Assignment - Lowlands (19 page)

He had enough to wipe out half the European continent; perhaps enough to destroy most of the world.

He ran back up the steps again. Trinka had pulled herself out of the trap door into the sunlight and was working on the rest of her bonds. He knelt beside her and quickly finished freeing her wrists and ankles.

“Are you all right now?” he asked quietly.

She was shivering violently. “I don’t know. I didn’t think I was frightened when I was trapped down there— I couldn’t let myself give in to the fear I felt, or I—I’d have gone crazy, thinking—”

“Take it easy,” he said.

“I know. I’ll be all right. But I thought I—I thought I would drown down there, or perhaps suffocate. I felt so helpless. I imagined how it would be, and—what time is it?”

“After two.”

“Then I still had four hours.”

“Was he going to leave you down there?”

She nodded, swallowed, nodded again. She rubbed her throat with her fingertips. “He said he would be back, but I didn’t believe him.”

“Did he hurt you, otherwise?”

“No.”

“Why did he take you here?”

“He is going to make a deal with Inspector Flaas—for safe passage. He said I was going to be a double guarantee of his safety. But he didn’t think Flaas would really get here in time to help me. He laughed at me. And he said I was typical of the fools who were trying to stop him.”

“All right, Trinka. You’re safe now, anyway.”

“It’s not all right. It will never be all right again. Not for me.”

“We’ll get him, you can be sure of that.”

“I don’t think so. I think he will succeed,” she said flatly. “There is something in him—a feeling that frightens me— He will get his money and disappear, you’ll see. He has it all planned. He was very talkative down in the bunker, when he cleaned it out.”

“I noticed he took everything.”

“Yes. His plans were made in every detail, long ago. He will get the money in Switzerland and then vanish. No one will be able to identify him after that. He will be rich. But he has a strange attitude toward the world. The Nazis degraded him until they warped his judgment. He—he hates everyone. All of us. He doesn’t care if we are all killed. He keeps talking about his brother Marius, too, about revenge for him—”

“Can you walk with me now?” Durell interrupted. “Are your legs all right?”

“They hurt. It’s the circulation, I think.”

“Rub them,” he said. “Hard.”

She rubbed her calves and thighs. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek, and her soft, dark hair was disheveled. Her eyes looked different. The hours she had spent underground in the bunker, waiting to die, must have been torment beyond comprehension. She kept shivering, although the hazy sun was still warm. The sea wind had sharpened a little, however, and he put his arm around her and she clung to him like a frightened child, still shuddering. Her body was warm and fragrant and desirable. He helped her to her feet and she leaned against him.

“How did you happen to get here and find me?”

“I came in the
Suzanne
,” he said. “It’s moored beyond the lighthouse ruins. Just over this rise.”

They walked that way.

The tide had turned, and the weather was changing with it, as it had changed yesterday. A haze obscured the sky to the west, but the sun still shone brightly on the endless expanse of muddy channels, drying mudbanks and dunes and salt-water pools left by the ebb tide. From the top of the dune that formed tie highest point of the whale-back island, Durell and the girl could see the lagoon where he had moored the
Suzanne
, to their left and to the north.

Everything looked the same, except for one thing.

The
Suzanne
wasn’t there any more.

He told himself it was impossible. The sloop couldn’t be gone. He had only been ashore a half hour. But it was possible. It had happened. The boat was not in sight. There was nothing human to greet his eye in all the arc of his vision, north and west, east and south.

Trinka sat down on the top of the dime. Her face was white. “Could the anchor have slipped?” she whispered.

“No,” he answered harshly. “And even if it did, the
Suzanne
would only have grounded over there, on the bar.” He pointed to the twisting channel mouth. “Somebody had to guide the sloop away from here.”

“It was Julian Wilde,” she said.

“You told me he was gone.”

“Perhaps he saw you coming. He must have hidden when you came ashore, and when you went to the lighthouse, he simply tied his launch to the
Suzanne
and towed her away with him.”

“To strand us here?”

“Of course,” the girl said.

“How high does the tide rise in this area?”

“High enough to drown us.”

“I haven’t studied the lighthouse ruins too closely,” he said. “It’s got the highest elevation on the island. Does the tide cover that, too?”

“I am sure of it,” Trinka said. “Otherwise, I’d have noticed it on my search last week. I think this whole place sinks under many feet of water at high tide.”

“So he left us here to drown.”

“That is his idea, it seems.” She smiled wanly. “But it is better to die in the sunshine than down there, in that place where he left me—”

She began to shudder again, and he put his arm around her. “When will the tide be at flood?” he asked.

“I think we will be under by nightfall.”

“We can swim for a time. And shout for help.”

She shook her head. “You do not know the currents here. They are treacherous. We might stay afloat for a short time, but the tide will drag us under soon enough.” She looked at all quarters of the bleak, milky-white horizon. “I do not like the looks of the weather, either. If there is a storm, then even nature has conspired against us. Isn’t there anything we can do?”

“We can only wait,” he said.

They walked back to the lighthouse, choosing it instinctively as a shelter because it was the highest point on the island. From the top of the ruin he searched the sea again, but he could not spot the
Suzanne’s
mast among the labyrinthine channels and islands surrounding them. Already, however, he saw how the turning tide had changed the current in places, and he heard a murmur from the swift-flowing sea at the base of the lighthouse ruin.

They had about four hours before the sea would cover them.

He wondered what Julian Wilde intended to do in those four hours. What did he mean to do with all the vials of virus culture he had taken out of the Cassandra bunker?

He tried to ignore his sense of utter and complete defeat. There was nothing he could do. He was trapped here; he had been neatly lured out of action and stranded in the middle of a barren, salt wilderness, while the enemy went ahead with whatever insane plan he expected to execute.

“Sam?” Trinka said quietly.

“Yes?”

“He’s beaten us, hasn’t he?”

“It looks that way.”

“Are we going to die here?”

“I don’t know.”

“When I was alone down there, tied up in the bunker, and I thought no one in all the world would ever find me—” She suddenly gasped and put a hand to her mouth in dismay. “I am horrible! Is Jan—is he all right? Is he—”

“I turned him over to a doctor.”

“I never thought to ask until now. It was all so sudden, you know. Julian Wilde came aboard just as calmly as you please. He knew who I was. He said he’d seen me searching the islands, and made his own inquiries. He told me he had planned to use me in an emergency, against the authorities, all along, if he had to. Jan was asleep in his bunk when he came aboard. I was studying the charts again—I don’t know why, because Flaas said it was all over and the authorities were giving Wilde everything he demanded. Then he stepped aboard out of the blue and went straight into Jan’s cabin. Jan heard him in his sleep, I guess, because he sat up and tried to fight back; but he never had a chance. I—I saw it happen. I saw Wilde’s face. It was so—so cruel, so vicious, I—”

She paused and shook her head and looked out at the sea. It was as if they were alone as sole survivors in a desolated world.

“When Wilde left me in the bunker, he said he would come back for me, or tell the authorities where I was, if they were reasonable and concluded a deal with him quickly. But I knew he would never come back and he wouldn’t tell anybody about me until it was too late. And it was cold and damp down there, and I tried to figure out how much time I had before—before the tide came in and poured down and—I was so alone—and it was so dark and cold, like a tomb—”

“Don’t think about it now,” Durell said.

“I don’t mind. I’m all right now. I’ve faced the idea of dying. It’s just that I couldn’t stand it to think of dying down there in the dark, trapped by the tide. It will be all right up here, even if it’s night before the tide reaches us. There will be the stars to look at, anyway.”

“We’re not going to die,” he said.

She smiled ruefully. “Are you King Canute, to command the tide?”

“Maybe something will turn up. We have several hours yet.”

“The hours will go fast enough,” she said.

The time went too fast. Seated at the base of the ruined lighthouse, they watched the afternoon wane, growing darker with massive thunderheads piling up in the western sky. The water changed color from blue to slate-gray. One by one, the low, reedy islands to the south grew smaller, ringed by white combers, and gradually yielded to the insistent, devouring hunger of the tide. Far off, a sail bent before the increasing wind; but there was no way to signal to the craft out there on the open sea, miles away.

Every few minutes Durell got up and climbed to the top of the lighthouse base to scan the horizons. Trinka was curious.

“No one will come here,” she said. “This whole area for miles around is marked on all the navigational charts as being dangerous tidal shoals. No one in their right senses would take a boat into this area this far.”

“I still think someone will come,” he said.

“I don’t know why you are so sure of it.”

“It’s the widow,” he explained. “The woman that General von Uittal named Cassandra, as a grim joke on her and the rest of the world. She’s got the general’s yacht, the
Valkyron
—the one that almost ran us down, remember?”

“Yes, but—”

“She was at the Wadden Zee Dike this morning, talking to the superintendent. She borrowed some charts from him.”

“That does not mean she will find this place.”

“She knows about the Groote Kerk Light. We must presume she managed to draw the name from Marius Wilde, before the general killed him. Cassandra wants money. She isn’t interested in the virus, I imagine. But she knows there were some art treasures buried here, and she’ll be coming for them.”

“Even so,” Trinka objected, “there certainly is not enough water here for a vessel like the
Valkyron
to reach us in time.”

“Not even at high tide?”

She said quietly, “It will be much too late for us then.”

He kept searching for Cassandra, anyway.

There was something hypnotic in the changes within the sea. Now the currents were completely reversed, and the tide came in with long, rolling swells—inexorable, timeless, powerful beyond imagination. The currents seethed and boiled in their channels, swept in among the reeds like charging phalanxes of horsemen, crashed in combers over the dunes and mudbanks and changed the scene moment by moment into one of angry, spume-lashed wilderness.

The wind came up, too. Thunder rolled majestically from the cumulus clouds that towered high out of sight in the ocherous western sky. The wind was cold, with a harsh bite to it, as if to remind them of its origin in the Arctic regions beyond the rim of the North Sea.

When Durell next climbed to the top of the lighthouse ruin, he saw that the entire shape of the island had changed, submerging into the combers that had sprung up with the turn of the tide. The lagoon had broadened immensely, and the old canal route he had followed, marked by the bleached stumps of submerged trees, was all under water and no longer to be identified. He studied the high ridge that marked the western edge of the island and was struck again by its artificial precision. There must be a long line of coastal fortifications here, he thought, sunk into the ground; subterranean gun chambers, munitions storage rooms, barracks for the men who had stood guard here years and years ago. . . .

He saw that Trinka was smoking a cigarette when he climbed down again. The cigarette was dry, and she had a waterproof packet of matches on the sand beside her.

“May I borrow this?” he asked.

“Of course. But what do you want to do?”

“I think I should explore the Cassandra bunker. There won’t be another chance. And I had no light when I got you out of there.”

“I wish you wouldn’t do it. It is too dangerous, already. The tide has come up several feet.”

“There’s still more than an hour,” he said gently.

She looked at the sky. “It will grow dark earlier than usual. It is going to storm badly. I know this land. It will be a regular gale, bitterly cold and with extraordinary high tides. Look, the sea is all whitecaps now. No one will come this way.”

“Then we’ll just have to help ourselves, somehow.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll see.”

“I think we are going to die here,” the girl whispered. “And I don’t want it to happen. I don’t want it to grow dark. The way it was in the bunker, I kept thinking of a tomb, of how dark and wet and clammy it would be, to be dead. I know it is silly—one wouldn’t feel anything, would one? And yet I hate the thought of the dark and the wet—”

“It’s not going to happen,” he said flatly.

“But the storm destroys our last hope. Can’t you see?” Her voice was thin. He looked for hysteria in her eyes, but they were strangely calm. The wind made her shiver, and she hugged herself. “I thought there was so much time ahead of me. I was such a fool. I thought there was time for love and marriage and children and doing all the things one usually dreams of—traveling, meeting people, fashioning a career—”

“Are you in love with Jan?” Durell asked.