Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  I bit back my reactions. 'Is that panel really part of the Gemsbok?’

  One of the civilians - Warren, the aircraft manufacturer's representative-said wearily from the depths of his shaggy beard, That section of fuselage comes from a Viscount, you can take it from me. The rivet style and metallurgical content correspond with the Gemsbok mark. It is certainly not a Buccaneer.’

  Another civilian, a Transport Ministry Inspector of Crashes, was about to speak when the door was opened by a sergeant, who showed in an officer in Air Force uniform.

  'Sorry, colonel.'

  "We hadn't gone far,' said Joubert shortly. 'This is Captain Fairlie.'

  Major Bates's handshake was firm but uncommitted. 'I saw your ship from my Shackleton the other day. My crew were laying bets how long you would stay afloat.' He looked inquiringly at the metal panel, at the colonel, at Tafline. No one spoke. He found himself a chair in the silence.

  The Inspector of Crashes broke the uncomfortable atmosphere.

  'The style of stencil and type of paint is the same as we use for our Airways planes. No doubt. Of course, we haven't yet had time to make a full chemical analysis but it looks good at first glance.'

  Tafline broke in. 'Those other words and scratches - they run into one another. What do they mean?'

  'We've tried them and the figures also, but they look pretty hopeless,' Warren replied. 'Most of them are on top of each other. We could try some specialized photography and the handwriting experts, but I'm not very hopeful. It seems as if the man who wrote this was either dying or injured.' He turned to me. 'Sorry, I forgot for the moment he was your father. One becomes impersonal about these things.'

  'I don't accept that,' snapped Joubert. 'Anyone could have fabricated a thing like that. Who ever heard of a will being scratched on a chunk of metal by a pilot who died at the controls of a plane which vanished without trace?'

  'I might agree with you, except that panel came from a Viscount,' answered Warren. 'No question about it.'

  'Is that all you can tell?'

  Warren glanced at the Inspector of Crashes and grinned. 'I said we were busy on it all night. It tells a whole story.'

  The colonel flushed with annoyance when Tafline said quickly, 'Such as?'

  Some of the tiredness seemed to ease out of Warren as he warmed to his explanation. 'One works backwards in these matters. The buckling of the panel forward where the Gemsbok's name was shows that the force of the crash was underneath and upwards; in other words, the Viscount did not crash nose-first into some obstacle. It also shows that there was no explosion in the turbines on the port side, or else there would be blackening. We can pretty well rule out fire.'

  'The sea would put out a fire anyway.' Joubert tried to halt Warren's exposition.

  Warren ignored him. 'The style of curvature of the buckling shows that the airliner went in at full power, hit something hard like the sea, bounced, and then hit something else with the starboard or opposite wing. That something did the real damage. Probably tore off the wing and killed most of the passengers.'

  'You can't possibly tell me you can find out all this from one piece of metal,' objected Joubert.

  The Inspector of Crashes rushed to the support of his technical colleague.

  'We have a set number of things we look for in every crash.’

  'Listen . . .' exclaimed the red-faced colonel, but the Inspector and Warren continued to ignore him.

  "There was no explosion in this case, or else the pilot couldn't have written the message.'

  'Scratched,' corrected Warren. ‘It was then prised loose with some instrument - after the disaster.'

  The Inspector remained in full flight. 'Could there have been misreading of the altimeter by the pilot, or simply an error in the instrument itself .. .'

  ‘I'd rate the chances of an altimeter fault high,' argued Warren. 'It's pretty certain that he hit the sea at full power and that he was confident that he was flying high enough not to encounter any obstacles.'

  Major Bates, the Air Force man, said, 'My squadron searched all that area with everything we had. Sonar and electronic instruments aren't the whole answer, though. But visual sightings and spottings are difficult in a sea which is murky from all the sand the current brings with it and the mud from all those rivers.'

  Colonel Joubert thumped the table with his fist.

  'This isn't an inquiry into the loss of the Gemsbok. That was held years ago,' he grated. 'It found that the pilot died at the controls-and that is good enough for me. I'm a policeman, and I say there is little proof that this inscription was made by Captain Fairlie's father.'

  Take it or leave it, that panel is from a Viscount - probably the Gemsbok,' replied Warren.

  The colonel glared at the two experts, at Tafline, and then let his gaze rest on me. Slowly, deliberately, he lit a cigarette and watched me through the cloud of smoke.

  'I don't deny it,' he said. 'I'll accept that it was the Gemsbok' He eyed me fixedly. 'Captain Fairlie, the C-in-C gave me a transcript of your interview with him.' He indicated the pile of typescript in front of him. There were newspapers in the collection, too, sensationalizing Musgrave's questions about the Waratah. Waratah Found?' asked one headline. 'Did Fairlie Brothers have a Treasure Tryst?' I squirmed at the sight of them. Musgrave had known just the right note to strike for the press.

  'There are pages and pages here about your views on the search for the Waratah . . .' He stopped and looked at me inquiringly.

  'Yes?'

  'Do you not find it strange that after your ship had nearly sunk in that big storm, you were sent a telegram which didn't say anything about your escape, or wish you safe, but only told you to stay away from the Waratah’

  'I understood what was meant.’

  'Did you, Captain Fairlie? Did you?'

  'I mean, we had talked about the Waratah, we shared something over the old ship.' 'What did you share?'

  Tafline interrupted. 'It was the thing which really brought us together. It was a kind of starting-point, our first common ground . . .'

  Joubert eyed us both. 4A very strange form of introduction, I may say. It struck me as so strange that I felt it necessary to ask you to come along here today and tell me more. "Keep away from the Waratah until I see you". Why keep away? What did you intend to discuss about the ship when you met Captain Fairlie again? If you keep away from something, you must know where the something is, not so?’

  Tafline blushed and was confused. 'It-it was a form of expression. I didn't know Captain Fairlie very well at that stage. I. ,.'

  'You were in the area recently where the panel was found, were you not, Captain Fairlie?'

  The faces round me turned blank at Joubert's tone of interrogation. It seemed, too, that the friendly surge of professional interest by the civilian experts had dimmed.

  'Yes, but. . .’

  'But what?'

  I gestured towards the documents on the desk. 'I explained it all to the C-in-C. I tried to at the Buccaneer inquiry. I have long believed that the clue to Waratah's disappearance was the answer to safety for oil rigs in that area.'

  'Quite so, quite so. Yet the telegram says, "keep away from the Waratah"'

  He let the silence fall, and then went on, 'I said before, I am a policeman, Captain Fairlie, and in order to get to the bottom of things, we look below what lies on the surface. There are a number of very strange undercurrents in all this. The juffrou's telegram is one of them.'

  'It was just a simple message with no hidden or sinister meanings ...' I began.

  'What do you say, juftrou’

  'It was an everyday thought wishing him well.'

  Joubert smiled sarcastically. ' "Keep away from the Waratah" - a very ordinary thing for a young lady in love to say!'

  'You're reading all sorts of things into this, colonel!' I protested.

  There is nothing ordinary about a testament being scratched on a sheet of aluminium,' retorted Joubert. ‘It is less ordinary still for some
one whom everyone believes was killed in an airliner crash to bequeath his son a non-existent ship. In all my experience, I have never heard of anything like it.'

  I said, 'You've forgotten the watch, Colonel Joubert.'

  'No, Captain Fairlie, I have not.'

  The police major chuckled in the background like a jackal at a lion's kill.

  'That watch is just the sort of extra fancy touch that rouses a policeman's deepest instincts of distrust. It makes the job look too right, too watertight. If it weren't for that watch, I might have had doubts. But look at it-it's one of those self-winding calendar types and the hand has been set at October 23, 1967. Not you notice, at the date of the crash, July, 1967, but a couple of months later. Very clever, very clever indeed!'

  I checked my anger. 'You want proof-we can easily have the watch analysed. Or I can tell you myself-there was an inscription from the Air Force Association on the back. It was given to him when he became chief civilian pilot. The wording said something about his war-time raids.'

  'I don't for a moment doubt it is your father's watch, Captain Fairlie, just as I don't doubt that it is a panel from the Gemsbok. What worries me is how all this surfaced at once, and why. And where that telegram about the Waratah fits into it.'

  ‘I’ve tried to explain. I've said over and over ..

  Joubert waved his hand in dismissal. ‘I want to think this thing over-a lot. You'll be hearing from me again.' He laughed in his overbearing way. 'If you really want people to be on your side, you produce the wreck of the Waratah, Until then, you still have a great deal of explaining to do to a lot of people, Captain Fairlie!'

  I went cold at the thought. 'What do we say to the press?'

  Joubert shrugged and laughed again. 'You say, Captain Fairlie! It's your story. You set the ball rolling.'

  I turned to Tafline. She was unhappy, withdrawn. Again I wondered, what was all this Waratah suspicion and subtle accusation doing to her feelings?

  Joubert added, 'That pretty face of yours will provide the press with the romantic interest on the story they love so, juffrou.''

  An hour later, stunned by a barrage of reporters' questionings and blinded by a score of bursting flashbulbs, we stood by the great splash of colour which is the flower market. She had not spoken since we emerged into the street, but she asked the Malay woman for kalkoentjies ('little turkeys') - those tiny exquisite wild gladioli, daubed with colours as if they had just been painted and scented, which came from hidden places of the Western Cape. Because it was winter, they were difficult to obtain in the market, but the woman came back smiling with some of the earliest which had been gathered from some sheltered kloof. I pinned the bunch to her lapel without speaking, and she looked down into the brown-and-yellow splashed centre.

  'They are like a woman in love.' she murmured. 'Beautiful by day, and her heart perfumed at night.'

  Why did my father have to find the Waratah? I asked myself resentfully, looking at her lovely face. Why did they have to come between us, those puzzling, bitter, unanswerable questions?

  She said, The Waratah is like the albatross hung round the Ancient Mariner's neck - for both of us. It has driven you into a corner, Ian. You are discredited, in danger of losing everything - your career, reputation, esteem .. .'

  The cold fear tugged at my heart as I waited for her next words.

  'We can never realize our love properly while we carry this burden.'

  The numb silence fell between us. I did not want it, but she was right and I knew that she was right.

  I was afraid, though, when I saw Greatheart reach for the sword.

  She said, 'We must go and look for the Waratah, you and I.'

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Touleier planed swiftly down the following sea, rose, and shook herself with an exulting motion as she raced out of the trough under full power of her great racing blue nylon spinnaker. A dollop of cold sea came aboard as she lifted and sloshed past me as I went forward to trim the jib a little so that all the spent wind of the spinnaker would spill into it, just as the mainsail was giving its overflow to the spinnaker itself.

  'Watch it!' I warned Jubela at the helm.

  Touleier was making a good eleven knots with a bone ' between her teeth’, and I was driving her hard. Her sails were as taut and eager as I to get to the Bashee. Touleier liked it that way-she was a thoroughbred and could take what I handed out and, even in the rising sea and fresh south-westerly wind on the port quarter, she did not roll much because of her lean, streamlined hull. She was steady, tense, alive, and seemed to be exhilarating in being taken from her winter confinement as much as I did driving her. Between Touleier and myself there was that imponderable rapport which comes sometimes between a man and his ship perhaps that is why I won the South American race in her -and I understood her every mood. It was this, perhaps, which made me a little particular about Jubela steering her, although he was handling the superb flier magnificently, grinning now and again as she picked up an extra knot or two in a downward plane, or giving a slight correction to the helm as he watched the taut, towering pyramid of canvas above him.

  Tafline watched us from the cockpit as we handled the yacht. Like us, she wore oilskins, but no hood, and the wind blew her short hair forward over her forehead. Something of the pure joy of the yacht's speed touched her, too, and relaxed the urgency of our forward flight; she spoke only a little now and then to ask me some technicality of sailing.

  Touleier drove for the Bashee.

  I had emerged from my unhappy engagement with the colonel and the reporters to the easement of that moment with her by the flower-sellers stunned, bewildered, raw, confused, certainly with no idea of repeating my search for the Waratah. The fact that the liner lay somewhere accessible, not hundreds of feet deep out of reach in some forsaken patch of sea, beat like a drum in my brain, but equally imperative was the unconcealed hostility of the authorities and their conviction that they had to do with an irresponsible nut. Whether I would ever be allowed to command the Walvis Bay again and resume the weather watch was open to the gravest doubt. At any moment I expected to be summoned to Pretoria to account for using the weather ship as a springboard for what the Weather Bureau undoubtedly now regarded as a private investigation of the Waratah mystery and nothing else.

  Because my whole being was a ripple of hurt nerves, I had responded badly to her suggestion that we should go and search for the vanished liner.

  How could we hope to succeed, I asked her roughly, where squadrons of specially equipped aircraft, helicopters and warships had failed? It was barely a fortnight since Major Bates and his men had been over it. Bates had button-holed me on leaving the Conference, and asked my permission to read in the transcript, in the interest of his Maritime Group, my statements about off-shore currents and winds. 'Only providing you don't also use it as evidence against me,' I had said firmly.

  I had used Bates's own words to justify my own reluctance.

  The air-search revealed nothing. Bates himself has said so, I argued with her. 'I myself sailed the Waratah's exact course, and I saw nothing, I assure you.'

  She had paused, in that guarded way of hers, her face buried in her nosegay.

  True,' she replied quietly. There was no island for Bates and his fliers to see, no mysterious underwater cavern, no hulk. But you saw what there was. You saw that ancient ship, sailing against the wind.'

  I had felt uncomfortable and on the defensive. I regretted having told even her.

  'It might have been anything - some sort of optical illusion caused by the waves and the light. One can't start a search on anything as nebulous as that.'

  'Phillips of the Clan Macintyre saw it too,' she replied.

  'I am not denying it,' I hedged. 'All I am saying is that it is certainly not substantial enough to approach the authorities. If I came along now, after all that has happened, with a story that I had seen the Flying Dutchman, I think they'd clap me in a lunatic asylum straight away. When it came to the point, I cou
ldn't even bring myself to tell the C-in-C. In order to convince them that they should renew the air-sea search, they need some completely down-to-earth, substantial, and tangible facts.'

  She smiled. 'I said, we must go and look, you and I. I didn't mention the authorities.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Touleier.'

  'Touleier, I expostulated. 'But she's laid up for the winter. You can't just go off in a yacht which doesn't belong to you anyway, but to a syndicate. Besides, it's winter, the worst time of the year.. .’

  The idea came to me during the Conference when I turned and looked at you,' she went on. 'Touleier's ready for the round-the-coast race in the spring, you told me so yourself. You also said they wanted you to skipper her, although you probably couldn't, if you're on the weather watch. She's got a new suit of sails and that untried self-steering device. Nothing would please the sponsors more than that the winner of the South American race should take Touleier on a quick shake-down cruise round the coast while his own ship is being repaired.'

  I gasped, then I laughed. It might still lie within my grasp to justify everything I had done and said about the Waratah.

  'It's so simple and so fantastic I’ I exclaimed, a little unsteadily. 'Jubela-I could get him to crew with us. It's a big strain handling a fast boat like Touleier by oneself, and Jubela knows his stuff. We can expect some rough weather . ..'

  'We want rough weather, we want another big gale,' she said firmly. 'It's the way we'll find the Waratah secret.'

  This time I'll take a camera along - a very good camera,' I remarked. 'If we see anything like my old sailing ship, I can at least bring back a picture for the doubting Thomases.'

  The thought of the wild sea and frenetic wind sobered my enthusiasm for a moment. 'We can count on at least half a dozen winter gales in those parts. However, the one I hit in Walvis Bay and the sort of gale which hit the Waratah was no ordinary winter gale. But we do know that the storm that hit Waratah was followed shortly afterwards by two other exceptional gales. We may be lucky-or unlucky. It's also very different being out in a blow in a small boat like Touleier and a ship even of Walvis Bay's size. The going will be rough.'