It seemed an age, the minutes dragging endlessly. At last there was a grating shiver. The sound continued for a moment and then there was silence, only the beat of the engines, and for’ard the bows swung against the stars—turning, turning steadily towards the north, the shadow of the deckhouse changing shape as the moon’s position changed. “Helm amidships.” Reece’s voice was clear and sharp against the rhythmic thump of the screw immediately below us.
“Helm amidships.” The order passed down the chain of men to the tiller flat. The bows stopped swinging, steadied on a star, and now we saw the sea beginning to move past us. Twice the grating sound deep under our keel sent our hearts into our mouths. But the ship had way now and though we could feel her check she did not stop. Astern the sea was lifted into great waves as the water we had displaced flooded in behind us, dredged up by the shallows. But these stern waves gradually diminished. By eleven-twenty they were gone and the wake was a normal wake, frothing a white line back across the moonlit sea as we thumped our way into deep water.
The cook had produced another curry, but most of us were too tired, too nervously exhausted to eat. Two bottles of Scotch were conjured up and we drank them fast, pouring the liquor urgently down our throats. I fell asleep where I was, lying on the hard deck, the sound of the engines, the sense of movement acting like a lullaby. And the next moment I was being shaken violently and a voice was saying, “Wake up, Bailey. Wake up.”
It was Blake bending over me and shaking me violently. “Are you awake now?”
I nodded, staring up at him, my brain still numb. “What is it? What’s happened? What’s the time?”
“Midnight and Reece has altered course.”
“Altered course?” I stared at him stupidly, not understanding what he was trying to tell me.
“To the north-west—towards Gan.”
It took a moment for the implication of that to sink in. “Towards Gan?” I started up. “But the island …” He couldn’t head for Gan, not yet—not without getting Peter and the others off that island.
“I thought you’d like to know,” Blake said.
“But didn’t you tell him? He can’t just leave them …”
“I’ve been arguing with the bugger for the last ten minutes. Finally I told him I’d call you.”
“Thanks.” I scrambled to my feet and up the ladder to the top of the deckhouse. Reece was there, sitting with his legs dangling over the for’ard edge of the roofing, a lascar at his side ready to pass his orders to tiller flat or engine-room. He turned as I stepped on to the roof, Blake close behind me. He knew why I was there and his face had a blank obstinate look. I sat down beside him. “You’ve altered course, I see.”
“My concern is for the safety of the ship.” He said it flatly as though repeating something he had learned by heart, his eyes deep-sunk in their sockets, his voice tired.
“You’re headed for Gan, then?” He nodded. I asked Blake to leave us then. I knew Reece wouldn’t give way in front of the older man. “Now,” I said as the grey head of the first officer disappeared down the ladder, “let’s get this quite clear. If you abandon Strode and the rest of the men on the island it won’t look good.”
“My instructions are that the safety of the ship is paramount,” he said woodenly.
“You had specific instructions to that effect?”
He nodded.
“From George Strode?”
“From Phillipson—though it’s the same thing.
“Specific instructions—in writing?” My brain was working painfully slowly.
“Yes.”
“Such instructions,” I said, “only re-state a responsibility vested in every captain. It extends to the crew and also to any passengers. There’ll be an inquiry—you realize that?” He didn’t say anything. “It won’t look good at an inquiry if you abandon these men.”
“I’m not abandoning them. They’re ashore there, and they’ve food for a month.” And he added, “We’re taking in water. Did you know that? Robbins says some rivets have gone, midships on the starb’d side. The heat, he thinks.”
“Are the pumps holding it?”
“At present, yes.”
“You’re at least three days’ steaming from Gan,” I said. “Two or three hours isn’t going to make all that difference.”
“How do you know?” His face remained set and I wondered what was behind his obstinacy, for I was certain this was something he’d made up his mind to some time back.
I was ten minutes sitting there arguing with him. Finally I said, “All right. You have one view. I have another. But I would remind you that I’m an executive of Strode Orient. I’m ordering you now, Reece. Head the ship back to the island and get those men off.”
He shook his head. “You have no power to give me orders on my own ship.”
He was right there, of course, but there was always the question of fitness to command. And when I told him that if he refused to head for the island I would gather the ship’s officers together and put it to them that he was no longer fit to captain the vessel, he sat for a long time without speaking. He knew it would finish his career coming on top of the stranding. Finally he said, “Will you give it to me in writing—a written order? Then, you see, man, if there’s any question——” His voice trailed away, broken and tired. Now that the ship was afloat and under way every turn of the screw brought the hour of reckoning nearer. And this was his first command. I felt sorry for him then. “Yes, of course,” I said. “You can have it in writing.”
“Now?” he asked, almost eagerly. “Now, please, before I change course?”
I went below and borrowed a pen and a sheet of paper and wrote it out for him, and when I’d handed it to him he read it slowly, carefully, by the light of the moon. And then he gave the order to change course and the bows swung north, back on to the track we’d steamed from the island to the point of stranding.
Shortly after four that morning the engines were stopped and we lay hove-to till dawn, when we got under way again, with a leadsman sounding regularly. But there was no bottom and no sign of the island.
As the sun rose we turned east, searching all the time, but there was nothing, nothing but the empty sea. We searched till noon, steering a pattern that even with the reduced vision from our improvised bridge must have covered 500 square miles. We saw no vestige of the island and the insistent cry of “No bottom” from the leadsman seemed constantly drumming home to me the fact that it had gone again, submerged beneath the steaming surface of the Indian Ocean.
“Have we been searching the right spot?” I asked Blake. And he shrugged and said, “As far as we can tell, yes.” His dour voice had a grim finality about it and when Reece finally gave the order to turn the ship towards Gan again I didn’t try to stop him. The midday heat was steadily reducing visibility. “It’s gone,” Reece said and there was something in his voice, in the look of his eyes—an agonized despair as though he were somehow responsible. And I wondered again why he’d left them there.
The following day it was cloudy with a fresh breeze. The old ship rolled as she ploughed her way nor’-westward as near as we could guess. And after that the sea was calm again, the sky clear, and nothing to relieve the monotony. On the third day Evans raised Gan beacon on an improvised DF set. We were much farther to the east than we had expected and course was altered accordingly. Just about sunset a plane flew over us. It was a Comet and we knew then that we were on the direct line between Singapore and Gan. The pilot must have spotted us for at dawn a Shackleton appeared, circling low. After making several runs over us at what would have been mast-head height, it headed back for Gan. It returned shortly after noon and stayed with us for nearly an hour to guide the high-speed launch to us.
Wilcox had come out himself to pilot us in and he told us that the search had been on for three days now with another Shackleton flown in from Changi to relieve the one operating from Gan. “They’ve been working seventeen hours at a stretch, the maximum, and
not a sign of you or that island. Every report negative.”
“Not even any shallows?” I asked.
“No, nothing.” He turned to Reece. “Either your position was way out, old man, or else …” He gave a quick little shrug.
A Shackleton has a cruising speed of about 150 knots. It would be flying at a height of say 1000 feet. In three days they would have covered thousands of square miles. If Reece had made an error it would have to be an enormous one. I turned to Wilcox. “Did they report any sign of volcanic activity—gas vents, pumice, anything like that?”
He shook his head. “No. I told you, the reports were negative. Nothing sighted at all. Oh, yes, two whales.” He grinned, but the grin vanished when I told him there were seventeen men on the island. “My God!” he said. “And you left them there?” The note of accusation in his voice made it obvious that he regarded the island as gone, vanished without trace. I turned away, the feeling of hopelessness that had been with me for three days now crystallized into certainty. The island was gone, and the shallows where we had stranded must have dropped back into the depths a matter of hours after we had got clear of them.
V
STRODE & COMPANY
“I DON’T believe it.” Ida’s tone was one of absolute conviction. “If Peter were dead I’d know about it. I’m certain I would.” She had come out to the airport to meet me and all the way in to London she had been questioning me, listening to my account of what had happened. Now we were back at the flat and her final comment was that I was wrong, everybody was wrong, that Peter was still there, on an island that couldn’t be found.
She accepted everything I had told her—the white water, the pumice, the stranding, the fire, even the sulphurous boiling of the sea around us—all the surprising, the unusual things, but not that the island had vanished. It made no difference that I had actually flown one of the searches; I’d probably have flown others if it hadn’t been for the urgency of her message. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you’ll have to accept the facts as we know them. The island’s just not there any more, neither the island nor the shallows on which we stranded.”
“Balls! You just haven’t searched in the right place, that’s all.” It could almost have been her father speaking—rude, obstinate, determined.
“Suppose you tell me where we should have searched?” It was the nearest we had come to a row since we first met.
She smiled, a little gesture of appeasement that didn’t reach to her eyes. “I can’t do that. All I can tell you is that he’s alive.”
“Then either you’re daft or Peter’s capable of performing miracles. There’s nothing there but sea.” And once more I told her about the flight I’d made, but this time in greater detail. I thought if she could see it through my eyes it would help her to accept the truth.
It was Canning’s idea. He came down to the transit Mess the day Reece had run the Strode Trader aground east of the oil jetty. It was just after sundown and we had a beer together. Canning had been extremely helpful—billeting us ashore, the lascars in the Pak camp, the Europeans in the transit quarters, sending engineers out to the ship to see if they could patch the leaking plates, allowing Reece and myself to be present when the Shackleton skippers made their search reports. “Would you like to fly tomorrow’s search? I’ve had a word with Freddie Landor. He’d be happy to take you along.”
I guessed what was behind the offer. He wanted to prepare me for the moment when the search would be called off, to convince me that the R.A.F. had done everything possible. “Is tomorrow your last attempt to find them?” I asked.
“No. But two more flights will complete the pattern. We’ll then have had sight of a quarter of a million square miles of ocean. Anyway,” he added, “I thought it would help if you saw for yourself.”
“Is tomorrow’s flight part of the pattern?” I asked.
He hesitated. “You think they’ve overflown the island without seeing it?”
“They’ve put in a hell of a lot of flying hours,” I said. “And it gets pretty hazy after midday.” I wasn’t happy about putting it like that, but I’d seen the crews when they came in. It was three hours out to the search area, three hours back and ten hours flying the pattern—a long day.
He thought about it for a moment. “You could be right.” He took a pull at his beer. “Okay. Talk it over with Reece. I’ll tell Freddie he’s to fly you anywhere you like.”
Take-off was at 0300 hours. The crew truck picked me up at two-fifteen in the morning. There were nine of them for a Shackleton carries an extra navigator, an air electronics officer and up to four signals personnel as well as two pilots and an engineer. Nobody spoke very much as we trundled out to the apron where the Shackleton’s bulk cast a dark moon shadow. Somebody gave me a spare flying suit and a helmet and when finally we took off I was told to sit braced on the floor just aft of the flight deck. The noise was deafening. Airborne, I was given the co-pilot’s seat and with my intercom plugged in could listen to the reports of the crew. We flew at 4000 feet, nothing to see but the pale expanse of ocean below and the stars above. Sandwiches and coffee were handed round as dawn began to break in the east. Afterwards Landor called me to the navigator’s table.
He was a skipper navigator, an arrangement peculiar to some Shackletons, and he had our position marked on the air charts. “In seventeen minutes we’ll be bang over the target.” I had discussed it with Reece and we had agreed that the day’s search should start from his estimated position and that I would then fly a circular pattern outwards. In one day it ought to be possible to cover an area big enough to take in any possible error. “If the position is correct and the island’s there, then it should be on the radar now.” We had come down to 1000 feet, but the scanner was empty, nothing showing.
The sun came up as we started to turn, beginning the ring pattern that would spread farther and farther out from the target as the day progressed. I was taken for’ard then, beyond the flight deck to the gun position in the nose. Here I stayed the whole day, searching and searching with my eyes and seeing nothing but the flat unending expanse of the sea below. The nose-gunner’s position had a Perspex hood and as the day wore on it became a hothouse, the sun blazing on my hands, burning through the rough denim of the flying suit. The sweat poured off me to be replaced every hour or so by the iced lemonade which they brought round.
Hour after heat-searing hour and the sea empty of anything. The monotony and the noise dug into my brain. More sandwiches and afterwards my head nodding and all my will-power concentrated on keeping my eyes open. Haze was forming, visibility decreasing and the plane flew on and on, the circles much bigger now so that the position of the sun changed only gradually. Coffee and still I had to fight to keep awake in the blazing heat. “Captain to Bailey—are you all right there or would you like to sit in on the radar?”
“Bailey answering. No, I’m fine, thanks.”
They’d been flying this monotonous, soul-destroying routine every other day for almost a week. I wasn’t admitting that I couldn’t take it though it was like being roasted alive. Somehow I kept awake, regarding it as a sort of penance for being the cause of their having to go over the same ground again. Then the sun was going down, the heat lessening. At sunset we turned for home and that was that—nothing seen, and nothing to report. All that time and energy and fuel wasted.
And when we landed Canning met me. A lift of his eyebrows, but he didn’t need to be told. He knew from the look on my face. “Well, no good worrying,” he said. “We’ll keep at it until we’re ordered to stop.” And he handed me the telex with Ida’s message.
I looked across at her. She had her eyes closed and the lines of strain showed on her face. “Why the urgency?” I asked.
“The annual general meeting is the day after to morrow.”
“I know that. But what’s the trouble? It was just luck that there was a spare seat in a Britannia that night to Aden. Whimbrill has my proxy.”
“I think I’d better
leave him to tell you. I rang him at his home this evening to say you’d be in the office in the morning. The shares have slumped, of course.” She opened her eyes, staring straight at me. “This wretched business has brought things to a head. But he’ll explain it to you better than I can.” She reached to the table behind her where she’d put her bag and gloves. There was a copy of the evening paper there and she passed it to me. “I didn’t tell you before. They’ve called off the search. You’ll find it in the Stop Press.”
It was on the back page. An Air Ministry spokesman stated that they had now abandoned all hope for the men still missing on a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean. It gave the names of the three Europeans. The decision was inevitable, of course, but it still came as a shock. “I’m sorry,’ I murmured.
“No good being sorry,” she said sharply. “It’s a question of what we do now.”
“What the hell can we do?” I said angrily. “The island’s gone and Peter’s dead.” I didn’t mean to put it as brutally as that, but I was tired and it worried me that she was still refusing to accept the truth of it.
An uneasy silence hung over the room. Finally she got to her feet. “I’m going to make coffee. And there’s some eggs and bacon in the fridge—will that do?”
I nodded. Sitting there, listening to her moving about in the tiny kitchen, I was thinking of Peter, wondering what it had been like at the end, trying to visualize it. All his hopes, all his plans vanished in one cataclysmic upheaval. And the Adduans—Canning hadn’t mentioned any vedis sailing. I wished now I had tried to visit Midu.
It was after we had fed, when we were sitting over our coffee, smoking, that Ida mentioned Deacon. “When Peter first went to the island it was in the Strode Venturer, and Deacon was in command. George sacked him, didn’t he?”
The Strode Venturer Page 21