‘Telemotor pipes damaged by the bomb blast, sir,’ Mackinnon said.
Hooper stopped in the doorway. ‘Bad luck, Mr Mackinnon, bad luck, damn it,’ he said, intoning a favourite formula for misadventure. He turned away, shaking his head and raising his binoculars after their late assailant. ‘Bloody bad luck . . .’
The retiring aircraft droned away, its shape gradually merging with its trail of exhaust smoke until that, too, became a smudge in the haze above the distant horizon.
Smoke began to uncoil from the forward contactor house. For half an hour the screw thrashed astern in a welter of churning mud and water while forward hose parties mustered and extinguished the blaze. The junk they had so nearly run down passed them, the four generations composing her crew grinning at the James Cook from her deck.
It was six hours before the tugs, two from Shanghai and one from Holt’s Wharf at Pootung, succeeded in plucking the James Cook off the mud and into deep water, allowing her to resume her passage to Shanghai under tow.
As she slid free Mackinnon heard Hooper, a man who made an affectation of superstition, grumbling irrelevantly to the Pilot: ‘It’s bad enough ju-ju for a company to name their ships after men, but most of Eastern Steam’s heroes came to a sticky end.’
‘You’ll have a job using such a justification for a grounding, Captain,’ replied the Pilot, laughing now that the Garden Reach and the tall buildings of the International Settlement came into view. ‘You’ll be all right if you note protest on arrival at Shanghai. That bastard,’ he added with a jerk of his head at the sky, ‘was probably supposed to be beating up the Reds beyond Woosung.’
‘Well he’s cost me an ex-gratia payment plus towage to the buoys, damn him.’
‘Oh, a little cumshaw will eradicate the worry over repercussions locally, Captain. The tug skippers are flexible men.’
Nothing was ever made of the incident outside the board minutes of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company. Relatives at home learned only through the letters of the ship’s company how a British merchant ship had been bombed and strafed by a lone fighter-bomber of Chiang Kai-shek’s demoralised air force. The British papers were full of a more newsworthy story of the China coast, a story about the escape of a Royal Naval sloop, HMS Amethyst, from under the guns of the Communist Chinese and down the Yangtse Kiang. Beyond the Yangtse bar Admiral Brind waited for the Amethyst to rejoin the fleet while less than a hundred miles away the James Cook lay at her buoy off the Bund and her Master cursed his luck . . .
Mackinnon woke from his dream in a sweat. It had all come vividly back to him so that he could still hear Hooper’s ridiculous, superstitious claim, a claim he continued to press as the real reason for the calamity with a persistence persuasive enough to make his officers doubt he was in full control of his mental faculties. For them the official indifference and public ignorance of what had occurred merely fuelled a bitterness engendered during the war and increasingly endemic among them.
Staring into the darkness Mackinnon knew his own resentment, born in those days and simmering in his brain while he slept, had cooked up the dream from his memory. He sighed and rolled over. It would be over soon and there was consolation of a kind for him, at least. It was a pity for Stevenson and the others, of course, but times had never been easy for fools who went to sea for a living.
To compound Taylor’s dereliction and further lull Mackinnon and his officers into a false sense of security, the presence of the Philippine archipelago to windward acted like a great breakwater to the South China Sea, preventing that natural harbinger of bad weather, a heavy swell, from alerting them to approaching danger until only hours before the first onslaught of the wind.
Mackinnon noticed it first, fourteen hours after they had received the second storm warning, a low ground swell which rolled the Matthew Flinders in a lazy motion. It was already late morning, and he was pacing the forward boat-deck, glancing up at the overcast sky and entertaining doubts as to their sighting the sun at noon.
He went on to the bridge, acknowledged Taylor’s report about the overcast and remarked on the swell.
‘Yes, sir,’ was Taylor’s non-committal response. Mackinnon thought he looked strained and tense.
‘You all right, Mr Taylor?’ he asked gruffly. ‘You look a trifle under the weather.’
‘I’m fine, sir,’ Taylor said hastily, almost visibly pulling himself together. ‘I don’t think we’re even going to get an ex-meridian,’ he added, changing the subject.
‘No,’ Mackinnon agreed, turning his attention back to the navigation of his ship. The ex-meridian, an observation of the sun close to its midday culmination, could be corrected to obtain a latitude. It was not an absolutely accurate method, but, if based on good dead reckoning, was of substantial value. ‘Nevertheless,’ he went on, hefting his sextant, ‘we’ll hang on for a while.’
The radio-room telephone rang and Taylor answered it.
‘Link call coming in from Hong Kong,’ Sparks told Taylor. ‘Tell the Old Man, will you, Chas? We’re turn four, so it may be a while yet.’
‘Okay.’ Taylor hung up and returned to the Captain on the starboard bridge-wing. Stevenson and Rawlings had made their dutiful appearance, both with their sextants.
‘More in hope than anger, I think, sir,’ said Rawlings pulling a face at the cloud cover. Mackinnon grunted.
‘There’s a link call coming in, sir,’ announced Taylor, joining the knot of waiting officers. ‘Sparks says we’re turn four and it may be some time.’
Mackinnon stared through his sextant in a vain attempt to sight the pale, obscured disc of the sun as it promised to make a fleeting appearance. He thought of the telex from Dent’s; it was not surprising the company should supplement it with further instructions now the ship was approaching Hong Kong.
‘Dentco, I suppose,’ ruminated Rawlings, echoing Mackinnon’s thoughts.
‘On a Sunday?’ queried Stevenson. ‘Modern management will be out to play.’
Mackinnon had forgotten what day of the week it was. Stevenson’s perceptive remark, in tune with the bitter aftertaste of his dream, lodged in his mind a disquieting conviction the incoming call was both personal and significant. He remembered another such, long ago, when he received the first intimation his baby daughter was ill. He wondered how long the three other ships included in the radio station’s traffic list would take with their own calls.
‘Eight bells, sir,’ Taylor reported as the mystic hour of noon came and went, and the sun stayed behind the thickening veil of stratocumulus.
‘Nothing today, gentlemen,’ said Mackinnon. ‘It’ll have to be dead reckoning.’ They trooped into the chart-room to mark up the ship’s position and then dispersed. At the time, no one realised just how prophetic Captain Mackinnon’s remark had been.
The Captain was leaving the bridge bound for the saloon and lunch when Sparks phoned from the radio-room.
‘Our turn next,’ he said and Mackinnon hurried aft, grabbing at an awning spar stanchion on his way as the Matthew Flinders leaned to a particularly heavy roll.
‘I think it’s a personal call, sir,’ said Sparks, holding out the handset as Mackinnon entered the radio-room. The Captain’s heart thumped with irrational foreboding. He took the handset.
‘Hong Kong Radio, this is Matthew Flinders – Golf, Oscar, Kilo, Echo. All attention. Over.’
The deadpan tone of the operator sounded in his ear. ‘Golf, Oscar, Kilo, Echo, I have a call for you from the UK. Stand by . . .’
Mackinnon waited and then Shelagh’s voice had replaced the operator’s.
‘Hullo . . . ?’
‘Shelagh!’ he broke in, not wanting to put her to the embarrassment of the formalities of radio-speak. Sparks retreated discreetly. ‘Darling, it’s wonderful to hear your voice. How are you?’
‘I’m fine, John, fine. Where are you?’
‘I’ll be in Hong Kong about midnight the day after tomorrow.’ The ship rolled heavily again and he found he ha
d to brace himself against the radio-room desk. ‘Maybe a bit later. I think we’ve a blow coming on. I’m not too sure when I’ll get away, though. They’re selling the old hooker to the Chinese. Over.’
‘I’ve got a surprise for you, John. I’m coming out; flying Cathay Pacific tomorrow night . . . Over.’
‘What? Darling . . .’ Captain Mackinnon’s eye fell on the neatly clipped wad of pink message forms hung on the hook under the stencilled label: WEATHER. Something very primitive stirred in his stomach.
‘Johnnie? Did you hear? I’m flying out to meet you in Hong Kong. Over.’
‘Yes, yes, I hear you, Shelagh, that’s wonderful news. Over.’
‘You don’t sound very pleased . . .’
There was something wrong, something appallingly, dreadfully wrong, though he could not be certain . . . And then he realized it was the proximity of the position written on the storm warning in Sparks’s neat hand with the noon position he had just had entered in the deck log. The figures were still fresh in his mind. Instantly he knew a mistake had been made in plotting the typhoon’s centre; knew, too, why the swell was building with such rapidity and why an instinctive uncertainty had been clamouring for his full attention. Christ Almighty, he even knew the dream had been a premonition!
Mackinnon experienced a wave of nausea and in mute rebuke the Matthew Flinders rolled with a ponderous reminder of what was to come. In a few hours the taifun, the great wind, the hurricane of the China Sea, would be upon them. While he had been worrying about boat people and the disquieting inconvenience of their meeting, fate had been storing up the oldest of challenges to meet man on the sea, a great storm . . . He concluded the telephone conversation with an almost heartless brusqueness.
Somebody – he looked at the received time of the warning and realised it had been Taylor – had made a mistake, but Mackinnon sought true guilt nowhere other than in himself. He felt old and beaten. He eased himself into Sparks’s chair and caught his breath. It was the last quarter of the twentieth century; he had information technology at his fingertips even on an ancient ship like the Matthew Flinders. There was no possible excuse for being caught out . . .
Had he been a younger man he would have welcomed the challenge, perhaps even gone in search of it, but now, within days of the end of his last voyage, it was simply not fair.
The unworthy petulance of the thought stirred him. Sparks was coughing pointedly at the radio-room door.
‘Everything all right, sir?’ Mackinnon remembered the content of the link call. A few minutes ago he had been talking to Shelagh in distant England. She was coming out to meet him and the marvel of the thing struck him at the same instant as Sparks recalled him to the present. He stood up and faced the radio officer.
‘Well, yes and no, Sparks,’ he said. ‘The missus is flying to Hong Kong to keep an eye on me, but first I think this typhoon is going to give us a bit of a dusting.’
The banality of the exchange steadied him. Perhaps it was Sparks’s quite unconscious deference, perhaps merely his own automatic assumption of responsibility, but he felt the sensation of fear recede.
‘Typhoon David,’ Sparks said casually. ‘Yes, it looks as if it might be getting a bit close.’ Both men braced themselves against another heavy lurch of the ship. ‘And feels it.’
‘Why the hell,’ said Mackinnon as he made to leave, ‘do they give the bloody things male names nowadays?’
‘It’s called progress, sir. In the name of sexual equality.’
But for Mackinnon it held a hint of superstition. He thought of Captain Hooper and his rabbit’s foot as he made his way back to the bridge. Out on the boat-deck he was aware the wind was increasing in force. White horses already dotted the sea and, although no more than a strong breeze at the moment, the wind had an edge to it. He looked up; the cloud base was lower than when he had searched for the sun at noon.
In the chart-room he pulled out the chart on which first Stevenson and then Taylor had plotted the positions of the tropical revolving storm, for so it had been denoted at the first report. By the time Taylor had bent over this chart the previous evening, it had already been upgraded to the sinister dignity of a typhoon and given the code name ‘David’.
Mackinnon studied the two positions. Whilst he realised the early movement of such disturbances is both unpredictable and irregular, the data about them can confuse. Premature judgements based on scanty information mislead, but the distance between them was suspiciously short and the predicted recurvature unusually abrupt. The mistake he should have spotted earlier was now so obvious that he found it difficult to understand why he had not questioned it before.
He knew, too, that the almost (at least in meteoreological terms) sudden generation of the storm meant that it was probably relatively small. That would account for both the size of the swell and the present moderate wind force they were experiencing. It would, however, be foolish in the extreme to think of its lack of size as grounds for dismissing it. The warning spoke of winds of force twelve, sixty-five knots. His only consolation seemed to be that it would probably not last long. But, equally, its arrival could not be far away.
Fourteen, fifteen hours ago the centre of the typhoon had passed over the west coast of Mindanao and must by now have traversed the Sulu Sea and be assaulting Palawan. Unlike Mindanao, Palawan was only about twenty-five miles wide. No wonder there was a swell . . .
Mackinnon strode out on to the starboard bridge-wing. He had not misjudged the steady rising of the wind. The inevitability of their passage through the typhoon and his estimation of its likely duration made the whole matter bearable. There was nothing he could do about it beyond nursing his ship through it. Shelagh would be waiting for him in Hong Kong. It was something to look forward to; a carrot to dangle in front of the donkey, allowing him to thrust to the back of his mind the stick of his own guilt which threatened to beat him. He must turn out the crowd and send them round the decks to make all secure, double-check the derrick lashings and tighten the wires on the drums of deck cargo on the after well-deck.
Young Stevenson was on watch and Mackinnon found him staring to windward through his glasses. There was no purpose in pointing out the error in the plotting of the typhoon warning. Stevenson would be better employed supervising the securing of the upper decks.
‘Mr Stevenson, I want a word . . .’
Stevenson turned. ‘Ah, sir, I was just about to call you. I think you’d better have a look at what’s four points to starboard.’ He held out the binoculars to Mackinnon. ‘Four points to starboard, sir,’ he repeated.
Mackinnon took the glasses, levelled them at the horizon and, focussing them, swung them forty-five degrees on the bow.
He did not want to acknowledge what he could see. For upwards of a minute he stood staring at the image in the glasses. Suddenly his confidence waned. The memory of his dream and Captain Hooper’s words came back to him. Eastern Steam’s eponymous heroes had mostly come to a sticky end. Cook hacked to pieces on the beach at Hawaii; Hudson and his son frozen in a small boat after the mutiny of their crew; Dampier dying of neglect; Fitzroy by his own razor, and Flinders, poor Flinders, whose luck changed after his encounter with Entrecasteaux . . .
Slowly Mackinnon lowered the binoculars.
‘Put the engines on stand-by, Mr Stevenson,’ he said expressionlessly. ‘Get a man on the wheel and then ring down and ask the Mate to come up.’
‘We are about to make our own encounter,’ he murmured to himself and then chid himself for his foolishness. He remembered the law of imbuggerance and the premonition he had sensed in Singapore. He had run out of luck, sure, but it was nothing he should not be able to handle.
Captain Mackinnon raised the glasses again and, on the rim of the typhoon, he considered how best to recover the sodden refugees in the waterlogged boat to windward.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Refugees
The jangle of the engine-room telegraph alerted almost everybody on board the Matt
hew Flinders to the fact that something unusual was happening. On some merchant ships it had once been the practice to ring it at noon by way of a test, allowing bridge and engine-room clocks to be synchronised. Telegraphs are rung when a vessel moves into fog, heavy rain or snow, but the crew are usually alerted to this by other symptoms such as their own senses, a call for lookouts, or the peremptory blare of the siren. Normally the telegraph remains silent from manoeuvring at one port to manoeuvring at the next. When, therefore, Stevenson rang it that afternoon, even those dozing in their watch below stirred uneasily in their bunks.
Only for Taylor, alone in his cabin after lunch, did the noise come as a welcome distraction. Unable to relax despite the fitful and unsatisfactory drowsiness of the past nights, he was exhausted to the point of nervous insomnia. He had come to dread his watches below and the awful isolation of being unable to live with himself.
The headaches he had complained of were secondary symptoms of his malaise, products of his intense anxiety and lack of sleep. For several days now he had suffered the agony of the damned without respite, too ashamed to confess it to Mackinnon, too obsessed with the conviction it masked a more terrible disease. The periods of acute pain were interspersed with long intervals of worry, of putting off the next onslaught, yet all the time imagining the desire to urinate was pressing. The foul truth of the gleet would not let him forget, while the greater fear of either syphilis or AIDS burdened every thought he had. And though Taylor had made a reprehensible mistake in the matter of the misinterpreted typhoon warning, he clung to his sanity and hid his shame with an almost heroic determination. When the telegraph rang, Taylor reacted immediately, beating Chief Officer Rawlings to the bridge.
The seamen, just turning to on deck after their dinner, crowded to the rail. Off-duty engineers and greasers appeared and the T-shirts of stewards and the cook sprinkled the gathering as that other, esoteric shipboard telegraphy sent the fact of their encounter through the vessel with the speed of rumour.
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