She whispered: ‘I wish this was our ship. Just ours, sailing on alone for ever.’
He pressed her face against his own and said: ‘You must leave here. I have made arrangements for your father to take his boat to Taiwan. You must stay there. I will give you an address I have and I’ll be with you after that for as long as you like.’
‘Will it be like that?’ She was studying his face, her hands on his shoulders. ‘Can I be lucky enough?’
He laughed quietly. ‘Lucky? That’s my privilege!’
He pulled her down across his chest and felt her spine quiver beneath his hands. She said: ‘I can’t bear to leave you. Not now.’ She was speaking close against his ear, her face hidden. ‘I cannot wait, I cannot tell you——’ He felt her quiver as his hand moved and touched her breast. ‘Please——’
Tenderly he slipped his arm beneath her shoulders and raised himself on his elbow. Her hair was a dark halo across his jacket, her arms and legs pale and unmoving as she stared up at him. Then as he bent over her she opened her arms wide and averted her face as he began to unfasten her dress, until as he tortured himself a moment longer she lay on the old ship’s deck like a white crucifix.
She said with a sob, ‘There has never been another—I have not done this before——’
Then he was pressing down on her, feeling her fingers gripping his shoulders with the fierceness of pain and want. Down, down, enclosing and enfolding, his mouth holding hers to smother that first delicious agony which neither wanted to end.
13
‘She’s Going Over!’
THERE WAS A harsh scraping of metal as a mooring wire was dragged along the deck overhead, and Gunnar looked up startled, pulled unwillingly from his brooding thoughts. The door of his cabin was closed, but seemed incapable of shutting out the sounds of a ship coming to life.
It was mid-morning, yet the sun had never regained its power, lost in the brief fury of the gale. The sea was still restless and sullen, and slopped against the slender hull in deep rhythmic waves. Everything creaked and muttered, and Gunnar could hear the bustle of movement, the clatter of feet and an occasional bark of orders. Without looking at his watch he knew it was close on sailing time. The mission to Payenhau was ending as it had started. Futile, empty, wasted.
Heavily he slumped down on to the edge of his bed and turned over the small carved figure in his hands. It was a newly finished figurine of an American navy officer. Of himself. She had given it to him almost shyly the day the Osprey had sailed for Taiwan. With a lull in the storm the fishing boat had sailed in sudden haste, and Gunnar realised how much he depended on her. But her absence made him realise something more. That he had nothing to offer her when eventually he reached Taiwan, and for himself there would no longer be even this ship.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing in his favour. In addition, there was much against him. The death and mutilation of the landing party, as well as Pirelli’s mysterious disappearance. And now this other thing. Within hours of sailing time, his own yeoman, Bella, had vanished, as completely as if he had been plucked away in the gale.
Gunnar could well imagine how all these things would appear in the cold atmosphere of a court of enquiry. He knew he would not have cared so much but for his own sense of failure, of being dragged away before the real danger was inmasked.
By contrast the ship showed itself in different mood. An almost holiday air prevailed, the gloom and mutinous despondency of the past weeks wiped away with the announcement of sailing orders.
A bosun’s mate poked his head around the door with only the briefest pause after a knock which Gunnar had not even noticed. ‘The exec’s respects, sir, an’ it’s five minutes to go.’
He vanished before Gunnar had time to answer. That was the way of it now, he thought bitterly. Every man aboard knew that it was almost over. The Hibiscus was no longer a part of everyday life. It was merely a passage-ship, a one-way ticket home.
He stood up slowly and then placed the little carving carefully beneath the pillow where it would be safe once the ship met the open sea. It would be a rough passage, and he knew he was unreasonably glad about this. He needed something to break the tension and the disappointment.
He waited a moment longer, his aching mind turning to that other memory for comfort. He could still imagine her smooth skin and feel the eagerness of their combined desire and love. But it did not help. Instead it added to the realisation that in her eyes he would soon be like her own father. A man forced from his set track, a failure impossible to live with.
Almost blankly he walked into the passageway and made his way on deck. The sky above the anchorage was high-clouded and angry, and a strong wind still ruffled the sparse vegetation above the town and blew the flag out stiffly from the staff.
He climbed the ladder, noting the quick glances from his men, the meaning looks which made him feel a stranger already.
Maddox saluted. ‘All lines singled up, sir. Engine room ready to proceed!’ His face was controlled and calm, and again Gunnar thought he was facing someone he hardly knew.
‘Very well.’
He walked to the front of the open bridge and gripped the rail, allowing his lungs to fill with the hot, dusty air being whipped from the beach and the coast road.
Regan stood at the starboard wing, staring down at the pier and waiting to take over the duty of O.O.D. once the ship had left the protection of the land, and Kroner lounged negligently against the taffrail, his face turned towards the bridge as he awaited his orders.
Ensign Maddox climbed breathlessly on to the bridge and blinked round, seeking out the captain, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Sir! They’ve found Bella!’
Gunnar swung round his face alert. ‘How do you know?’
‘I was just disconnecting the shore phone, sir. Sergeant Rickover told me.’ Some of his excitement drained away. ‘He’s dying, sir.’
Gunnar balled his hands into tight fists. ‘Get the doctor on the double.’ As the ensign scurried away he yelled: ‘Mister Maddox, hold everything! Stand by to receive a stretcher party!’ The slow-moving jeep which he had noticed minutes earlier took a on a new and grimmer significance. The silent crowd fell away to allow the vehicle to lurch on to the pier at a snail’s pace, and Gunnar could see Colonel Jago’s stiff-backed figure beside the driver and the two Chinese soldiers in the rear with their covered burden.
It seemed to take an hour, but in fact Connell and his assistants were already easing the stretcher across the rail as Gunnar reached the deck. Roughly he thrust aside the murmuring sailors and laid one hand on the doctor’s arm. ‘How is he?’ He hardly recognised the yeoman’s white, pallid face. He looked dead already.
Jago climbed aboard and said shortly, ‘He’s been carved practically in half!’
Gunnar swayed, his eyes misting with helpless fury and despair as he stared past the marine’s stony features towards the placid town and the humped hills beyond. Another one. Another victim of his own folly!
Jago stood aside as the still figure was passed out of sight. ‘My medics have shot him full of dope, but I guess it’s only putting off a certainty.’
Gunnar clenched and unclenched his fists. ‘But why? How did it happen?’
‘Probably one of the damned villagers working off a bit of hate. A patrol found him beyond the town. He was trying to crawl with half his guts hanging out!’
Gunnar’s eyes were ice-cold and suddenly very still. ‘You must change my orders, Colonel! You can do it. You could send a despatch right now and say you need my ship here!’
Jago eyed him strangely. ‘But I don’t, Captain. Frankly I’ll be glad to see the back of you!’ He looked at the clouds. ‘There’s another gale brewing, and you’d be wise to get clear and into a bit of sea-room.’
Gunnar swallowed his helpless anger. ‘If that’s an order?’
‘It is.’ Final. Nothing more.
‘You’re making a mistake, Colonel. I hope to God you realise that?’
>
Jago gave a thin smile. ‘Forget it. Go back to the navy and leave this sort of war to the professionals, Captain.’ He held out his hand. ‘Good luck.’
Gunnar shook it briefly and walked back towards the bridge ladder. Over his shoulder he said quietly, ‘Save it for yourself!’
He returned to his place on the gratings, aware of Regan’s curious stare. He snapped, ‘Take in all lines!’ It was finished. Bella’s return had rounded off the finality to sickening perfection.
‘All engines back one-third.’ The deck began to tremble, and he watched the pier begin to slide past the low hull where Maddox moved amongst the seamen with the rope fenders.
Gunnar found that he was shaking uncontrollably and his chest felt bathed in sweat. With something like fear he realised that the old feeling was coming back. The edge of collapse he had left in the hospital after Viet Nam. He forced himself to watch the ship’s steady movement across the wide anchorage, her twin screws dragging her astern towards one of the sheltering islets. He was seeing it for the last time. The hills, the listing wreck on the sandspit where he had taken the girl’s love with the same lack of consideration as he had done everything else.
‘All engines stop.’ He waited as the cross-wind made the bows swing slightly towards the western channel. It was as if the ship too was eager to be away and could no longer wait for the helm.
‘All engines ahead one-third. Left standard rudder!’ It was useless to prolong it. The ship began to turn away from the narrow beach, past the untidy cluster of the fishing village where so much had started and ended. Behind him a signalman clattered on to the bridge the Jack already rolled carelessly beneath his arm. It would not be needed much more.
An islet loomed large on the port bow as the little ship began to thread her way into the channel. There was a good quartermaster at the wheel, and this time he would need little help and encouragement. The sea looked grey and hostile, and the sun’s path was silvery through the haze as the Hibiscus thrust her stem into the deeper water beyond the islet.
‘All secure, sir.’ Maddox had returned to the bridge. ‘Shall I take the con?’
Gunnar nodded absently. ‘If you please. I am going below to see Bella.’
The exec said uncertainly: ‘I’m sorry about him, Captain. On top of everything else too.’
Gunnar eyed him coldly. ‘Bring her round to the south-west as soon as we are clear. If there’s to be another storm warning I want to be well clear before we turn north on to the final course.’
Maddox said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He looked across at his young brother, who turned away as if unable to watch Gunnar’s despair. He added, ‘It’s better this way, sir.’
Gunnar swung his leg on to the ladder, his shoulders outlined against the green and brown hump of land. ‘I’m glad you think so.’ Then he was gone, and Maddox cursed himself for wavering from his decided course of action. The captain was done for. He should never have been sent back to sea duty so soon, if at all. He leaned his arms on the screen and turned his thoughts back to Mary and the completed letter which he would post in Taiwan.
* * *
Connell glanced up as the captain entered his small domain and stood swaying between the white-enamelled pipe-cots. Connell noticed how he did not appear to be holding on for support although the ship was already swinging through a rapid and violent series of sharp arcs.
Gunnar asked, ‘Any change, Doc?’
Connell shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ He wondered why the captain was showing such concern over Bella. The poor wretch strapped in the lower cot had once been his yeoman, but that meant very little. If the ship had been on a long commission it might have been different. A commanding officer often grew very close to his yeoman, if only on a master/servant basis. But Gunnar seemed haunted and driven, and although the weather had worsened already since the ship had left Payenhau, he appeared to be unable to stay away. For hours the Hibiscus had flogged south-west away from the island group and its protective layers of reefs before turning towards the north on her new course. Now she had the bleak and tossing sea to herself. There was no longer an horizon, and in the grey half-light their immediate world was a tossing panorama of white and yellow crests, which crumbled into long streamers of spray and drifting spume in the mounting wind. Connell had never heard wind like this before. It howled and whined, as if trying to shake the pitching ship apart. From the rattling signal halyards to the uneasy jolting furniture, it drove its gusts through every crack and opening until even the clothes on a man’s back became sodden with spray and seeping damp.
Gunnar sat on a cot and stared fixedly at Bella’s white face. Already it was sunken and skull-like, like that of an old man.
Connell said quietly: ‘I’d give a lot to get him into hospital. This place is little better than a field ambulance!’ He looked almost pleading. ‘No chance of calling up help, sir?’
Gunnar shook his head. ‘None. No chopper could find us in this gale, even if it could get airborne.’ Bella stirred in his coma, and Gunnar said sharply, ‘What’s happening?’
Connell rubbed his lined face. ‘Nothing. He’s half conscious some of the time, but he doesn’t know anything. Once he said something about a girl. I think it was that Chinese girl he wanted to marry.’ He bit his lip. ‘Poor kid.’
Gunnar watched his hand in his lap. What was the point of staying here? Bella would be able to tell him nothing. It was better to let him die in peace.
Connell said slowly, ‘The storm seems to be getting worse.’
‘It is.’ Gunnar brought his mind to the present again. ‘A Force Eight again, and worse to come before we get out of it.’ He did not want to talk. There was no point in adding the fact that the glass had dropped with frightening rapidity even in the last hour. It could mean everything or nothing. In the China Seas tropical storms had few of the reliable symptoms of other areas.
A telephone buzzed at his side and he dragged it from its hook in one movement. ‘Captain speaking.’
It was Kroner, his voice far away and distorted by the howl of the wind. ‘She’s not holding on the new course, sir!’ He sounded scared.
Gunnar’s mind stirred. ‘I’ll come up.’ He added as an afterthought, ‘How is it?’
‘Bad, sir. Damn bad. The glass is still dropping, although not so rapidly, but the visibility is down to four miles.’ The hull shivered and hummed like a mad musical instrument. ‘Jesus, it’s throwing us about like a bucket!’
Gunnar stood up and clung to the cot as the deck canted suddenly beneath him. ‘Keep at it, Doc. Call me the moment he tries to say anything.’ His eyes bored into the crouching doctor. ‘ Anything, got it?’
With effort he forced open a hatch and almost fell on the streaming upper deck as a big breaker surged over the rail and thundered against a twenty-millimetre gun-tub. It was wild all right. With something like awe Gunnar realised that he had hardly noticed the storm’s approach, nor had he read the signs with much interest. All at once it was real, and very close.
The small upper bridge had long since been abandoned in the face of wind and weather and as was normal on such occasions, all watchkeeping was carried out in the wheelhouse. It too seemed smaller and more crowded, crushed by the weight of the sea’s fury which faced the ship on every side.
Gunnar had to grip the steel door to stop himself sliding backwards across the rail as the bridge canted above him, while over his shoulder he could see the water boiling alongside as if being heated from far below in some impossible cauldron. He waited until the labouring vessel had completed her upswing and then pushed into the wheelhouse and slammed the door behind him. Already the windows were streaming with salt spray, whilst inside they were constantly running with damp and condensation.
Kroner skidded towards him and shouted: ‘It’s real bad, sir. The helmsman’s having a job to hold her on three fifty degrees!’
Gunnar felt his way past the straddle-legged quartermaster, whose intent features shone yellow in the compass
light, and stared back across the ship’s yawing stern. The sea was cruising down in long, unbroken rollers and catching Hibiscus on her starboard quarter. Rank upon rank, some curving over in yellow-fanged crests, the others steep and black-sided like solid things. He watched one such mass of water reach under the narrow stern and saw the ship cant skywards. Like a toy she was pushed forward and down into a deep trough which buried the bows as far back as the little three-inch gun on the fo’c’sle.
Paice, the quartermaster, yelled hoarsely, ‘She’s payin’ off, sir!’
The gyro tape ticked remorselessly round as Kroner shouted, ‘Bring your rudder hard left!’
‘Three five five—three six zero!’ There was a sob in Paice’s voice. ‘I can’t hold her!’
Gunnar wrapped his arm around a stanchion and felt his ship tearing at his muscles, pulling him down. ‘Back the port engine! Flank speed on the starboard!’ He felt the hair prickle on his neck as the telegraph jangled, and imagined Malinski in the bowels of the engine room with his small world standing on end about him.
Three five five—three five zero!’ Paice let out a gasp. ‘Comin’ left, sir!’
‘All engines ahead full!’ Gunnar watched Paice’s thick hands spinning the wheel as he met the swing of the bows against the corkscrewing stern. That was close, he thought. If the ship paid off and broached into those rollers he might never hold her. She would turn turtle and go straight down in minutes. It had happened before.
The door at the rear of the wheelhouse rasped back on its rollers and a radioman staggered drunkenly through the gap. ‘’Nother message from Hong Kong Radio, Captain!’ His eyes rolled in the semi-darkness as he caught sight of the sea for the first time. ‘Jesus, what a friggin’ mess!’
Gunnar’s jaw muscles tightened. ‘This is it, Kroner.’ He sensed the lieutenant’s fear as together they sprawled across the chart table and Gunnar picked up the brass dividers. ‘It’s a typhoon. We seem to be running parallel with it!’
Typhoon. The word moved in the wheelhouse like an evil thing. Paice glanced briefly from the compass towards the man at the telegraphs and pursed his lips in a silent whistle.
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