Eye of the Needle(58)
In one of his last clear moments he noticed that the waves were moving in one direction, carrying the boat with them. Lightning flashed again, and he saw to one side a huge dark mass, an impossibly high wave—no, it was not a wave, it was a cliff…. The realization that he was close to land was swamped by the fear of being hurled against the cliff and smashed. Stupidly, he pulled the starter, then hastily returned his hand to the wheel; but it would no longer grip.
A new wave lifted the boat and threw it down like a discarded toy. As he fell through the air, still clutching the wheel with one hand, Faber saw a pointed rock like a stiletto sticking up out of the trough of the wave. It seemed certain to impale the boat…but the hull of the craft scraped the edge of the rock and was carried past.
The mountainous waves were breaking now. The next one was too much for the vessel’s timbers. The boat hit the trough with a solid impact, and the sound of the hull splitting cracked in his ears like an explosion. Faber knew the boat was finished….
The water had retreated, and Faber realized that the hull had broken because it had hit…land. He stared in dumb astonishment as a new flash of lightning revealed a beach. The sea lifted the ruined boat off the sand as water crashed over the deck again, knocking Faber to the floor. But he had seen everything with daylight clarity in that moment. The beach was narrow, and the waves were breaking right up to the cliff. But there was a jetty, over to his right, and a bridge of some kind leading from the jetty to the cliff top. He knew that if he left the boat for the beach, the next wave would kill him with tons of water or break his head like an egg against the cliff. But if he could reach the jetty in between waves, he might scramble far enough up the bridge to be out of reach of the water.
The next wave split the deck open as if the seasoned wood were no stronger than a banana skin. The boat collapsed under Faber, and he found himself sucked backward by the receding surf. He scrambled upright, his legs like jelly beneath him, and broke into a run, splashing through the shallows toward the jetty. Running those few yards was the hardest physical thing he had ever done. He wanted to stumble, so that he could rest in the water and die, but he stayed upright, just as he had when he won the 5,000-meter race, until he crashed into one of the pillars of the jetty. He reached up and grabbed the boards with his hands, willing them to come back to life for a few seconds; and lifted himself until his chin was over the edge; then swung his legs up and rolled over.
The wave came as he got to his knees. He threw himself forward. The wave carried him a few yards then flung him against the wooden planking. He swallowed water and saw stars. When the weight lifted from his back he summoned the will to move again. It would not come. He felt himself being dragged inexorably back, and a sudden rage took hold of him. He would not allow it…not now, goddamn it. He screamed at the f*cking storm and the sea and the British and Percival Godliman, and suddenly he was on his feet and running, running, away from the sea and up the ramp, running with his eyes shut and his mouth open, a crazy man, daring his lungs to burst and his bones to break; running with no sense of a destination, but knowing he would not stop until he lost his mind.
The ramp was long and steep. A strong man might have run all the way to the top if he were in training and rested. An Olympic athlete, if he were tired, might have got halfway. The average forty-year-old man would have managed a yard or two.
Faber made it to the top.
A yard from the end of the ramp he felt a sharp pain, like a slight heart attack, and lost consciousness, but his legs pumped twice more before he hit the sodden turf.
He never knew how long he lay there. When he opened his eyes the storm still raged, but day had broken, and he could see, a few yards away from him, a small cottage that looked inhabited.
He got to his knees and began the long, interminable crawl to the front door.
18
THE U-505 WHEELED IN A TEDIOUS CIRCLE, HER powerful diesels chugging slowly as she nosed through the depths like a gray, toothless shark. Lieutenant Commander Werner Heer, her master, was drinking ersatz coffee and trying not to smoke any more cigarettes. It had been a long day and a long night. He disliked his assignment; he was a combat man and there was no combat to be had here; and he thoroughly disliked the quiet Abwehr officer with storybook-sly blue eyes who was an unwelcome guest aboard his submarine.
The intelligence man, Major Wohl, sat opposite the captain. The man never looked tired, damn him. Those blue eyes looked around, taking things in, but the expression in them never changed. His uniform never got rumpled, despite the rigors of underwater life, and he lit a new cigarette every twenty minutes, on the dot, and smoked it to a quarter-inch stub. Heer would have stopped smoking, just so that he could enforce regulations and prevent Wohl from enjoying tobacco, but he himself was too much of an addict.
Heer had never liked intelligence people, he’d always had the feeling they were gathering intelligence on him. Nor did he like working with the Abwehr. His vessel was made for battle, not for skulking around the British coast waiting to pick up secret agents. It seemed to him plain madness to risk a costly piece of fighting machinery, not to mention its skilled crew, for the sake of one man who might well fail to show up.
He emptied his cup and made a face. “Damn coffee,” he said. “Tastes vile.”
Wohl’s expressionless gaze rested on him for a moment, then moved away. He said nothing.
Forever cryptic. To hell with him. Heer shifted restlessly in his seat. On the bridge of a ship he would have paced up and down, but men on submarines learn to avoid unnecessary movement. He finally said, “Your man won’t come in this weather, you know.”