Page 32 of The Rising Tide

AsHuntsman’s Daughterclimbs another wave, Lucy spins back to the study, the balance sheet, the paperwork; her husband’s cold kiss and lost expression.

That voice sings its horrors on the wind.

Another image comes: Fin, in the water, blue-lipped in a maelstrom. Her boy without his glasses, unable to see.

Lucy covers her ears and screams. Beside her, Jake takes the wheel. He keeps the yacht on its course as the ocean thrashes beneath them. A clout of water bursts across the deck. It foams and hisses in the cockpit before draining out through the scuppers. Jake turns to starboard just in time to avoid another wave hitting them broadside, this one so solid it surely would have driven them under.

She thinks of Billie, exploding with ideas, with sheer unadulteratedlife. Earlier this year the girl joined Sea Shepherd, the marine conservation charity. In July, she’s sailing to the Danish Faroe Islands for Operation Bloody Fjords. There, she’ll attempt to disrupt the annualgrindadráp– an all-summer-long slaughter of pilot whales in the bays around the archipelago.

Lucy remembers the photographs Billie showed her: laughing men wading in a blood-red sea; whales hooked by their blowholes and dragged on to beaches to be butchered; rows of shining carcasses – calves and pregnant mothers among them.

‘They banned us from their waters,’ Billie told her. ‘So we can’t stop them driving the pods ashore. But this year there’s something different planned.’

Lucy knew that meant direct action. Knew, too, that it would likely end in violence. Daniel lobbied the girl hard to change her mind. Ed joined him. If it had been a sudden preoccupation, Lucy might have added her voice. But Billie didn’t just grow up by the sea, she grew upinit; enamoured of its wildlife, committed to its protection. Her heroes form aWho’s Whoof marine conservation.

Again, Lucy senses that voice calling out across the waves. She casts a furtive look at Jake – worried, irrationally, that it’ll get inside his head and use him as its mouthpiece. Because if it does, what then?

The cold eats into her bones. She can’t feel her fingers, nor the binoculars Jake passed her to scan the sea. She should go below and strip off her soaked dungarees, but they can’t afford to lose her eyes on deck.

Lifting the binoculars, she scours the water for a sign. TheLazy Susan’s immersion suits are deep red. Sealed atthe extremities and triple insulated, they form a completely waterproof barrier. Worn correctly, they’ll delay hypothermia for hours.

That voice presses close.

Lucy clenches her teeth against it.

2

At six knots, it takes over an hour to reach the edge of the search pattern plotted by SARIS. This far out, in these conditions, there’s no sight of land. Despite Jake’s assurances, Lucy sees no evidence of a rescue operation. No sign, whatsoever, of humanity.

BeyondHuntsman’s Daughter’s bow, the world has emptied of colour. Overhead, the sky resembles an ash cloud, boiling and rolling, driving the rain before it.

The weather worsens. The sea comes at them from all angles. Wind slices a full metre of water from each wave’s crest. They hit with the power of a cannon salvo, rocking the boat, filling the cockpit, repeatedly knocking Lucy off her feet.

She knows she’s risking Jake’s life. Knows, too, that he’ll search these waters for as long as she asks – that he’ll accept whatever danger that brings. It’s selfish to the point of monstrous, but she needs to be out here and Jake is her only means. However barbaric it may be, in a trade for the lives of her family, she’d willingly sacrifice him as collateral. It’s a deal with the Devil to make her teeth squeal, to make one part of her soul recoil from the other. But shecan’t deny the reality: there’snothingshe won’t do to bring her husband and children home.

That voice returns, poisoning her with questions. This time it doesn’t quit. It beats in her ears, thumps in her chest. Suddenly – impossibly – she senses that Jake hears it too, because sheseesit in his eyes when she looks at him, and she’s just about to cry out and prevent him from acknowledging it when she realizes it isn’t what she thought but something quite different: the whistle of turbines, the violent chopping of rotor blades, the sound, unmistakeable, of a hovering coastguard helicopter.

3

Lucy searches the clouds, hunting for a breach. That pulse of rotors ebbs and swells. One moment it seems to be fading, the next it sounds like it’s directly overhead. She casts about, frustrated. For precious seconds the wind roars so intensely it drowns out everything. And then—

‘There!’

At first, Lucy can’t see the helicopter, just its flashing anti-collision beacon. It floats behind a maroon ring of cloud, a vast cataracted eye.

She can’t fill her lungs. Despite the falling air pressure, it feels like she’s being crushed. Because a helicopter, hovering all the way out here, meanssomething, even if she doesn’t know what.

Jake turns the wheel, marginally adjusting their course.Huntsman’s Daughterplunges down another wave. Everythingis lost in a blinding eruption of spray. Then, ahead of them, a curtain of cloud parts. And there, hanging like a huge mechanical jewel, utterly implausible in size and shape, is the AgustaWestland Lucy saw hours earlier.

Its body is frozen in place, defiant of wind and rain. If ever there was an example of humanity’s arrogance in the face of nature’s savagery, this is surely it.

The downdraught has created a white sinkhole upon the sea, its surface flayed open to reveal the pale ribs of water beneath. Winched from the eye of that sinkhole by the helicopter’s steel umbilical come two drenched humans.

A buzzing, now, in Lucy’s head. Her jaw tightens. Every muscle in her body locks in place. She wants to cry out her family’s names but they form a logjam in her throat.

Please, she begs.

Please be here. Please be alive.

---