suggested. “I’ll come down when I can.”
By dusk we were thirty miles north of the Isla Tormentos. Our pursuers had long disappeared, and their final plaintive radio transmissions had subsided into a crackled silence. As the sun shadowed the ravines with a purple haze I nosed Stormchild into a narrow passage edged with towering black rocks. We seemed to be at the very bottom of the tide, for thick weeds and bunches of mussels showed high above the waterline at the channel’s edges. I crept forward, fearing to hear the scrape of steel on rock as our keel touched bottom, but at last the channel widened into a deep sheltered cove where I was able to rig our mooring lines and drop our anchors. I shut off the engines, and suddenly the world was a place of blessed and wonderful silence. There was not even a wind moaning in the chill, still air. The cliffs soared above us, making an amphitheater of sky in which a thousand thousand seabirds wheeled.