Rocky Island
Authors: Jim Newell
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Action & Adventure, #Thriller
Rocky Island
By Jim Newell
Copyright 2012 by Jim Newell
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
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Also by Jim Newell and Untreed Reads Publishing
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Rocky Island
By Jim Newell
PROLOGUE
The rusty old freighter plowed slowly through the North Atlantic, making about five knots in the relatively calm seas of the early morning. The ship, built some fifty years previously and showing her age, at the moment was flying no flag at all. When they did raise the flag before entering harbor, the flag would be a white five-pointed star and eleven bars, six red, five white of Liberia. Only about six thousand gross tons, the typical small freighter of half a century before, was spending her final days plying the Atlantic between North and South America, carrying mixed freight made up of whatever its agent could find for a load. Also typical was the crew: the Captain and Mates were Greek, the engineer and most of the engine-room crew were Chinese, and the deck and bridge crew were Filipino. Dozens of such ships with similar crews could be spotted on the Atlantic within a couple of hundred miles of shore, some travelling North, some South, some tied up in ports along the coast discharging cargo or waiting for new cargo to take to the next port. Sometimes the crews had to wait for their pay as well. Sometimes, they never received their pay at all and the ship would be seized and sold to some other shipping company who would hire the crew back on and send it off to continue the process.
This particular ship bearing the glamorous name
Helen of Troy
had a special section of cargo, which it would discharge long before reaching its Montreal destination. The Captain stood on the bridge scanning the horizon, looking for something. He was actually looking for two somethings: the Canadian Coast Guard and the fishing boats with which he was to rendezvous. There would be no rendezvous if a Canadian Coast Guard cutter or an Air Force patrol plane were within sight.
At last he saw one of the somethings he was looking for and rang the engine room to slow the engines to idle. The ship rolled in the small chop of the sea and waited for the three fishing boats as they drew closer. While they waited for the distance to close, the crew broke out the loading boom from its lashings and hauled up the first of three small containers. When the first fishing boat drew alongside, the crate was lowered to the craft, which then made haste to leave, and a second pulled alongside, repeating the process. When all three containers had been off-loaded, the boom was replaced, the hatch cover dragged back to its location and the Captain rang the engine room for normal speed.
The next destination for the
Helen of Troy
was south of Newfoundland where the off-loading was repeated; only this time the recipients of the crates were much larger fishing boats and the crates were appropriately larger also. Three days later, the
Helen of Troy
arrived in Montreal and off-loaded its cargo of Venezuelan food-stuffs and manufactured goods.
The ship’s agent came on board and spent an hour with the Captain, handing over money, several hundred thousand United States dollars which went into the specially built safe in the skipper’s cabin, and giving him orders for the return trip back to the Caribbean. He would not pick up cargo in Montreal, but would proceed to Halifax for a cargo already waiting there.
CHAPTER ONE
Seagulls’ mournful cries and the continuous quiet slapping of the waves against the shore were the only early October morning sounds penetrating the consciousness of Toby French as he made his daily circuit of the island. The seagulls he ignored. The birds were a constant presence, a continual ritual of calling to each other as they wheeled above the rocks and searched for food. The waves were a different matter.
Toby sensed that the slow slap, slap, slap of the water against the shore was an indication of a storm brewing. The ocean was calm and the waves tiny when they hit the stony shelving of the beach. He looked up at the milky sky to the west and thought to himself, “Stormy weather less than twenty-four hours away.”
Not that this knowledge disturbed him unduly. Storms in this area of Nova Scotia were not uncommon. Rocky Island, about twelve square miles of rocks with a shallow dirt covering, scrubby gnarled trees and huge granite boulders that gave the island its name, rose out of the Atlantic Ocean fifteen miles off the South Shore of the province. He knew that the land was high enough on the small acreage of the island that twenty-foot high waves just smashed against the rocks and did no damage to the few buildings that made up the lighthouse keeper’s domain.
To the tourist, the South Shore of Nova Scotia is made up of beautiful beaches, bed and breakfasts and roads that curve around the coast line. To the geographer, the South Shore is small coves and harbors, many small islands—365 of them in Mahone Bay alone. Most of the small harbor are home to small fishing boats—40 to 80 feet long or thereabouts, most of them called Cape Island boats because they were first built there and continue to be built in shipyards at Cape Sable Island less than a mile off the coast of Shelburne County and connected to the mainland by a two-lane causeway. The sturdy fishing boats, called longliners, are distinctive in their shape and their ability to cope with rough seas.
Longlining, as the name implies, involves the use of a long fishing line with a series of baited hooks spread along the ocean floor. At one time retrieved manually, this system has now become mechanized and uses automatic hauling, and baiting machines. These improvements have made longlining an increasingly popular form of fishing. Fishermen are able to fish with more gear, and in many other ways can compete with other forms of fishing. They can be more selective, landing a higher quality catch, and require less fuel for the operation. Longlining is used primarily to catch groundfish such as cod, hake, haddock, and halibut.
Larger harbor such as Lunenburg and Yarmouth are home to deep sea fishing boats, large craft that stay out on the Grand Banks, Brown’s Bank and other areas where they drag or cast deep nets for the fish or for scallops along the bottom of the ocean. In recent years the fleet has joined the Newfoundland fishermen in crab fishing in northern waters off Labrador. Small craft or large ones, the Nova Scotia fishermen’s catch is usually sold to fish processing plants at Lunenburg, Lockeport, Clark’s Harbor or Yarmouth.
Lobster season in the winter is usually the busiest and most dangerous. The Cape Island boats go out very early in the morning piled high with lobster traps which are dropped into the water, each marked by a buoy bearing the name of the fisherman who owns the traps. Next day the traps are collected, the catch dumped into the boat, the traps reloaded and the craft returns to shore to sell its cargo of the much sought after crustaceans.
The small boats are equipped with radar and GPS navigation systems, but they still rely to greater or lesser extent on lighthouses at particular dangerous locations. There are few large freighters operating close to shore until they turn to enter Halifax harbor, the largest in the Atlantic provinces of Canada, but occasionally they stray off course because of storms or fog and lighthouses are a valuable source of help to them as well. Still, the number of lighthouses, operated by the Canadian Department of Transport, has been vastly decreasing in recent years. The lighthouse at Rocky Island was one that has survived because of the location of the island, far enough off shore to make it essential for the safety of the ships, large or small.
The major building in the complex was of course the five-story lighthouse, a shining white tower with a glass-walled top floor where the light made the slow and steady three-hundred and sixty degree turns all night every night as well as during periods of low visibility during daytime. This lighthouse was only twenty years old, a replacement for the hundred year-old structure which has stood in close proximity to the site of the new one until the Department of Transport finally came to the conclusion that a replacement was needed. The lighthouse stood on the highest point of the island, about fifty feet above sea level where the light could be seen for up to twenty nautical miles from all points of the compass. At least in clear weather, the light could be seen that far, but it was in the foggy and stormy weather that it was most needed.
The other buildings included a ten year-old brick bungalow, also a replacement. The previous light-keeper’s home had been an old wooden house which had become a constant thorn in the side of the Department personnel who had to look after the calls for repairs and upkeep. The newer house was down hill slightly, about a hundred yards from the lighthouse, about half a mile from the shore. Nearer to the lighthouse stood a metal storage shed, painted white like the lighthouse, and a slightly larger brick building housing the turbine that ran the generator which produced the electricity needed to keep the light burning and the home supplied with power for heat and general living comfort.
In early years, the old lighthouse, like its counterparts along the shore relied on kerosene to power the light that shone out over the water, and the fog horn was hand-operated by the keeper. In modern times, with a new building, electricity came from three separate sources. A commercially produced windmill located about a hundred yards from the lighthouse supplied regular power for the lighthouse by a turbine though a generator; solar panels built into the roof of the house supplied power for that building. There was also a large diesel engine located in the generator building for emergency use. The diesel ran every Thursday for an hour to make sure that it was ready in case it was needed. Before an intense storm, Toby threw the gears of the windmill into neutral so the sails could free wheel without damage from the high winds and used the diesel-powered unit to run the light until the winds calmed down. The government had invested a pile of money in the Rocky Island complex.
As Toby continued his daily walk around the five-mile circumference of the island doing a check for anything that might have washed up on the shore, his mind flashed back over the past few years of his life. He had been lighthouse keeper for almost five years, since the retirement of his predecessor. He had grown up along the South Shore on Nova Scotia in Barrington Township and after high school had attended the Community College in Shelburne where he received his certificate in diesel mechanics and a second certificate in commercial electricity. By the time he was twenty-five, he knew that it was past time that he found a job. His father had supported him long enough and he was grateful for that support. An advertisement in the local newspaper, the Shelburne
Coastguard
, seeking a lighthouse keeper for Rocky Island intrigued him.
Toby was not by nature a social creature; not that he didn’t like people, but he was was content with his own company. He was a reader, a nature lover, and a good technician and handyman. He answered the advertisement without consulting his father, his only living relative. When he had travelled to Yarmouth for two interviews and was offered the placement, he took the job.
His father was pleased with his son’s choice. The older French, a widower for several years, was much the same in character as his son. He was a long-time fisherman accustomed to spending many hours sometimes alone on his boat, working in the on-shore fishery, and he wished his son well. Toby had promised to repay the money his father had put into his education, and though he initially refused the offer of the money, French senior did eventually accept the sums which were deposited to his bank account every month as a deduction from Toby’s paycheque.