Canal Dreams

Hisako waved the readied flare. 'Uncle Saaam!

One of the rowers reached back, started to stand, bringing his gun up; she heard shouting as she ducked, grabbing the flare pistol as it fell from her armpit, holding the parachute flare in the other hand. She peeked round the life-raft cluster. The Gemini was rocking, one of the men in the stern had stood up; he was grappling with the soldier holding the gun. She put the flare pistol on the deck, stood, stuck her finger through the ring-pull. The soldiers were shouting. She pointed the flare into the sky and pulled the ring.

A moment's hesitation; enough, in cartoon-land, for her to look puzzled, turn the flare round and stare into the business end of the tube.

She waited.

The canister leapt back against her hands; detonating. Echoes rang off the metal walls behind her. The flare rocketed into the misty blue sky, spiralling and arching with a firework hiss.

She ducked, but still looked.

The men in the Gemini were in tableau; stood and sitting, clean and oil-soaked, all four staring up as the flare rose above and beyond them, rasping into the air. She threw the spent, smoking container away; rattling on the deck.

The rocket slowed, wavered. It had just started to drop when it puffed, sent a tiny little white cloud to the top of its arc, and suddenly blazed; incandescently brilliant and swinging like a pendulum beneath a miniature parachute.

Screams, when they realised.

She dropped to the deck, looked over the little metal flange beneath the deck rails.

One of the soldiers started rowing desperately, yelling at the others. The one holding the gun shook the man from the stern off, leaving him teetering. The gun fired. She spread herself on the deck, heard shouting and screaming through the percussive clatter of the machine-gun. In a few seconds, the superstructure above her sang to the noise of the bullets hitting. The deck rattled to one side; a window in the bridge shattered. The firing stopped. She popped up for a look. Two rowing now, though the Gemini was still going in a circle. One soldier was stabbing at the outboard, trying to start it, the fourth… the fourth was overboard, in the lake, astern and to the side of the inflatable; a brown shape screaming and thrashing inside the thick brown mass of oil. The parachute flare dropped gently, spiralling slowly down towards the oil, a white hole in the sky.

The soldier at the stern stood up and screamed at the outboard, slapping at it. He crouched, started tugging at the back-up toggle which should start it even if the electric starter didn't. Pulled and pulled. The man in the lake was only a couple of metres behind the black Gemini, reaching for it, trying to swim through the oily sludge. The other two were rowing mightily, glancing behind them into the sky as they did so, shouting incoherently. The flare swung, describing lazy bright circles in the air as it fell.

Then one of the rowers shouted something while the man at the outboard tugged and pulled at the engine's lanyard — and took up a gun. He stood and fired at her; she ducked again, flattening, heard and felt shots slap and burst into the life-raft casings, sending curved white shards of plastic raining about her, bouncing over the deck, pattering on to her back like heavy snowflakes, making her flinch despite the relative weakness of each impact.

The firing went on, changing in tone, and the sounds around her ceased. She risked another look.

The man was firing at the flare.

The other oarsman tried to stop him, as the man at the outboard pulled again, snapped the lanyard and fell over backwards into the other two and the man in the lake splashed heavily towards the stationary inflatable.

The three men fell in a heap into the bows, gun still firing, then cutting off.

The flare had been hit.

The holed parachute sank through the air, ripped and fluttering. The white blaze of the magnesium charge plummeted to the brown surface of the lake.

They stopped, again. Frozen by the impending heat, like a photograph; three crumpled in the boat, in the act of scrabbling back up again; the one in the oil on the water like a dirty brown sculpture, one arm raised. All looking at the flare. The flare sank, diving; met the oil and disappeared. The tattered remnants of the parachute flopped into the greasy surface as the oil ignited.

She stood and watched.

The fire spread at a fast walk, blossoming outwards from the point of its birth in an ever-widening circle like a slow ripple on that thick brown tide. The flames were yellow and orange and red, the smoke dense and black.

One soldier went back to the outboard, stabbing at it again. The man in the lake did what looked like butterfly strokes towards the stern of the boat. One just looked at the spreading field of flame, the fourth one took up an oar again, screamed at the man still standing and looking, and with one foot kicked guns and missile launchers out of the bottom of the Gemini, sending them bouncing over the side, sliding into the brown surface without a splash.

She ran a hand through her hair, thinking how greasy it had become.

The boiling mass of yellow rolling flame expanded, smoke cutting off the view of the nearest island. The thick black billows rolled as high as the tanker's bridge, then its masts. The man in the lake reached, found one conical end of the inflatable's double stern; slipped off.

They were probably still yelling and shouting, but the noise of the blaze was starting to take over; roaring. Gradually, gradually increasing in volume.

The smoke was way above.

She took up the flare pistol, leant over the side, and fired directly down, the pistol jumping in her hand.

The flare burst upon the water to the stern of the canted pontoon, bursting fire around the impact point.

The smoke was starting to blank out the horizon, while the fire ate up the distance between it and the black Gemini. The man in the water reached between the stern hulls of the craft, grabbing at the outboard engine just as it fired. He was flicked round, oil splashing brown metres into the air; if he made a noise, she didn't hear it.

The outboard died; the man in the water floated broken behind the boat while the soldier at the Gemini's stern stabbed again at the engine casing and the other two rowed, trying to angle the boat away from the flames. But the fire was sweeping quickly round and past them, closing in on their bows, and the secondary wave-front was heading out towards the Gemini from the ship itself, sending billows of acrid, stinging black smoke up in front of her, blanking out the view.

She walked towards the stern of the lifeboat deck, to see.

When the fire was almost on them, one of the rowers took a pistol from his belt and put it in his mouth; his head jerked back and he flopped over the bows of the inflatable just as the flames got there.

The smoke swam up in front of her, hiding them. It was hot and windy now, even up where she was, and fire was almost all she could see.

She went back along the deck, ducking through the black clouds of smoke to the bridge.

Philippe's cabin; nothing.

The store where they usually left the gear; nothing.

Sweating, ru

Am I praying? she thought. No, I'm not, she decided.

The workshop.

There.

She hefted the gear. Full tank.

By the time she got out on to the starboard deck, the fire was closing round under the stern of Le Cercle, swinging in like a bright wave of cavalry wheeling for the final attack. She buckled in, checked her valves and gauges.

Glanced down. It was a long drop.

She looked up at what there was of the still unsullied sky, waited for her life to pass before her and decided that could wait, then climbed up and over the rail.