‘Thanks.’ He took a roll and then the mug just as the ship dipped her bow and began to broach and roll.
‘Steady there . . .’
Bracing themselves, the three men waited for the ship to right herself. She shook at the impact of the first quartering sea. Stevenson, the mug in one hand, stuffed the roll in his mouth and seized the range grab-rail as the rolling increased. A moment later they each knew something had gone seriously wrong.
‘Holy shit!’ swore Thorpe as the Matthew Flinders rolled to port and they felt her rise as the approaching sea heaped itself under the hull. They felt her thrown over to starboard as the breaker slammed against her with an immense, terrifying jar.
Like Mackinnon three decks above him, Stevenson was caught partially off balance with only one hand free. Wang Lee and Thorpe cannoned into and clung to each other, skidding down the galley’s tiled deck and crashing into the stainless-steel lockers to starboard. The ladles and straining spoons dangling above the range were flung from their hooks, the port-side lockers burst their turn-buckles and pots and pans, knives and utensils tumbled down upon them with a clatter.
Stevenson was precipitated towards the hooked-open entry door. He had dropped the mug, but he had the fleeting impression that gravity drew it chest height, parallel to his own direction of descent, the soup slopping from it in a dollop. He spat out the roll as his hands went out to save himself; the entrance loomed, he caught at the side of it and, with a sickening blow, his shoulder fetched up against the door jamb. A wave of nausea tore through him as the intervention of the door jamb spun him round and shot him backwards into the alleyway beyond.
Simultaneously water burst in upon the accommodation. Stevenson fell full length and it washed over him as it rushed like a miniature bore the length of the alleyway, diminishing only where it spewed into adjacent cabins and down, over the low sea step, into the storeroom alleyway and master-gyro room below. The air was filled with the screams and howls of the boat people. The security of their exhausted sleep was abruptly terminated by this terrifying change in their apparently secure circumstances. The motion of the ship was suddenly a suffocating extension of the exposed horrors of the junk. The edge of their tiredness removed by two or three hours’ oblivion, they woke to be revolted by the smell of diesel oil, of European cooking, of the Europeans themselves in this battened-down, enclosed, staggering, drunken steel box.
In the Chief Engineer’s cabin the telephone rang about thirty seconds before Macgregor lost control of the ship.
After Mackinnon had visited Mr York prior to amputating the feet of the Vietnamese woman, the Chief had gone below and told the Second Engineer, who was then on watch, that he wanted the engines put on to diesel oil. Normally, when on passage between ports, the Matthew Flinders’s Burmeister and Wain diesel engine ran on fuel oil, a cruder, cheaper means of power than the more expensive pure diesel oil. This was only fed to the engine on ‘stand-by’, when the ship manoeuvred in and out of port. Reliability being essential at such times, the more volatile diesel oil was used as the engine was stopped and started.
Mackinnon, mindful of the worsening weather, had ordered the ship back on to diesel oil, anticipating the need to adjust the engine revolutions in the coming hours. Mr York had already hurriedly changed over from fuel oil to diesel once that afternoon, as Mackintosh had manoeuvred close to the drifting junk. Having recovered the boat people and increased speed, Mackinnon had telegraphed ‘full speed away’ and they had reverted to ordinary fuel oil.
But Mr York had a problem. Since the ship was to be paid off for scrap when she arrived in Hong Kong, Mr York had been instructed by the company superintendent before leaving the United Kingdom not to take more bunkers than was absolutely necessary. Calculating fuel consumption being both part of the Chief Engineer’s domain and something in which Mr York took a particular pride, he had left Singapore congratulating himself that he had done so to a nicety. He was in complete agreement with the company’s policy and had always abhorred waste.
During the course of their chat, Mackinnon had revealed that the old ship was to be sold to the Chinese for further trading. Not that the fact altered the matter of bunkers, York thought; it was too late for that! Nor did it bother him if the Chinks took the old lady over with empty double-bottoms. Let them buy their own bloody fuel; he intended remaining true to his principles. His standards had already saved the ship, though he did not, nor would he ever, appreciate the fact. As in the matter of the steering-flat door, the amount of bunkers generally, and diesel oil in particular, now became a matter of importance.
Mr York was a little older in years than Captain Mackinnon, and a lurking heart ailment he refused to admit to made him tire easily. He had no trouble falling asleep and was prostrate on his bunk when the insistent ringing of the telephone recalled him to consciousness. It was situated on the bulkhead above him and he reached up for it and heard the voice of the Second Engineer.
‘Chief? There’s something wrong. Can you come down?’
‘What’s the matter?’ The obvious note of concern in the voice of George Reed worried York. His normally competent and imperturbable Geordie Second sounded extremely anxious. Still holding the telephone York began to heave his legs over the leeboard of his bunk, bracing himself against the sudden roll of the ship.
‘I think there’s been a bit of a cock-up, Chief. Best if you come down.’
‘Right.’ York stood, leaned over the rumpled bunk and hung up the phone. He turned to reach for his boiler suit, worrying over Reed’s words, and had one leg in the garment when the Matthew Flinders flew over to starboard. Hopping and cursing, York cannoned into the edge of the partition separating his night cabin from his dayroom. Losing his balance he fell and struck his head on the corner of the steel filing cabinet beside the end of his desk. He was unconscious before his body subsided on the deck.
The ringing of the telephone impinged upon Taylor’s consciousness above the terrible boom of the typhoon and his anxiety to locate Mackinnon. He was the first of the trio on the bridge to recover his senses, aware the wheel was untended. Despite the deep gash on his arm from the flying shards of armoured glass, Taylor realised the perilous position of the ship. He clawed at the wheel, dragging it over to port in a desperate attempt to heave-to. Beside him in the darkness Macgregor whimpered.
‘Here, Macgregor! Take the wheel again! Hurry, man!’
The pale shape of Macgregor’s face shook itself as the telephone continued its insistent noise.
‘Taking the fucking wheel!’ Taylor shouted.
Macgregor lay inert, his face eclipsed as he hid it in the crook of his arm. Like an animal, Macgregor had lain down to die.
‘You gutless, fucking bastard!’ Taylor screamed, ignoring the telephone and looking frantically about. Something else was clamouring for his attention, something more urgent than the telephone. Something was wrong. Very wrong. For a moment he was unable to identify the source of his fear, for the deafening, booming roar of the wind dulled his wits and numbed his reflexes. All he could do was cling on to the wheel spokes and drag the rudder over to port. Then he knew it was useless.
The main engine had stopped.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Typhoon David
In that awesome moment Taylor felt a surge of adrenalin. Macgregor’s folly followed by his abject surrender made him intensely angry. His unnaturally elated mood sustained him, for he alone knew what was happening. Until Captain Mackinnon was located, he, the officer of the watch, was in command.
Drawing himself upright he looked at the dimly lit overhead magnetic compass. The ship’s head was unchanged. The Matthew Flinders lay a-hull, his efforts to heave her to were futile without the main engine. He let go of the wheel and it spun back to amidships.
He struggled uphill kicking aside large slivers of glass and answered the jangling telephone.
‘Hullo? Bridge?’
‘I was beginning to think you’d all died up there.’ Geordie
Reed’s frustrated sarcasm was apt, but he rushed on, preoccupied. ‘I can’t get hold of the Chief. I spoke to him before we rolled. Anyway, we’ve got an airlock in the fuel line, bloody engine’s stopped.’
‘I know.’ A chilling and distant rumble sent tremors through the ship. The Matthew Flinders continued to roll, but the roll no longer oscillated either side of the vertical, for she already lay at a mean angle of ten degrees to starboard. Taylor asked the question all hurrying, hastening navigators ask: ‘How long will it take?’
‘How the fucking hell would I know? Twenty minutes if you bastards’d stop rolling the sodding ship. In this lot, Christ knows!’ The phone slammed angrily down.
Taylor turned. The lights still glowed, so the auxiliary generators were unaffected, but the rumblings in the hold were ominous in the extreme. For a moment he stood still in the darkness, trying to listen for more noises despite the thrumming boom of the typhoon’s terrifyingly powerful note.
Someone loomed in the starboard doorway, a hunched, unfamiliar figure.
‘Who . . .? Sir? Are you all right?’
‘I’m alive, Mr Taylor,’ Mackinnon gasped.
‘The main engine’s stopped,’ Taylor reported, ‘some sort of fuel problem. The Second’s below and doesn’t know how long it will take to get going again. He’s sent for the Chief.’
‘Then we shall have to be patient, Mr Taylor,’ said the Captain, stumbling over Macgregor. ‘Is this you, Macgregor?’
The pale oval of Macgregor’s face rose from its supine funk and grunted.
‘Anybody ever tell you,’ Mackinnon said, his voice shouting above the wind-roar yet sounding menacingly low in the wheelhouse, ‘that you’ll never make a helmsman as long as your arse points downwards?’
Incredulous in that primordial blackness in which the wind reached a crescendo of mind-numbing noise and with its gusting beat about the ship making his head ache, Taylor cleared the glass away and watched Captain John Mackinnon step over Macgregor with a disdain visible in the gloom. With a sigh the Captain resumed his post in the forward corner of the wheelhouse.
‘Patience,’ he said, half to himself, ‘patience and daylight.’
Then, as the motion of the ship eased slightly, her lolling roll settling to a more regular pattern, Stevenson and Rawlings reported to the bridge having come up the internal companionway.
The stilled rumble of the engine had summoned them.
Rawlings announced his presence with lugubrious news. ‘I think the cargo’s on the move, sir.’
‘You can hear it down below,’ said Stevenson. He was nursing his shoulder.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Mackinnon said. ‘How are our passengers?’
‘Pretty frightened, sir. When that green one hit us, I was in the saloon area,’ Stevenson volunteered.
‘Clean swept us, sir,’ added Rawlings.
‘That,’ said Mackinnon in a tired voice, ‘was little more than heavy spray, gentlemen.’ He paused to let his words sink in. ‘I fear we can expect more of the same – if not worse. We’ll have to lie a-hull now while the engineers do what they can. Any oil we can get to windward of us will help? How much leeway we are making I leave to your imagination.’
‘We could get some out of the galley sink. The scuppers are amidships and there’s cooking oil down there . . .’
‘See to it, Mr Stevenson, then reassure our passengers. We mustn’t forget the news you brought aboard.’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’ Stevenson turned to go below again. He made way for Sparks, hauling himself up the companionway by the handrails with an air of exhaustion.
‘Mr Rawlings,’ Mackinnon went on, addressing the Mate, ‘I want you to try and assess what’s happened below. Better assume the worst. We can expect to have heard something from forrard and not from Number Five ’tween deck. See what you can do.’
‘Very well, sir.’
‘And Mr Rawlings . . .’
‘Sir?’
‘No risks.’
‘No risks, aye, aye, sir.’
Mackinnon could guarantee Rawlings would take no risks, but the public instruction not to might stiffen his resolution. He caught sight of another figure in the wheelhouse.
‘That you, Sparks?’
‘Yes, Captain, d’you want . . .?’ Sparks’s voice tailed off as if unwilling to form the words. Mackinnon caught his meaning.
‘No, no, not yet. We’re down, but not out. You can make yourself useful by sending another typhoon report. Say: wind north, force twelve.’
‘Position?’
Mackinnon grunted. ‘Same as the last, near enough. What we made to the north we lost to leeward long ago. I’ll work out something more accurate later.’
Give them all something to do, Mackinnon thought; keep them busy, thinking about their own tasks. Only way to save the ship. No one would get to them in this weather, if they did send a distress signal. Maybe, if they survived until daylight, he would change his mind. Not now. ‘Got that, Sparks?’
‘On my way, sir.’
‘Be careful on the boat-deck.’
‘Don’t worry, sir.’
But Mackinnon did. As the Matthew Flinders leaned away from the wind her decks were in the lee of the weather rail. So strong was the wind now that in such areas it created a partial vacuum, sucking a loose object to leeward. Sparks, exposed on the boat deck, was one such loose object.
In the days of wooden hatch-boards and canvas tarpaulins such a suction could tear a vessel’s holds open. Fortunately the Matthew Flinders’s steel Macgregor hatches were proof against that, though the irony of both their plight and their survival being synonymous did not escape the Captain’s divagating mind. The unreliable owner of the proud clan name sat hunched in a corner.
‘Mr Taylor?’
‘Sir?’
‘Get another seaman up here and then have that arm of yours dressed. You’re leaking rather badly.’
Taylor looked down. His bare forearm was black with blood and, now that Mackinnon drew his attention to it, it throbbed painfully. He began to laugh.
‘What’s the matter?’ Mackinnon asked sharply and Taylor muffled his hysteria with an effort. If he bled to death the loathsome gonococci would leach from his body! The image of his pale, putrified corpse sinking in the ocean was irresistibly funny.
Going below again Stevenson thought of the ammunition clip. The Captain’s remark had reminded him. Funny how one forgot things, how events overlay each other eclipsing one concern with another. He tried to remember the boat trips in detail. There had been so many of them and only the last stood out, but by then he was alert to the possibility of one of the boat people having a gun.
Yes, some bundles had gone aboard, slung over the shoulders of at least two women and, he was certain, one of the men. They might have concealed a gun, but so what? The poor devils had been running for their lives. If one of them had a gun it did not, in itself, mean he nursed any sinister intent now. Was old Gorilla not being a bit over the top with his apprehension?
As he reached the main-deck level Stevenson heard the babel of the boat people. The cries of the children, the keening of frightened women and the helpless anger of the men had subsided now the ship had steadied somewhat. Animated shouts came from the saloon. They could get ugly, Stevenson thought, but would gain nothing by it. Their chances of survival were entirely dependent upon the crew of the Matthew Flinders. Such a consideration revived the feeling of protection towards the girl, then he tossed the silliness aside. He had a more urgent task.
In the galley he found a disgusting mess of flour, cooking oil, spices, salt and rice mixed with seawater swilling across the deck. The ready-use lockers had disgorged their contents, their doors banging back and forth with a metallic clatter. Not all the sunflower oil had been lost, however, and, dragging his feet through the muck, Stevenson reached the large, stainless-steel sink on the port side of the galley. Grabbing a passing tea-towel he stuffed it down the plug hole to stop the oil running ou
t in a dollop. With infinite caution, his wrenched shoulder paining him, he got hold of a five-litre can of oil and laid it in the sink. Then, looking round, he saw a large cooking knife, picked it up and hauled himself back uphill. Clinging to the rim of the sink with his left hand, his shoulder racking him, he stabbed furiously down with the knife, perforating the thin tin-plated can. The golden oil glooped viscously into the sink. He realised it would take one entire can to bring the slopping level up to the elevation of the plug hole. Patiently he worked round the galley and discovered two more cans in a leeward corner. Feet slithering and his now oily hands slipping on the handrails, he painfully dragged each to the high side of the galley.
When he had finished he stood panting. The simple task had taken twenty minutes and he felt exhausted and ill-tempered by it.
‘Like the poor bloody Viets,’ he muttered. Nothing was more truly exhausting than enduring. When he had caught his breath he turned and slid across the heaving deck. Back out in the alleyway, where he had fallen earlier, the chatter of the boat people surged like the filth borne by the water up and down its length. Drawing himself forward as much by the handrails as by walking, he approached the saloon. From the noise one imagined some sort of seething mass of wildly protesting humanity. Instead the men huddled against the bulkheads, their knees drawn up under their chins, emaciated elves clustered beneath the overhanging, toadstool-shapes of the dining tables. About their haunches the watery muck sluiced back and forth, while above their heads hung a thick blue haze from the glowing cigarettes they smoked.
Catching sight of Stevenson their voices rose in an arsis of misery and uncertainty. Bracing himself spread-legged, he held up his hands, palms towards them, fingers splayed, then pressed downwards, as though against resistance. Seeing the gesture they grew quiet.
‘Everything o-kay,’ he said with a calm deliberation. He glanced round the circle of hollow faces with their dark, tenebrous eyes. And smiled.
They watched, silently impassive. He waited, wanting a response, unable to leave them on so unsuccessful a note.
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