Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [74]
He gave them a few minutes to get well away, then walked around the edge of the harbor and jumped onto the boat. She was called Marie II.
He found the wheel chained up. He sat on the floor of the little cabin, out of sight, and spent ten minutes picking the lock. Darkness was coming early because of the cloud layer that still blanketed the sky.
When he had freed the wheel he raised the small anchor, then jumped back onto the quay and untied the ropes. He returned to the cabin, primed the diesel engine, and pulled the starter. The motor coughed and died. He tried again. This time it roared to life. He began to maneuver out of the mooring.
He got clear of the other craft at the quayside and found the main channel out of the harbor, marked by buoys. He guessed that only boats of much deeper draft really needed to stick to the channel, but he saw no harm in being overcautious.
Once outside the harbor, he felt a stiff breeze, and hoped it was not a sign that the weather was about to break. The sea was surprisingly rough, and the stout little boat lifted high on the waves. Faber opened the throttle wide, consulted the dashboard compass, and set a course. He found some charts in a locker below the wheel. They looked old and little used; no doubt the boat’s skipper knew the local waters too well to need charts. Faber checked the map reference he had memorized that night in Stockwell, set a more exact course, and engaged the wheel-clamp.
The cabin windows were obscured by water, Faber could not tell whether it was rain or spray. The wind was slicing off the tops of the waves now. He poked his head out of the cabin door for a moment, and got his face thoroughly wet.
He switched on the radio. It hummed for a moment, then crackled. He moved the frequency control, wandering the airwaves, and picked up a few garbled messages. The set was working perfectly. He tuned to the U-boat’s frequency, then switched off—it was too soon to make contact.
The waves increased in size as he progressed into deeper waters. Now the boat reared up like a bucking horse with each wave, then teetered momentarily at the top before plunging sickeningly down into the next trough. Faber stared blindly out of the cabin windows. Night had fallen, and he could see nothing at all. He felt faintly seasick.
Each time he convinced himself that the waves could not possibly get bigger, a new monster taller than the rest lifted the vessel toward the sky. They started to come closer together, so that the boat was always lying with its stern pointed either up at the sky or down at the sea bed. In a particularly deep trough the little boat was suddenly illuminated, as clearly as if it were a day, by a flash of lightning. Faber saw a grey-green mountain of water descend on the prow and wash over the deck and the cabin where he stood. He could not tell whether the terrible crack that sounded a second afterward was the thunderclap or the noise of the timbers of the boat breaking up. Frantically he searched the cabin for a life jacket. There was none.
The lightning came repeatedly then. Faber held the locked wheel and braced his back against the cabin wall to stay upright. There was no point in operating the controls now—the boat would go where the sea threw it.
He kept telling himself that the boat must be built to withstand such sudden summer gales. He could not convince himself. Experienced fishermen probably would have seen the signs of such a storm and refrained from leaving shore, knowing their vessel could not survive such weather.
He had no idea where he was now. He might be almost back in Aberdeen, or he might be at his rendezvous. He sat on the cabin floor and switched on the radio. The wild rocking and shuddering made it difficult to operate the set. When it warmed up he experimented with the dials but could pick up nothing. He turned the volume to maximum; still no sound.
The aerial must have been broken off its sixing on the cabin roof.
He switched to Transmit and repeated the