Driftwood (19 page)

Victor yelled his name over the wind, calling him back from a chilly distraction. “We should be right on top of them. Anything?”

“Not a bloody thing.” Not looking up from the screen, Tom felt Victor lock the helm and come to stand beside him. Without her forward momentum, the boat was a cork on the waves. Slap after drenching, blinding slap of salt water cracked against her hull, exploding spray into his face and across the instrumentation. “Look, Vic,” he said hoarsely, dragging a cloth across the panel for the fiftieth time. “Nothing. Christ, they must have gone under.”

Victor didn't reply. He reached across Tom, steadying both of them with his grip on the rail, shielding him from some of the gale's ferocity while Tom reset the unit and began another sweep. “No, wait. There. Look!”

“Okay, yes. That size, though, could be a porpoise or a fish school.”

Tom understood. Victor, the good soldier, would offer neither empty words of comfort nor of hope, not until they were sure. He swung away from the radar, and a moment later Tom heard the engines snarl as he turned her in the direction of the screen's pale ghost.

The rigid-inflatable life raft, low in the water from the weight of her crew. The lights of the
Shellshock
picked out her RNAS colours and insignia, a match for her mother-ship chopper, as she became more than an echo on the scanner, and Victor steered close, bringing her round in a sweeping arc to protect her from the swell.

Tom remained at his station. The navigator's job was done, he supposed. In a moment, he would get up and help Vic throw out a cable, make sure it was caught, and haul the raft, with its waving, gesticulating cargo of lives, towards the relative safety of the larger craft. He would overcome the aching lassitude that had slowed his heartbeat, weighted his limbs with cold lead. He could not see Flynn, in the strobing, shifting light. The faces of the rescued men were sombre, even while they yelled their greetings and thanks across the diminishing gap. Tom knew the look, from a hundred returned mission-flights into Bastion—they had lost someone.

The sight of Victor fighting to unhitch the heavy tow-cable brought him round. Mechanically he shoved himself upright, the pain he had forgotten boiling up from his legs and broken ribs. Two of the ASaC crew, soaked and shivering in their flight suits, were reaching out, the others moving automatically to balance the raft's far side. Tom went to join Vic, and between them they rolled out enough of the wire that the survivors could grab it, locking it tight to the RIB's rail. There was more to be done. Tom took it on himself, a last buffer between now and the moment when he would have to speak, to ask. Hitching the two boats together on one wire would soon damage both as the waves slammed them together, and he struggled against the
Shellshock's
pitch to secure the stern too, lashing both craft to one movement on the swell.

“Tom Penrose? Is that you?”

He jerked his head up. A third ASaC man had made his way to the back of the raft and was helping him, pulling the tow through his numb hands. Tom's cognitive process came slowly, but at last he recognised him—Charlie Mitchell, who regularly brought one or another of his increasing brood of kids to the surgery. He opened his mouth to answer him, but the cold seemed to have entered his throat and lungs, and he could only nod. “What are you doing out here, Doc? Is that Vic Travers? God… What's happened to the RNLI lads?”

Tom tried to put the question together with his reason for asking it, but Victor came to his rescue. “We're not the lifeboat, mate. A poor substitute, but at least we've got you. Or most of you, anyway. Where's…”

“Flynn,” Tom broke in, finding his voice at last. He could not let Vic ask it. “Flynn Summers. Is he—?”

“They're gone. Him and Rob Tremaine. Dunno what the hell's been going on all night. We… Christ almighty!”

Tom reached to grab him. He held him fast as a huge wave smashed across both boats. It swamped the smaller life raft, knocking one of the surviving crewmen casually overboard. Tom waited till the water's fury was spent, and he had seen the others begin to haul their comrade back to safety, then he rasped, “Victor, help me get them on board here. Quick.”

The transfer took less than a minute. Tom saw blood, black in the
Shellshock's
lights, and knelt instinctively beside the rescued crewman, beginning to examine his head wound. He was on autopilot. Behind him he could hear Charlie Mitchell continuing his story, in a shout over the wind, but he could not care. “We don't even know what Flynn was doing flying her. He hasn't logged a flight hour in two years. But our skipper—Tremaine—said there was nobody else. And he flew like a fucking angel, give him that. Got us out here so fast…”

“You were after the gun runners?” That was Victor, pulling poor shocked Mitchell back on track. Still Tom could not listen. He had nothing to treat this head wound with, but digging in one pocket, found a handkerchief—clean, of course, and scrupulously folded—and shook it out.

“No such thing as covert ops in bloody Cornwall, is there?” Briggs laughed unsteadily. “Yeah. Massive shipment. We were right above the coordinates, and suddenly Flynn tells us to bail. That he's dropping the raft for us, and not to ask questions. I tried to see through into the cockpit, and…it was chaos. Rob Tremaine was out of his seat. I thought he had a gun in his hand, for God's sake. I shouted through to him, to try to check the bail-out order, but it was like he didn't hear. So I…I took my men, like Flynn had told me, and we bailed. I was last out. Christ. Last second before we jumped, I think I heard a shot.”

Tom turned around. He said to his patient, “Hold that in place until it stops bleeding.” He lurched to his feet and turned to face Mitchell.
A shot.
His world was darkening, closing to a tight black tunnel around Briggs's last word. “Charlie. What happened to the helicopter?”

“She went down. I didn't see—too busy swimming for the boat—but Jim said she didn't just drop. Flynn can't have bailed. Someone took her into the water like a real pro.”

“She didn't crash?”

“No. But there's no way she could've stayed afloat. And even if Flynn and Rob got out—”

Screw Rob.
Tom was grateful for the seizure in his throat that kept that thought silent from Tremaine's ASaC crew. He swung round to find Victor—who was one step ahead of him, already beginning to unlash the RIB from the lifeboat. “You lads keep this,” Victor yelled over his shoulder. “We'll take the raft. Start making for shore before the storm gets any worse. You can radio for help, but it's gonna be a while getting to you.”

“What?” Mitchell took a step towards Victor, but Tom intercepted him, putting him quietly out of his path to the other cable. “We're not leaving you.”

“We'll be okay. She's manoeuvrable, and she's got a good outboard. This one's more likely to stay afloat with the six of you aboard.” Victor put out a hand, and Tom grabbed it, making what he knew was a poor leap for the raft and landing awkwardly, dragging himself immediately upright. “Get home!” Vic shouted, casting off. “Tell Hawke Lake we're looking for your pilots. Go on!”

The RIB was matchwood on the swell, more fragile even than the lifeboat, but Tom was almost past feeling her lurches and leaps. He was almost past feeling. He knew that Victor was making the best of a bad job at the rudder, revving stolidly from crest to crest. He knew that they were systematically quartering the area in which the chopper must have gone down. He was clinging to the life raft's searchlight rack, directing its solitary beam into the night with numb hands. Beyond the borders of these thoughts, there was nothing.
Flynn
, his mind said to him sporadically, each time bringing a flash of memory. A presence at his bedside in the hospital. Hitting the turf by the Lanyon road, the air leaving his lungs at the impact of another body on his. Of flesh that would immolate itself to shield him.

Flynn, in the rain, holding him out of the wreckage as his petrol tank caught fire. “Flynn,” he said aloud, unable to tell if the bitter salt taste in his mouth was seawater or tears. Once more, like a prayer, swiping his eyes clear with his sleeve. “Flynn…”

Another flash—this one in the world with him, here and now. Orange on indigo black—one glimpse, in a trough between two heaving waves. For a nightmare second Tom could not get air into his lungs to yell to Victor, then it came, abrading, scalding. “Vic! Vic, come about!” Vic turned to him, face an expectant blank, waiting for a direction, some degrees or an
o'clock
, but Tom's brain would not supply him with such detail and he could only swing the searchlight round, throwing out its beam in silent gesture. “There!”

A buoy, or a fragment of wreckage. These possibilities rose up, frail shields, across the fire of hope. There was a third one too. Tom swore inwardly, to a god he had lost under the Afghan sun and rediscovered in the wreck of a Land Rover six days before, that he would not leave Rob Tremaine to drown. More specifically, that he would not reach out, cut the cords of his lifejacket, put a hand to the top of his head and shove him under to make sure. That he would not allow Vic, who had fewer scruples and had never taken a
do no harm
oath, to do it for him. The RIB clambered, motor roaring, to the top of the next wave, and there it was again. No, not wreckage. A human shape.
Flynn
.

He was blue to the lips, his face serene. The seawater cradled him. Tom could not know when he had stopped fighting it—saw, in a kind of streaking slow-motion as he reached out with Vic over the side of the raft, that his watch had stopped, blurred with water and steam. But it had been half an hour when they had found the ASaC crew. Flynn had been in the water too long.

Too long for life to be flickering still behind his peaceful mask. Everything Tom knew—about the sea, about human biology—screamed out against it, and he thought, hauling the poor lost deadweight into the lee of the raft, that he understood. Accepted. His own heart was drowned inside him and it could not make a difference. His fists closed alongside Victor's in Flynn's soaked flight suit. Together they dragged him far enough out of the water for Tom to get hold of his belt. The sea, remorseless, even now not sated with what it had taken, heaped itself up more and broke across them all, nearly sending the RIB under. Tom sobbed, choking, heaving Flynn halfway on board over the gunwale tube, and Flynn beneath his hands gave one enormous twitch and began to fight like a wildcat.

He was trying to finish a conflict whose beginnings Tom struggled to imagine, as he and Victor pulled him in and pinned him down on the life raft's soaking deck. He was too waterlogged to get out more than a faint, rasped
Rob
, but the punch he threw was well aimed and sincere. Tom caught his fist. “Flynn. Flynn, love, it's me.”

“Rob…
Bastard
, let me
go
…”

“Hush. Easy.” Tom heard his own voice, the shudder of laughter in it, the raw edge of tears. “Flynn, for God's sake, it's Tom.”

Flynn fought out of his grasp, evading Victor's too, and bolted upright. The move threw him into Tom's arms. Tom seized him tight, ignoring the convulsion that went through him. He wrapped one hand around the back of his skull. His hair was tangled and rimed with salt.

“It's Tom,” he repeated, in a whisper against his ear, sealing the promise with a rough, clumsy kiss, rocking him. “I found you. Flynn, sweetheart. I found you. It's me.”

Flynn went still. He stopped trying to tear himself out of Tom's embrace. Tom felt his two fists, which had been balled against his shoulders, open suddenly up. Felt against his neck, indescribably, the astonished waking gape of Flynn's mouth. The hands moved—reading him quickly like Braille, sweeping his shoulders, his hair. “Tom.”

“Yes. You're okay.”

“No. I must've died,” Flynn stated calmly. Tom fought laughter. He sounded so sure of himself, and unfazed, as if death, even his own, was just another aspect of rescue work to be dealt with. “That, or I've got the cold-crazies, because…”

“I'm sure you do have those.” The raft lurched, taking on another rush of water. Peripherally Tom saw Victor push upright and go aft. A moment later the outboard snarled, pushing them forward against the swell. He kissed the side of Flynn's brow. “But you're alive. Going home.”

“No. Because you just see what you want.” He paused, gasping, and Tom listened in concern to the half-drowned rattle in his chest. He struggled back a little, far enough to look into Tom's face, his eyes' sea-green burning eerily. “You just hear and you see what you want. Tom's in hospital. Findlay said he'd be all right, or I'd never have left him.” He frowned, putting up an unsteady hand to brush Tom's face. “I'd never have left you. Oh, Christ.
Tom
.”

“That's right,” Tom said in relief, as the hypothermic body he held shuddered back to reality, at the same time registering at last how much water it had swallowed and inhaled. Flynn sucked a noisy breath and began to cough. “That's right, come here. Sit forward.” Tom pulled him up onto his hands and knees, held him tight against the boat's movement and his own expulsive spasms. When he could spare a hand, he tore off his jacket. It was soaked, next to useless, but on top of Flynn's flight suit would give him at least one layer of protection against the remorseless, leaching wind. He wrapped it round his shoulders, and saw that Victor was shrugging out of his oilskin. “Ta, Vic.” He caught it as Victor threw it, and bundled that around Flynn too. “Okay, sunbeam. You done there? Your lungs clear?”

Flynn moaned. “Ought to be,” he managed, on a faint wry rasp between fits of coughing and retching. “Be okay, Tom. Core temp's still over ninety. Organs are functional.”

“Oh, an expert patient. I love those. Come on.” He hauled him upright, aware of his own pain now only as background noise, a distant music he didn't need to hear. “Your bloody organs won't function much longer if they stay out here. Victor! You okay there?”