[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 31

"But, Ernie — why don't we simply walk along the cliffs to this hole and climb down the stairway to the platform, and get in to the tunnels that way?"

The boy smiled. "You don't know the nineteenth-century coastguards," he said. "Efficiency at the expense of imagination. They dynamited the stairs between the platform and the lip. You can only get to the tunnels from the sea."

"But that would surely mean... No matter! It suits us. Let's go!"

Snatching up the handbag, she held open the door for him to leave, and then ran lightly down the steps, slamming it, shut behind her.

Forever in her mind, the next half hour was a kaleidoscope of movement and of colour. There was the push and jostle through the Saturday night crowd, laughing, shouting, screaming, their open-mouth faces lit harshly from the flares of the booths; the sickly warm smell of candyfloss, nutty fumes from the roast chestnut stall — and over all the strident wheeze of a hurdy-gurdy... And then they were away and running down the hill, past the thatched cottages in the lamplight, under the bridge and into the square, now filled with the headlamps of cars backing and filling to find a place because there was a film showing at the mission halt. Beyond the women in winter coats queuing for the doors to open, they were in a huddle of narrow lanes pricked out with lighted windows or the flickering green of family television... and then at last, salty in the nostrils, there was the cold push of the wind on their faces as they came out on to the quayside.

Ernie took her arm and guided her along the Hard, past rows of gunwales straining at ropes creaking to the swell. They edged beyond a stack of crab-pots pungent with tar and rotting bait and trod along a boardwalk leading out, rising and falling with the moored dinghies to which it was tethered, to the middle of the harbour.

At the end of the planking, he jumped down into a bright green boat with a high bow and stern post and threw the tarpaulin from the engine housing amidships. The craft was about fifteen feet long, April judged, and wide in the beam. There was a curved half-deck which ended just forward of the engine housing, and the bulkhead blanking off the fore- part which this covered held wheel, compass and other controls on one side, and a small door leading to the sail locker on the other. The stern half of the boat was open.

"She's a funny old craft," the boy called up to her. "Originally they built her for a miniature whaler — as an experiment, like — but she was too small. Then she hung about for years, just a hulk for kids to play in. Then Harry, my brother Harry, he got this two hundred horsepower diesel cheap — and he put the two together, and there she is."

"No sail?" April asked.

"No — just the engine. She doesn't even have a mast, that I know of. But she's a sprightly old tub, for all that. Do a good eighteen to twenty knots if pushed! And she's real tough. That's why we're using her instead of borrowing one of me mates' more modern craft."

The girl jumped down into the cockpit. There were a couple of thwarts and a narrow bench which ran around the stern. Apart from these and a pair of oars lying along the duckboards, it was empty.

As Ernie bent down and grasped the handle which turned the heavy flywheel, she looked back at the quayside. Masts, rigging and crosstrees tossed against the illumination of the streetlamps lining the Hard. The moon was up, silvering the shallow slate roofs, mellowing the thatch — and if she turned the other way, she could see the agitated water just outside the harbour mouth in its shining path.

It certainly promised to be very rough. Even at its moorings, the boat was lifting and falling sickeningly. And as soon as the engine caught and settled down to the characteristic diesel knock, and the boy shoved them off and into the middle of the port, she realised how small it really was.

The rollers were marching in between the piers at fairly long intervals — she could hear the continuation of them thundering on the beach at one side of the harbour — and it was not until they were well clear of the warning lights on each break water that they really hit the swell. The old boat lifted its blunt nose to the crest of every wave, hung suspended for a moment, and then crashed down into the trough with a thwack that sent the spray flying and jarred April's teeth in her head. And then the boards were pressing the soles of her feet again as they rose like a lift to the next one.

As soon as they drew out from the shelter of the headland, the full fury of the weather seized them. April was looking out over the stern at the lights of Porthallow, clustered like fruit along the dark branch of the valley, when suddenly they slid away and out of sight and the whaler was dropping endlessly into an abyss.

The girl swung round and gasped with amazement at the wall of moonlit water rearing over them. At the instant that it threatened to engulf them, the boat slewed, and then seemed to climb almost vertically up the slope. The vicious, curling tip of the comber hissed past, only inches below the gunwale, and then on the downward tilt, the wind snatched her breath, whistling in her ears and howling across the foam-flecked surface of the water to flick tongues of spume from the waves. "I thought you said the weather had calmed down!" she shouted, flinging herself forward and cowering down in the shelter of the bulk head beside the boy.

He was hunched over the wheel, his wet eyes bright in the moonlight, anticipating every movement with small motions of the spokes, tiny variations in the opening of the throttle. There was a smile on his lips.

This, April saw at once as she repeated her comment, was a young man doing what he wanted to do: pitting his skills against the elements.

He turned and grinned at her. "I said the wind had dropped. But I warned you there was a sea running, mind," he yelled back.

"There still seems plenty of wind to me!"

"Oh, come now — she's not a point over Force Six! These seas are about eighteen foot, trough to crest. It's when they're shorter that you're in trouble: front half liftin' before your stern's down, and you break your back as soon as whistle!"

The bows corkscrewed through a crest crumbling into foam, hung giddily over space, and then roared down into a trough, to thunder against the swell of the next wave with a shock that sent showers of icy spray exploding into the air. Drenched to the skin, the girl pushed the soaking hair from her eyes and screamed against the wind: "Do you think you can make it to your cave in this kind of weather, Ernie?"

"Sure I can. We have to head out a bit because of the reefs inshore this side of the point. But there's slack water off Tregunda, and it runs powerful deep just there, which is why the old smugglers used it. It's when you get big seas on a shallow ground that it's dangerous... like the Manacles, off Coverack. That's beyond the headland on the far side of the cove: you can see the flashing light as we rise.... There! See! They've had more wrecks there than the rest of the coast put together."

"Okay, Ernie. You're the skipper. if you think you can — Good grief! Look at that!"

A mountainous wave rose at them crosswise, canting the boat alarmingly on her beam. At the same time another breaker speeding diagonally across its face burst with a noise like a thunderclap over the stern, cascading a torrent of sea water into the cockpit. April picked herself up groggily from the duckboards, to hear Ernie shouting: "Bail, woman! bail for your life! Get that water out or we're done for next time we hit a sea like that!"

"What... with? What shall I bail with?" she screamed against the howling of the wind.