He worked deftly as he spoke, trying to ignite the torch. Le Roux and I huddled close to form a windbreak. The cutter suddenly burst into bright flame, hissing and spitting in the rain and spray.
'I'll go for the big boy first,' said the engineer. He looked apprehensively at the grab I had made fast. 'I'd really like to ditch that to begin with, but if I cut it loose it may only get fouled up with the clutter under the stern. Then we double our problem.'
Holding the spitting, blue-tongued flame in his left hand, he steadied himself against the buckled rail with his right. He strained to see where to begin.
'Bring the light closer, skipper,' he called. 'This will be trickier even than I thought.'
I shone the beam on the twisted mass. The main three-inch heavy tube was so contorted that it seemed impossible that the sea could have wrought it. Strong, flexible steel cable, used for lowering the grab hundreds of fathoms deep to the ocean floor, was snarled about it like a knotted ball of wool. The winching device which was integral to it had been unseated from its bolt and seemed inextricably mixed up with the lower portions of the crane. No part of it would ever be fit for use again.
The three of us ducked as a wave crest toppled over the rail on the lee roll; again, I was surprised at the sea's lack of viciousness. The waves were no smaller, but they seemed to be pawing at the ship now rather than punching.
When the water cleared, Scannel hung over the rail. 'I'm going over head-first, skipper,' he told me calmly. 'You'll have to hang on to my legs while I work. Piet, boy, get yourself alongside the skipper. When you see a wave coming, shout. I'll hand you the torch. Shove it above your head-keep it out of the water — do anything, but keep it alight.'
'You'll get drowned, Nick,' I objected. 'This is a modern variation on keel-hauling a man.'
Scannel brushed aside my anxiety. 'If you yell in good time, I'll take a long breath. Getting wet doesn't matter. We can't play musical chairs with each wave, back and forth to the deck and over the side again each time. Every time that wreckage bashes her, our chances of seeing tomorrow get slimmer.'
'Right,' I replied. 'But don't object if I recommend you for the George Cross or whatever they offer enginers in tight spots.'
Scannel already had his flashlight on the heaving water, judging his moment to go overside. The water looked murky, oily, almost as if someone had drawn a thin sheet of plastic over its surface.
'Here we go!'
Scannel stuck the cutting torch, where the metal joins the rubber tubes from the cylinder, between his teeth and plunged himself full-length over the rail; I held his lower legs and feet, and young le Roux craned over to snatch the vital light from being doused.
Had it been a matter of cutting away the gravity corer on the other side of the stern, our task would have been far easier. There was a great deal more water coming aboard on the lee roll (where we were) than on the weather roll opposite. The cold, too, made movements stiff and hands clumsy, I worked my jaws to keep my face from freezing.
Scannel called to le Roux to open the gas cock. The whole scene flared into unnatural, incandescent brightness as flame bit into metal, throwing up showers of blue-white sparks.
In that sudden brightness, I spotted the next wave.
'Nick! The torch — quick!'
The engineer was almost through the thick pipe. Despite my warning, he went on cutting, using every last second. The sea started its upward heave. The seared metal support broke and swung, bringing with it a flurry of flaring steel which exploded in a sizzling cascade over Scanners neck and chest.
The wave broke.
I had a momentary glimpse of his agonized face: he swivelled sideways and upwards and thrust the torch clear of the water into le Roux's grip; he rammed it high above his head.
The rail dipped under. Water engulfed us.
It cleared. I reached forward and dragged Scannel bodily back on to the deck. His left shoulder was a polka-dot of burn-holes. He would carry those scars for the rest of his life.
He managed to speak. 'Let me get back-give me the torch! I'll have her completely free this time …'
'Nick-no-'
He shook his head, as if not trusting himself to speak through the pain. He gestured for me to take his legs. He snatched the torch from le Roux and dived, so it seemed, headlong over the side once more.
Again the bright light lit the scene unnaturally white. Then, miraculously soon, Scannel signalled to be pulled back.
There's only the cable left, and that's nothing,' he said quietly.
'Here it comes!'
We ducked for another sea, but le Roux hung on, standing upright.
'Good boy!' exclaimed Scannel after the roller had passed. 'Now for the cable.'
Skilfully and quickly he sent the flame through the tangle of wire and chains. The wind drowned its splash.
Scannel grimaced in agony.
'Nick,' I said urgently, "I'll come below to the engine-room and fix you up. We've got to get something on those burns right away..'
‘I did,' he winced lop-sidedly. 'Seawater. Try it some time. The hot so hot and the cold so cold. No, skipper, someone else can patch me up-you're needed to save the ship, not play nursemaid to me.'
He was right. Walvis Bay now had a sporting chance. It was up to me to exploit what Scannel had achieved.
'Okay,' I answered, 'but, Nick, that doesn't mean I don't appreciate. .'
The pain and reaction were hitting him. 'Save the speech for a calm sea,' he said. 'Can we risk that screw?' I asked.
'We'll try, anyway, and see what happens.' He snapped out the torch. 'I'll get on the bridge blower as soon as I can. Pumps, too. We've had a lucky break from the calmer seas. Just depends whether that tarpaulin holds over the hole in the deck. .'
I groped my way along the lifelines to the foredeck below the bridge. The men were putting the final touches to sealing the ragged hole where previously the winch had stood. Ends of the double tarpaulin still flapped and snapped, but my team was on top. Apart from another mammoth wave, it would keep out enough sea to enable the pumps to cope with what did make its way below.
I headed for the bridge.
Smit had rigged a couple of storm lanterns overhead and both he and Jubela were heavily oil-skinned against the driving rain. He had cleared away some of the glass and seen Feldman below to the ward-room. He had also found a small boat's compass somewhere and had taped it over the smashed binnacle.
'Do you think we'll make it, sir?' Smit was more excited than fearful.
I dodged a straight answer. 'How's she steering?'
'It would be a big help if we could get the port screw working.'
Walvis Bay's head seemed to be pointing somewhere east of south, but the tiny compass made it difficult to tell with any degree of accuracy.
'We'll try,' I replied. 'There may be a chunk out of it, Scannel thinks, but we still could get by if the shaft's not messed up.'
'Better than nothing at all, sir.'
I picked up the voice-pipe. 'Nick? Can we risk that port screw yet?'
The engineer's voice was tight with reaction. 'Aye. But we'll have to cut speed on the starboard prop first. Quarter-speed to start with. Maybe we can work up a bit more later, if the other can take it.'
Jubela gestured to me as I spoke.
I, too, felt the change of motion. Walvis Bay rose sharply to the next sea, quite unlike her longer, lazier motion a little while before. The white crest crashed aboard and sluiced to port, with the earlier characteristic deep lee roll. She lifted her bows well, but I could detect the inhibiting weight of water inside her.
I nodded to Jubela. 'Nick,' I went on. 'The sea's beginning to hit her again. I don't know why, but it is. How soon can you pump the water out of her? I need all the buoyancy I can find.'
'Couple of hours,' he answered. 'Depends on how much comes via the tarpaulin. Skipper-here comes your port screw.'
There was a squeal of agonized metal and a heavy, thumping vibration. It s
truck right through the hull to the bridge. The voice-pipe dropped with a crash the other end and Scannel yelled orders to stop the engine. The shattering noise stopped.
Scannel came on the voice-pipe.
'That's the sort of scream you should have let out just now if you weren't such a bloody spartan,' I told the engineer.
The engineer was in no mood to respond. I knew how much that damaged prop hurt him.
'She's bad, skipper-very bad,' he said. The shaft must be bent — what else, only a dockyard could know.'
I made my decision. 'Nick,' I said, 'I'm going to heave to. The sea's gone back to what it was before the big 'un hit us. I can't hold her all night with the engines like this. See if you can coax that starboard prop into giving me just enough to help hold her head into the run of the sea. I’ll stream a sea anchor and a drum of oil. The oil will soften the waves and keep them off the decks, maybe.'
CHAPTER SEVEN
I fought, hour by hour, for the life of the ship through the long night that followed. What I did not know was that the news of the storm I was challenging had brought as great a storm, emotionally, to Tafline in Cape Town. Her storm, like mine, held its secrets: when the shock-waves of her long night were over, she admitted consciously that she was in love.
It began, she told me afterwards, like mine, with the Buccaneer. She heard the radio announcement that a Buccaneer had gone missing on a training flight. Aboard Walvis Bay, all radios were dead. The main set was out because the radio hut had been smashed. All portable sets had been flooded and their batteries swamped. Until daylight it was impossible to find new ones in the 'tween-decks shambles.
She had frozen at the Buccaneer announcement. She saw intuitively behind the standard, cautious, well-used phrases: she guessed it was Alistair.
A second radio bulletin later increased her own tumult. It described the severity of the great storm I was riding out, hanging between life and death at the end of a wood-and-canvas sea anchor and a drum of oil. We had knocked holes in the drum before getting it overboard to let the oil seep out and try and soften the waves from swamping the labouring weather ship. Nonetheless, all night they broke through the shattered bridge; they cascaded through the hole in the deck; again and again we replaced the torn canvas. Our hands were numbed by the cold. Our nails were ripped. Our flesh bled. The tarpaulin reared, whipped, lashed, like a maniac. Strong men wept and cursed the south-west wind. Again and again it tore away their puny efforts to save themselves.
Then the Weather Bureau stated: 'Radio contact with the weather ship Walvis Bay in the storm area has been lost.'
At that, she had known the answer: Waratah!
She had made a long-distance telephone call from Cape Town to the Port Met. Office in Durban. Where, she asked, had I last been heard of? The weatherman told her more than he normally would a stranger. There must have been something in what she said which made him guess how close, how newly close, she was to me. He did not tell her, though, that the Air Force had confided that they held out little hope for the Buccaneer. The search would be their main concern now.
It would have comforted me, that night, to have known of her anxiety, but I did not. All I had was the decision-tapping attrition of icy gale and sea on a mind growing more and more numb as the hammer-blows followed one another unabated. When a pump burned out in some desperate hour of the night, I thought the storm had won. Scannel, disregarding the burns which had turned his upper chest into a Martian red surface of craters and blisters, calmly stripped it down with the unruffled patience and steady hand of a Grand Prix mechanic who sees the race roar past while his driver loses precious race-winning seconds. The pump drew again, and once again we sucked out the life-inhibiting load of water.
The first stunning wave had pitched the steel cabinet with all my Waratah material across the cabin on to my bunk. Hurrying below to visit the injured Feldman, I stopped at the sight of it. Like the peace at the heart of every cyclone, the outside roar ceased to exist for me, and telepathically she was there in that moment of exclusion. I did not try and move the cabinet; maybe it was safer on the bunk than on the floor, where the water from the bridge still sloshed past on its way to the depths of the ship. Beyond a wetting, the documents were in reasonable shape — another chapter of the same story was being written at that moment up above in wind, wave and water 1 Likewise, my marked chart escaped only with a drenching.
Automatically, I looked at the photograph of the Waratah. Something had been hurled across the cabin; its glass was cracked clean across.
The ship's wind direction and velocity gauge on the top deck had been wrecked; the cabin repeater pointed statically, ironically — south-west. The books she had taken from my shelf lay in a pulpy mess on the floor.
Where, Tafline had asked, had contact with me been lost?
Bashee, the weatherman replied. South of the Bashee.
There had been no need for her to hear any more then. She had thanked him mechanically, put down the telephone, and gone over to the window of her flat. The Mouille Point lighthouse nearby always used to flick an arrow of light against the flat wall, and she screwed up her eyes against it now. She loved the lighthouse as her Welsh grandfather had loved the one he had tended. Tafline — the Welsh ancestry had given her that soft name, and somehow the sixth sense of the Celt enabled her to identify herself so closely with the mysterious fate of the old ship. She loved the sea too, a derivative from Viking blood on her father's side. The Olens had come from Sweden to South Africa sixty years before and had pioneered a Scandinavian settlement in the Transvaal. It was this seafaring streak which let her understand, with almost Arab fatalism, the ocean drama being played out of which I was part. Below her window in the light winter rain car headlights made a home-going procession. She watched. She did not weep; she did not do any more than make that one telephone call. The cinemagoers, the diners, the dancers, would sleep tonight, but she would not.
There was a last news bulletin that night. The Buccaneer, Walvis Bay and the great storm took top place. Growing concern, said the radio, was being felt for the safety of the ship and the jet. Despite repeated attempts to make contact with the weather ship, there had been no response.
Feldman lay half-conscious in the ward-room, mumbling, only half-aware of his surroundings. We strapped him to the bunk to protect his damaged side from the ship's lurches. He was our only operator, even if we had had a spare, the radio hut was gone.
Finally, she heard the radio appeal to all ships to be on the alert for traces of the weather ship and to go to her assistance if spotted. The storm warning and order was repeated. Three Navy frigates had been ordered to the Pondoland coast, and Maritime Command was to fly rescue sorties at daylight, if the storm would permit.
Traces? she asked herself in agony. Had there been some further information behind the news bulletins which already presupposed the loss of the weather ship? For a moment she was tempted to telephone again, but she resisted it. She made some tea, put out the light, and let the recurring lighthouse flash be a pulsating, calculable goad across her face all through the long night. When it became colder, she fetched a rug and put it over her knees and pulled on the thick yachting sweater with its strange shoulder design, the one she had worn when she came aboard my ship in harbour. She remembered that too.
She sat and waited, because in her heart she knew, like the other Fairlie women who had waited, the one for the Waratah and the other for the airliner, that the man she loved was not dead.
When the light came, the lighthouse's scalpel no longer cut into her eyes, and she slept in the chair.
When the light came to my eyes, a bright imperative flash cut across the waves under the grey cloud scud. I could not see the signalling ship itself in that wild sea, but that quick, professional clatter of the shutter told me it was a warship. What ship is that?
'Get me a torch-a lamp — anything that signals,' I ordered Smit.
He went below to look. The warship was coming up fast;
I began to make out her guns and radar through the water she was throwing over herself. For a moment the sailor in me paused to admire the splendid sight, but my pleasure was rapidly overshadowed by the fact that the warship represented, in the most tangible form, the authority I had defied. A string of explanations raced through my mind, for daylight had shown what a beating the staunch little whaler had taken. The flimsy radiosonde hut had been flattened to the deck; its companion, the radio hut, was still standing drunkenly, one side crumpled and askew. The fragments of the radar antenna, the high direction-finder forward of the funnel and the small stern mast were wrapped together in an inextricable embrace with stanchions and bridge plating which had been torn away. The catwalk for'ard to the bows from the starboard side of the bridge to the harpoon gun platform was bent to the deck in an untidy V. Two heavy steel supports with which it was normally attached to the starboard rail had been snapped off. We had managed to save the stocky foremast from going overboard by trapping the stays, but nevertheless it lay over drunkenly too; the metal outriggers which took the masthead lights seemed somehow to have woven themselves into the ratlines. Normally the harpoon gun was positioned between the flares of the bow, but I had had it removed in Durban, so that the break which it would have afforded to the head seas was missing. As a. result, a solid body of water had smashed on to the foredeck, ripping from its foundations the big winch, which had been thrown upwards through the centre of the bridge windows.
I had had no damage report from the two technicians in charge of the satellite observation apparatus, but Smit had told me enough to know that it would never work again. The hole in the deck had been our biggest anxiety during the night, but with daylight it was evident that the worst of the storm had spent itself, although the wind velocity was still, I estimated, Force 6 or 7, which meant it was blowing between 30 and 40 miles an hour. Far less water was coming aboard, and the pumps were managing. Walvis Bay, was, however, a sorry sight, and I would have to answer for it.
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