17
FABER CROSSED THE SARK BRIDGE AND ENTERED Scotland shortly after midday. He passed the Sark Toll Bar House, a low building with a signboard announcing that it was the first house in Scotland and a tablet above the door bearing some legend about marriages which he could not read. A quarter of a mile farther on he understood, when he entered the village of Gretna; he knew this was a place runaways came to get married.
The roads were still damp from the early rain, but the sun was drying them rapidly. Signposts and nameboards had been re-erected since the relaxation of invasion precautions, and Faber sped through a series of small lowland villages: Kirkpatrick, Kirtlebridge, Ecclefechan. The open countryside was pleasant, the green moor sparkling in the sunshine.
He had stopped for petrol in Carlisle. The pump attendant, a middle-aged woman in an oily apron, had not asked any awkward questions. Faber had filled the tank and the spare can fixed to the offside running board.
He was very pleased with the little two-seater. It would still do fifty miles an hour, despite its age. The four-cylinder, 1548 cc side-valve engine worked smoothly and tirelessly as he climbed and descended the Scottish hills. The leather-upholstered bench seat was comfortable. He squeezed the bulb horn to warn a straying sheep of his approach.
He went through the little market town of Lockerbie, crossed the River Annan by the picturesque Johnstone Bridge, and began the ascent to Beattock Summit. He found himself using the three-speed gearbox more and more.
He had decided not to take the most direct route to Aberdeen, via Edinburgh and the coast road. Much of Scotland’s east coast, either side of the Firth of Forth, was a restricted area. Visitors were prohibited from a ten-mile-wide strip of land. Of course, the authorities could not seriously police such a long border. Nevertheless, Faber was less likely to be stopped and questioned while he stayed outside the security zone.
He would have to enter it eventually—later rather than sooner—and he turned his mind to the story he would tell if he were interrogated. Private motoring for pleasure had virtually ceased in the last couple of years because of the ever-stricter petrol rationing, and people who had cars for essential journeys were liable to be prosecuted for going a few yards off their necessary route for personal reasons. Faber had read of a famous impresario jailed for using petrol supplied for agricultural purposes to take several actors from a theater to the Savoy hotel. Endless propaganda told people that a Lancaster bomber needed 2,000 gallons to get to the Ruhr. Nothing would please Faber more than to waste petrol that might otherwise be used to bomb his homeland in normal circumstances; but to be stopped now, with the information he had taped to his chest, and arrested for a rationing violation would be an unbearable irony.
It was difficult. Most traffic was military, but he had no military papers. He could not claim to be delivering essential supplies because he had nothing in the car to deliver. He frowned. Who traveled, these days? Sailors on leave, officials, rare vacationers, skilled workmen…. That was it. He would be an engineer, a specialist in some esoteric field like high-temperature gearbox oils, going to solve a manufacturing problem in a factory at Inverness. If he were asked which factory, he would say it was classified. (His fictitious destination had to be a long way from the real one so that he would never be questioned by someone who knew for certain there was no such factory.) He doubted whether consulting engineers ever wore overalls like the ones he had stolen from the elderly sisters—but anything was possible in wartime.
Having figured this out, he felt he was reasonably safe from any random spot checks. The danger of being stopped by someone who was looking specifically for Henry Faber, fugitive spy, was another problem. They had that picture—
They knew his face. His face!
—and before long they would have a description of the car in which he was traveling. He did not think they would set up roadblocks, as they had no way of guessing where he was headed; but he was sure that every policeman in the land would be on the lookout for the grey Morris Cowley Bullnose, registration number MLN 29.
If he were spotted in the open country, he would not be captured immediately; country policemen had bicycles, not cars. But a policeman would telephone his headquarters, and cars would be after Faber within minutes. If he saw a policeman, he decided, he would have to ditch this car, steal another, and divert from his planned route. However, in the sparsely populated Scottish lowlands there was a good chance he would get all the way to Aberdeen without passing a country policeman. The towns would be different. There the danger of being chased by a police car was very great. He would be unlikely to escape; his car was old and relatively slow, and the police were generally good drivers. His best chance would be to get out of the vehicle and hope to lose himself in crowds or back streets. He contemplated ditching the car and stealing another each time he was forced to enter a major town. The problem there was that he would be leaving a trail a mile wide for MI5 to follow. Perhaps the best solution was a compromise; he would drive into the towns but try to use only the back streets. He looked at his watch. He would reach Glasgow around dusk, and thereafter he would benefit from the darkness.
Well, it wasn’t very satisfactory, but the only way to be totally safe was not to be a spy.
As he topped the thousand-foot-high Beattock Summit, it began to rain. Faber stopped the car and got out to raise the canvas roof. The air was oppressively warm. Faber looked up. The sky had clouded over very quickly. Thunder and lightning were promised.
As he drove on he discovered some of the little car’s short-comings. Wind and rain leaked in through several tears in the canvas roof, and the small wiper sweeping the top half of the horizontally divided windshield provided only a tunnellike view of the road ahead. As the terrain became progressively more hilly the engine note began to sound faintly ragged. It was hardly surprising: the twenty-year-old car was being pushed hard.
The shower ended. The threatened storm had not arrived, but the sky remained dark and the atmosphere foreboding.
Faber passed through Crawford, nestling in green hills; Abington, a church and a post office on the west bank of the River Clyde; and Lesmahagow, on the edge of a heathery moor.
Half an hour later he reached the outskirts of Glasgow. As soon as he entered the built-up area he turned north off the main road, hoping to circumvent the city. He followed a succession of minor roads, crossing the major arteries into the city’s east side, until he reached Cumbernauld Road where he turned east again and sped out of the city.
It had been quicker than he expected. His luck was holding.
He was on the A80 road, passing factories, mines and farms. More Scots place-names drifted in and out of his consciousness: Millerston, Stepps, Muirhead, Mollinburn, Condorrat.
His luck ran out between Cumbernauld and Stirling.
He was accelerating along a straight stretch of road, slightly downhill, with open fields on either side. As the speedometer needle touched forty-five there was a sudden very loud noise from the engine; a heavy rattle, like the sound of a large chain pulling over a cog. He slowed to thirty, but the noise did not get perceptibly quieter. Clearly some large and important piece of the mechanism had failed. Faber listened carefully. It was either a cracked ball-bearing in the transmission or a hole in a big end. Certainly it was nothing so simple as a blocked carburetor or a dirty spark plug; nothing that could be repaired outside a workshop.
He pulled up and looked under the hood. There seemed to be a good deal of oil everywhere, but otherwise he could see no clues. He got back behind the wheel and drove off. There was a definite loss of power, but at least the car would still go.
Three miles farther on steam began to billow out of the radiator. Faber realized that the car would soon stop altogether. He looked for a place to dump it and found a mud track leading off the main road, presumably to a farm. One hundred yards from the road the track curved behind a blackberry bush. Faber parked the car close to the bush and killed the engine. The hiss of escaping steam gradually subsided. He got out and locked the door. He felt a twinge of regret for Emma and Jessie, who would find it very difficult to get their car repaired before the end of the war.
He walked back to the main road. From there, the car could not be seen. It might be a day or even two before the abandoned vehicle aroused suspicion. By then, Faber thought, I may be in Berlin.
He began to walk. Sooner or later he would hit a town where he could steal another vehicle. He was doing well enough: it was less than twenty-four hours since he had left London, and he still had a whole day before the U-boat arrived at the rendezvous at six P.M. tomorrow.
The sun had set long ago, and now darkness fell suddenly. Faber could hardly see. Fortunately there was a painted white line down the middle of the road—a safety innovation made necessary by the blackout—and he was just able to follow it. Because of the night silence he would hear an oncoming car in ample time.
In fact only one car passed him. He heard its deep-throated engine in the distance, and went off the road a few yards to lie out of sight until it had gone. It was a large car, a Vauxhall Ten, Faber guessed, and it was traveling at speed. He let it go by, then got up and resumed walking. Twenty minutes later he saw it again, parked by the roadside. He would have taken a detour across the field if he had noticed the car in time, but its lights were off and its engine silent and he almost bumped into it in the darkness.
Before he could consider what to do, a flashlight shone up toward him from under the car’s hood, and a voice said: “I say, is anybody there?”
Faber moved into the beam and asked, “Having trouble?”
“I’ll say.”
The light was pointed down, and as Faber moved closer he could see by the reflected light the moustached face of a middle-aged man in a double-breasted coat. In his other hand the man held, rather uncertainly, a large wrench, seeming unsure of what to do with it.
Faber looked at the engine. “What’s wrong?”
“Loss of power,” the man said, pronouncing it “Lorse of par.” “One moment she was going like a top, the next she started to hobble. I’m afraid I’m not much of a mechanic.” He shone the light at Faber again. “Are you?” he finished hopefully.
“Not exactly,” Faber said, “but I know a disconnected lead when I see one.” He took the flashlight from the man, reached down into the engine and plugged the stray lead back onto the cylinder head. “Try her now.”
The man got into the car and started the engine. “Perfect!” he shouted over the noise. “You’re a genius! Hop in.”
It crossed Faber’s mind that this might be an elaborate MI5 trap, but he dismissed the thought; in the unlikely event they knew where he was, why should they tread softly? They could as easily send twenty policemen and a couple of armored cars to pick him up.
He got in.
The driver pulled away and moved rapidly up through the gears until the car was traveling at a good speed. Faber made himself comfortable. The driver said, “By the way, I’m Richard Porter.”
Faber thought quickly of the identity card in his wallet. “James Baker.”
“How do you do. I must have passed you on the road back there—didn’t see you.”
Faber realized the man was apologizing for not picking him up—everyone picked up hitchhikers since the petrol shortage. “It’s okay,” Faber said. “I was probably off the road, behind a bush, answering a call of nature. I did hear a car.”
“Have you come far?” Porter offered a cigar.
“It’s good of you, but I don’t smoke,” Faber said. “Yes, I’ve come from London.”
“Hitchhiked all the way?”
“No. My car broke down in Edinburgh. Apparently it requires a spare part which isn’t in stock, so I had to leave it at the garage.”
“Hard luck. Well, I’m going to Aberdeen, so I can drop you anywhere along the way.”
This was indeed a piece of good fortune. He closed his eyes and pictured the map of Scotland. “That’s marvelous,” he said. “I’m going to Banff, so Aberdeen would be a great help. Except I was planning to take the high road…I didn’t get myself a pass. Is Aberdeen a restricted area?”
“Only the harbor,” Porter said. “Anyway, you needn’t worry about that sort of thing while you’re in my car—I’m a J.P. and a member of the Watch Committee. How’s that?”
Faber smiled in the darkness. “Thank you. Is that a full-time job? Being a magistrate, I mean?”
Porter put a match to his cigar and puffed smoke. “Not really. I’m semiretired, y’know. Used to be a solicitor, until they discovered my weak heart.”
“Ah.” Faber tried to put some sympathy into his voice.
“Hope you don’t mind the smoke?” Porter waved the fat cigar.
“Not a bit.”
“What takes you to Banff?”
“I’m an engineer. There’s a problem in a factory…actually, the job is sort of classified.”
Porter held up his hand. “Don’t say another word. I understand.”
There was a silence for a while. The car flashed through several towns. Porter obviously knew the road very well to drive so fast in the blackout. The big car gobbled up the miles. Its smooth progress was soporific. Faber smothered a yawn.
“Damn, you must be tired,” Porter said. “Silly of me. Don’t be too polite to have a nap.”
“Thank you,” said Faber. “I will.” He closed his eyes.
The motion of the car was like the rocking of a train, and Faber had his arrival nightmare again, only this time it was slightly different. Instead of dining on the train and talking politics with the fellow-passenger, he was obliged for some unknown reason to travel in the coal tender, sitting on his suitcase radio with his back against the hard iron side of the truck. When the train arrived at Waterloo, everyone—including the disembarking passengers—was carrying a little duplicated photograph of Faber in the running team; and they were all looking at each other and comparing the faces they saw with the face in the picture. At the ticket barrier the collector took his shoulder and said: “You’re the man in the photo, aren’t you?” Faber found himself speechless. All he could do was stare at the photograph and remember the way he had run to win that cup. God, he had run; he had peaked a shade too early, started his final burst a quarter of a mile sooner than he had planned, and for the last 500 meters he’d wanted to die—and now perhaps he would die, because of that photograph in the ticket collector’s hand…The collector was saying, “Wake up! Wake up!” and suddenly Faber was back in Richard Porter’s Vauxhall Ten, and it was Porter who was telling him to wake up.
His right hand was half way to his left sleeve, where the stiletto was sheathed, in the split-second before he remembered that as far as Porter was concerned James Baker was an innocent hitchhiker. His hand dropped, and he relaxed.
“You wake up like a soldier,” Porter said with amusement. “This is Aberdeen.”
Faber noted that “soldier” had been pronounced “soljuh,” and recalled that Porter was a magistrate and a member of the police authority. Faber looked at the man in the dull light of early day; Porter had a red face and a waxed moustache; his camel-colored overcoat looked expensive. He was wealthy and powerful in his town, Faber guessed. If he were to disappear he would be missed almost immediately. Faber decided not to kill him.
Faber said, “Good morning.”
He looked out of the window at the granite city. They were moving slowly along a main street with shops on either side. There were several workers about, all moving purposefully in the same direction—fishermen, Faber reckoned. It seemed a cold, windy place.
Porter said, “Would you like to have a shave and a bit of breakfast before you continue your journey? You’re welcome to come to my place.”
“You’re very kind—”
“Not at all. If it weren’t for you I should still be on the A80 at Stirling, waiting for a garage to open.”
“—but I won’t, thank you. I want to get on with the journey.”
Porter did not insist, and Faber suspected that he was relieved not to have his offer taken up. The man said, “In that case, I’ll drop you at George Street—that’s the start of the A96, and it’s a straight road to Banff.” A moment later he stopped the car at a corner. “Here you are.”
Faber opened the door. “Thanks for the lift.”
“A pleasure.” Porter offered a handshake. “Good luck!”
Faber got out, closed the door and the car pulled away. He had nothing to fear from Porter, he thought; the man would go home and sleep all day, and by the time he realized he had helped a fugitive it would be too late to do anything about it.
He watched the Vauxhall out of sight, then crossed the road and entered the promisingly named Market Street. Shortly thereafter he found himself at the docks and, following his nose, arrived at the fish market. He felt safely anonymous in the bustling, noisy, smelly market, where everyone was dressed in working clothes as he was. Wet fish and cheerful profanities flew through the air, and Faber found it hard to understand the clipped, guttural accents. At a stall he bought hot, strong tea in a chipped half-pint mug and a large bread roll with a slab of white cheese.
He sat on a barrel to eat and think. This evening would be the time to steal a boat. It was galling, to have to wait all day, and it left him with the problem of concealing himself for the next twelve hours; but he was too close now to take risks, and stealing a boat in broad daylight was much more risky than at the twilight end of the day.
He finished his breakfast and stood up. It would be a couple of hours before the rest of the city came to life. He would use the time to pick out a good hiding place.
He made a circuit of the docks and the tidal harbor. The security was perfunctory, and he noted several places where he could slip past the checkpoints. He worked his way around to the sandy beach and set off along the two-mile esplanade, at the far end of which a couple of pleasure yachts were moored at the mouth of the River Don. They would have suited Faber’s purpose very well, but they would have no fuel.
A thick ceiling of cloud hid the sunrise. The air became very warm and thundery again. A few determined vacationers emerged from seafront hotels and sat stubbornly on the beach, waiting for sunrise. Faber doubted they would get it today.
The beach might be the best place to hide. The police would check the railway station and the bus depot, but they would not mount a full-scale search of the city. They might check a few hotels and guest houses. It was unlikely they would approach everyone on the beach. He decided to spend the day in a deck chair.
He bought a newspaper from a stall and hired a chair. He removed his shirt and put it back on over his overalls. He left his jacket off.
He would see a policeman, if one came, well before he reached the spot where Faber sat. There would be plenty of time to leave the beach and vanish into the streets.
He began to read the paper. There was a new Allied offensive in Italy, the newspaper headlined. Faber was skeptical. Anzio had been a shambles. The paper was badly printed and there were no photographs. He read that the police were searching for one Henry Faber, who had murdered two people in London with a stiletto….
A woman in a bathing suit walked by, looking hard at Faber. His heart missed a beat. Then he realized she was being flirtatious. For an instant he was tempted to speak to her. It had been so long…. He shook himself mentally. Patience, patience. Tomorrow he would be home.
She was a small fishing boat, fifty or sixty feet long and broad in the beam, with an inboard motor. The aerial told of a powerful radio. Most of the deck was taken up with hatches to the small hold below. The cabin was aft, and only large enough to hold two men, standing, plus the dashboard and controls. The hull was clinker-built and newly caulked, and the paintwork looked fresh.
Two other boats in the harbor would have done as well, but Faber had stood on the quay and watched the crew of this one tie her up and refuel before they left for their homes.
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 simple message. “Come in, please,” several times; then left the set on Receive. He had little hope of his signal getting through.
He killed the engine to conserve fuel. He was going to have to ride out the storm—if he could—then find a way to repair or replace the aerial. He might need his fuel.
The boat slid terrifyingly sideways down the next big wave, and Faber realized he needed the engine power to ensure that the vessel met the waves head-on. He pulled the starter. Nothing happened. He tried several times, then gave up, cursing himself for switching it off.
The boat now rolled so far onto its side that Faber fell and cracked his head on the wheel. He lay dazed on the cabin floor, expecting the vessel to turn turtle at any minute. Another wave crashed on the cabin, shattering the glass in the windows. And suddenly Faber was under water. Certain the boat was sinking, he struggled to his feet and broke surface. All the windows were out, but the vessel was still floating. He kicked open the cabin door and the water gushed out. He clutched the wheel to prevent himself being washed into the sea.
Incredibly, the storm continued to get worse. One of Faber’s last coherent thoughts was that these waters probably did not see such a storm more than once in a century. Then all his concentration and will were focused on the problem of keeping hold of the wheel. He should have tied himself to it, but now he did not dare to let go long enough to find a piece of rope. He lost all sense of up and down as the boat pitched and rolled on waves like cliffs. Gale-force winds and thousands of gallons of water strained to pull him from his place. His feet slipped continually on the wet floor and walls, and the muscles of his arms burned with pain. He sucked air when he found his head above water, but otherwise held his breath. Several times he came close to blacking out, and only vaguely realized that the flat roof of the cabin had disappeared.
He got brief, nightmarish glimpses of the sea whenever the lightning flashed. He was always surprised to see where the wave was: ahead, below, rearing up beside him or completely out of sight. He also discovered with a shock that he could not feel his hands, and looked down to see that they were still locked to the wheel, frozen in a grip like rigor mortis. There was a continuous roar in his ears, the wind indistinguishable from the thunder and the sea.
The power of intelligent thought slipped slowly away from him. In something that was less than a hallucination but more than a daydream, he saw the girl who had stared at him earlier on the beach. She walked endlessly toward him over the bucking deck of the fishing boat, her swimsuit clinging to her body, always getting closer but never reaching him. He knew that, when she came within touching distance, he would take his dead hands from the wheel and reach for her, but he kept saying “Not yet, not yet,” as she walked and smiled and swayed her hips. He was tempted to leave the wheel and close the gap himself but something in the back of his mind told him that if he moved he would never reach her, so he waited and watched and smiled back at her from time to time, and even when he closed his eyes he could see her still.
He was slipping in and out of consciousness now. His mind would drift away, the sea and the boat disappearing first, then the girl fading, until he would jerk awake to find that, incredibly, he was still standing, still holding the wheel, still alive; then for a while he would will himself to stay conscious, but eventually exhaustion would take over again.
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 fucking 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.