by Alan Silltoe
Appleyard tried, and the plane slid out of his sights. I sent another burst. He fell away early, not mad enough to die.
‘Hold your fire,’ said Nash. ‘I’ll get the gold-lover.’
He came from the north, a quarter turn to put his gunner in line. ‘I see him,’ said Appleyard. ‘And would you believe it? He’s blue-eyed, blond and wearing a yellow scarf.’
‘Don’t care if he’s in his underpants,’ said Nash. Bullets ripped the fuselage. They were throwing pebbles. I didn’t know where they struck, but hoped the radio wasn’t hit. I tasted ashy rage at the thought. Blowing bubbles, said Nash. Spite will get you nowhere. As the plane wheeled the length of the flying boat he fired from side-on. The plane continued south.
‘Going home with a cat up his arse,’ Nash mumbled.
Bennett kept his unflinching course. ‘Call the roll.’
‘OK, Skipper. You all right?’
‘Nose shipped a few.’
‘Sparks?’
‘Sir!’
‘Salute when you speak to me!’
‘Hi-di-hi!’
‘Ho-di-ho!’
There was a pause while levity sank away.
‘Appleyard?’
Nash sounded weary: ‘After action I’m knackered. Like an orgy – done in, for ever and ever, though it’s nothing a good kip or a fried egg won’t cure. Have a dekko, Sparks, there’s a good lad.’
I knocked on all protuberances. The plane roared steadily, gaining height, but only by the mile. Take ten years before we need oxygen, but I felt light-headed at the thought that we had seen the last of the Nemesis and its bluebottle-seaplanes. Well, don’t be so sure. Life’s full of nasty surprises. They must have been discouraged, anyhow, by one down and the other damaged. I wanted to return to my wireless in case I learned something new.
Appleyard’s turret was spattered with holes, and a mess of blood poured from his stomach. I was fixed by a paralysis that would enable me to remember, and then tell about it. He began screaming that he didn’t want to die, and because I couldn’t save him, I willed him to.
Nash opened a field dressing. To staunch the flow, he said, would be like trying to patch a burst dam with a postage stamp. Which might be something you can do in Holland, he added, his face flour-white, the lines deeply accentuated, but not here.
18
The reek of petrol and oil seemed to put up the temperature. Haggard from turning the nose-gunner’s body into the sea, Nash said that one of the tanks might have sprung a leak. That last raking did damage. It was certain, however, that Bennett’s high octane optimism hadn’t yet started to spill out. Perhaps it was better so, because in the end only his press-on-regardless spirit might save us.
I clung to the refuge of my wireless station. The magic-eye would be the last glowing item before we went into the dark. Unless I could contract to homunculus proportions, assume salamander-like properties, take on the role of a phoenix and get between the valves of the transmitter, it would be a dark I would never come out of. As long as I didn’t think of it I was not afraid, yet I resented being unable to dwell on matters for that reason.
Everything seemed so certain that I felt as if I were on a conveyor belt, but such thoughts insisted on being cold shouldered by my fingers flicking the various switches in spite of myself and to no real purpose, though my ears were listening for any tinkle of hope. The seaplanes must have radioed their base ship, for the wireless operator on board sent a message which he knew I must receive. ‘TELL CAPTAIN PROCEEDS SHARED BETWEEN YOUR FORCE AND WE STOP SAFE CONDUCT GUARANTEED TO YOUR GALLANT CREW STOP TERMS HONOURABLY KEPT IF YOU RETURN.’
‘Gee,’ said Nash, ‘let’s throw the oboe out of the window and contact the consul!’
I passed the half-full bottle of whisky. ‘Calm down. Have a drink.’
He imitated Tommy Handley’s side-kick to perfection. ‘Don’t mind if I do!’
‘Sing a song of sixpence,’ Bennett chimed in, ‘and let’s live forever.’ Knowing our kite to be damaged, the Nemesis was steaming north in the hope of being close when we came down. Our lives in danger, we would send an SOS with the ditching position conveniently attached. If the Aldebaran sank and the gold with it, and we were picked up by them from our dinghy, we would be killed. That much was implicit in their telegram. Bennett read the signal and said nothing, his mood like a yo-yo.
On my way to the set I looked at the port inner. There was a haze around the exhaust which is sometimes seen in hot weather. The shimmer attracted me when I hadn’t expected to see anything at all. I was wary of pointing it out to Bennett. To tell him he should stop hoping was not worth the risk of a bullet. His face showed no threat, but his fixed pose daunted me. By his stillness he seemed to be in touch with more than either I or Nash could imagine. It was a mistake to think so. He wasn’t. If he didn’t wish for information he would have to be force-fed. But I was wrong. As a pilot he had more senses than a cat in a snake pit. ‘Sparks, get down to the panel and read me the oil temperature gauges, and the oil pressure gauges. Also the fuel contents gauges while you’re about it. Routine stuff.’
We were near the woolly corrugations at five thousand feet, but no longer climbing. Because none of us should lack information on our plight, I copied the readings for Nash as well.
Bennett waved me away. ‘Read them again in ten minutes.’
The same gunmetal glaze from the starboard inner tallied with the figures. Oil pressure was low in both engines. The angle between our longitudinal heading and the ceiling of cloud increased. Divergence was subtle, but we were going down. Nash sat on the bunk, and when I showed him the signal from the ship, and the engine data, he said: ‘The old man won’t turn back. He’ll ditch first.’
‘Isn’t that the last thing we want?’ I leaned against the bulkhead. The plane was no safer than a packing case. ‘We’ll keep half the loot if we turn. Otherwise we get nothing.’
‘Don’t believe that signal. They’d kill us on sight. We’ve given ’em too much stick.’
He gave a bitter smile of resignation, the sort of expression that must have been on his lips when he heard his prison sentence. Under Bennett’s rule he had become mortally pliable. Then I saw a flicker of his former self. ‘The only way to maintain height is to lighten the load. If we get as far as the shipping lanes and then come down we might be rescued.’
I felt the blow of defeat. The cardboard world was coming to an end. ‘Tell that to Bennett.’ There was bitterness in my smile too. ‘He’ll chuck us off, rather than the gold.’
‘He’s in no condition to do any such thing. There’s nothing to throw out that weighs so much.’
‘What about the guns?’
‘They’ll go last of all. And it would take too long.’
The blockage in the oil feed pipe had righted itself. We were flying level. Renewed hope was the measure of our desperation. We drew another tot of whisky. When I got back to the radio, the operator from the ship was repeating his message. To maintain silence seemed senseless, so I tapped sufficient to indicate that I had received and understood his text, and added that they could go to hell, because we were taking the gold to Shottermill as prearranged. Let them chew on that, and Shottermill bite the bullet if ever they got to him. In the meantime I told them to wait, wait, wait – till the crack of doom – as we must surely wait to find out whether we had any chance of getting beyond their range. That their signals were diminishing was due as much to the passing of time as to increase of distance. But at more than a hundred knots we had no difficulty leaving their orbit behind. To use a flying boat had been a fine ploy, though whether it had been good enough we didn’t know.
Checking the gauges, there was a vibration underfoot, as if the fuselage was trying to explain its sickness. Too much cargo had been put on, and a substance was not getting freely through to the engines. The life force was failing. Endurance was one thing, but the weight of dreams was another. Perhaps Bennett, in his central position, was not aware of our tonnage grinding aga
inst the sky. Calmness in the midst of adversity had become a serenity which he did not want to lose even to save himself. After getting the aircraft off the water he had settled into a brittle senility of purpose. He threw the ship’s message down, and smiled because the figures from the engineer’s panel had not altered in ten minutes. His expression said that he would prove us wrong.
19
The sea was roughened by a breeze from the west. Airborne for two hours, we were out of the influence of the island. In the good conditions just after dawn there seemed more life on short wave. Even on low there was traffic between ships, though most was faint and indecipherable.
It was impossible to ignore the flow from the inner engines, or not to take note of the fact that the third reading of the fuel gauges showed a fall in pressure. Nash in the galley had seen the fumes. ‘If the Skipper doesn’t feather those props the engines will either catch fire or disintegrate.’ The circular spirit-cap of the primus was about to burn itself dry. ‘Or the whole caboodle will go up in smoke. I wouldn’t forget where your parachute is if I was you.’
He pumped a flame under the kettle. ‘I never thought there was much future in such things. But don’t worry. It may not come to it. Bennett once brought a Lanc back from Germany on one engine and half a wing. Or near enough. We’re still in the Queen Mary compared to that.’
He heaped six dessert spoons into the large pot as if we still had a full crew. The aroma of brewing tea came even through the smell of fuel and, connected to some comfortable past, seemed to promise a future. Who cared about danger anymore? Reality slotted to a lower level of my mind.
Nash swore but did not flinch when the vibration of the plane threw drops of scalding water across his hand. ‘I wouldn’t worry, Sparks. Bennett’ll get us back to base.’
I was angry at his assumption that I was afraid, and slopped a third of the tea out of my mug ascending the ladder to the wireless. Nash followed with two mugs hooked on one hand and spilled none. He sat in the co-pilot’s seat and, with the controls on automatic, he and Bennett looked at the sea, and at the clouds they could not reach, as if they had only to stare long enough for land to appear a few miles to starboard.
I stayed tuned to the distress and general calling frequency, both for what I might hear, and to send our lifesaving message should the emergency come. Nash appeared uninterested in our common peril. Anxiety made it hard to devise a policy of salvation. He and Bennett were paralysed by optimism, or an ancient friendship difficult to break. I saw no alternative but to wait until that instant when we had to decide how to save ourselves.
Daytime atmospherics were in full sway, but an SOS had a habit of getting through. The Cape Town to Australia shipping route began 300 miles north of Kerguelen, and we had done almost that distance. There was no need yet to send an SOS, but I stayed alert for the sign of another ship. Every hour they would listen for fifteen minutes in case any vessel was in distress. I might try 8280 or 6040 for more long distance rescue, not in the hope of being reached in time, but so that there would be a record of our final plunge. The necessity of an SOS seemed a long way off. To send it not only admitted defeat, but would pull us into defeat even sooner – when it might not otherwise come at all. It was easy to be infected by the optimism of Nash and the skipper.
I put a hand towards my transmitter, fearing it would work loose from the mounting and fall forward. Thus the juddering of the airframe pulled me from my only refuge. Tea drops straddled the logbook like a stick of bomb-bursts. I steadied it and, gripping my morse key, managed to drink. With earphones around my neck I looked out, and saw the propeller of the inner port engine come to a stop, the distorted metal like a wave of greeting that had gone wrong.
Bennett emerged from his torpor. A hand went to the throttles, and he switched off the starboard inner for fear it would explode and scatter bits into the sea. This righted our slide-and-bump across the sky, and the two engines seemed tinnier and further away. He pushed the two outers onto full throttle so as to maintain speed, and prevent us skimming like a stone into the sea.
Nash noted all readings on the panel, the most significant being those from the air speed indicator and the altimeter. Bennett had set the barometric pressure at take-off, which made our height fairly accurate, but such a load on low power meant that the only solution was to shed some weight.
I stood behind, phone-lead trailing. Neither spoke. Each minute was another victory. Nash glanced at the altimeter like a fox at the horizon with the hounds behind. The hand spoke an inevitable descent, the arm of a failing clock coming back to the zero of the ground.
I could hear the sky, ions shifting in millions and making their own peculiar noise. The subtle river formed and unformed, a world to which I belonged. One morse signal would shaft a path through, man-made like a sword. They had no option but to give way for such rocket-pulses. None came. I searched and waited. The sensible course was to send a CQ call and contact whoever heard. If Bennett knew that a ship was close perhaps he would ditch within its radius.
The sea was a sheet of steel taken from a fire after the last heat had gone, ragged and corrugated, with pieces of blue clinker still attached. At three thousand feet, Bennett fought for every inch of height. ‘I can call a ship, in case we go down.’
Nash waved me angrily away. Bennett was cool. ‘Radio silence, Adcock. We’ve got to hang on to those boxes. You’re too young to know what they mean. A life without worries means freedom. Now I’ve got it. You lack the imagination to know what it signifies. As for you, Nash, I’ll buy you a fish-and-chip shop! You deserve no less.’
Bennett – Nash between them made a star, Rose once said. And Bennett spoke as if much humour lay behind his words. We knew how right he was. Nash and I laughed. So did the skipper. As the Aldebaran whined and rattled on its northward way we laughed till the tears splashed at our faces. Bennett didn’t believe it. There was more to it than that, his sombre face said. Beyond the gleam of riches was the challenge of getting our cargo – any cargo – to a destination. But that wasn’t entirely the case, either, and Nash was to prove it. I was making up stories which had no truth, a sign of moral depravity in the face of death.
His amiability came as a surprise, and I felt guilty of having doubted that we would reach dry land. Confidence came back. We weren’t losing height. Our airspeed increased. The outer engines, on full boost, seemed fit to run forever. ‘Believe you me,’ said Bennett when we stopped laughing, ‘as soon as I’ve disposed of what’s in those boxes, you’ll have a fair packet coming to you. I don’t forget good service.’
Nash said: ‘I realize that, Skipper, but those boxes will have to go overboard, all the same.’
The altimeter showed below three thousand feet. Nash was right, Bennett wrong. The simple values came uppermost at last. A ton in weight would keep us longer in the air, but a minute at a time was all we had a right to. Bennett pulled a whitened cigar from his jacket pocket and put it between his teeth. In his agitation he moved it from left to right like a piece of stick.
Nash glanced at me. I put my hand to where the revolver lay, unashamed of the value we had put on our lives. Bennett sweated with the effort of flying the plane. When he reached for his lighter, the hand on my gun tightened. He smoked for a minute or so. ‘All right, Mr Nash, open the hatch. Prepare to jettison cargo.’
I stood aside to let him by, a feeling of relief mixed with irritation. An operator on some ship not far off bounced his signals to all stations, whiling away his hours of boredom. Never so glad to hear that beautiful sparking rhythm, I tapped my call sign and the wireless operators’ laugh, and he replied with ‘Best bent wire’, and we played on the ether as joyfully as two dolphins sporting on the surface of a warm sea. I requested his QTH. He asked for mine. To respond was illegal, for no signal should go from ship or plane without the captain’s permission, but I looked at Rose’s chart and decided that our position was close to 42 00 South 71 30 East.
The controls were on automatic p
ilot and, suddenly remembering, I rattled down the steps, though for no reason – or so I thought – except that a feeling of dread swamped me as one rung after another resounded under my feet.
20
The hatch had gone into the sea. Nash stood in the patch of sky, ready to slide the first box out. We seemed to be gliding, without engines. My ears played tricks. A sunbeam like a scalpel – I almost felt its warmth – lay as if to cut my sleeve.
I pushed Bennett, half turned from me, doing what I did as if not yet born. The gap between each action was timeless because there were too many factors to measure. But not everyone has the opportunity of looking back, and so they go blind into action and never recover their sight.
The same with Bennett. His revolver fired during the lapse between the hand going forward and making contact with the cloth of his coat. I hardly saw the gun, perhaps not at all. Certain details will never become clear. I didn’t need to. My life passed in that moment from one authority to another, as if the ultimate word came back and told me what to do, taking thought out of responsibility and leaving me only with action.
Nash’s face, normally placid, showing a man to be relied on, with plenty of practical knowledge, a good share of courage, a temper lost only in the presence of fools, but flawed by being loyal at the wrong time and to unsuitable people, was a portrait of horror as the death-mist closed in. A hand went to his jacket where the bullet had left a zone of ragged flesh. Crimson liquid spurted from between his spread fingers. He swayed before I could reach him, and fell through.
I clutched the ladder so that my turn would not come, determined to prevent it as my finger eased down on the trigger. The rush of engine noise came back to clothe the senses – though there was little enough of what might have been there in the first place. He knelt, as if waiting for the sword of knighthood to tap him on both shoulders. I felt as if I had shot into myself, and almost wished I had, wanting to separate every minute of my life to find out what had led to it.