Endangered Species

by Richard Woodman

  The hold spaces of the Matthew Flinders consisted of six hatches numbered from forward, beneath each of which extended a three-metre-high ’tween deck and then a deep lower hold. The bottom of the latter was formed by a double skin used as a fuel oil tank. In Singapore much of the cargo had been discharged from the ’tween deck. Exposed ‘faces’ of cargo for Hong Kong had been ‘tommed off’, shored up with heavy timbers and planks, a surprisingly effective, if time-consuming and expensive, method of preserving cargo stows. But where the bulldozers’ own inertia combined with the heavy chain lashings had held against the worst ravages of the typhoon, the lighter rope lashings about the cement mixers had parted. It would have started with a small movement, a tiny, imperceptible sawing of the ropes, tensioned by twisted toggles of timber to form a ‘Spanish windlass’. The lighter cement mixers were less stable than the massive, track-mounted ’dozers. The rolling had exaggerated their movement, increasing the sawing and slackening of the lashings, gradually casting them loose. As Stevenson dropped from the dull grey light of the overcast morning into the stale, dusty air of the ’tween deck, lit by the orange pools of the intermittent cargo lights set behind grilles in the deckhead, he was overwhelmed by a sense of claustrophobia.

  When Braddock plucked at his arm he almost jumped, then steadied himself.

  ‘Third’s over there.’ Braddock pointed and Stevenson could see Taylor’s grubbily white form dodging about a monstrous shape as it lurched and slid with a squealing of steel on steel and a shower of sparks that in themselves sent shivers of apprehension down Stevenson’s spine.

  ‘He wants to get a rope on each mixer, Sec. That’s what he told me to tell yer. Once we’ve restrained ’em we can get some chains down ’ere.’

  ‘Got it!’

  Stevenson scrambled forward over a stow of cases of beer. In the airless ’tween deck, in marked contrast to the atmosphere on deck, a faint but insistent queasiness seized him. A melange of stinks, chiefly that of stale alcohol filled the available space. Uncoiling his length of rope he advanced towards Taylor who, he could now see, was, with Williams, circling the nearest of the three mixers.

  ‘Look out!’

  Taylor, wary as a hunter, had been watching his quarry and already sensed the coming movement of the ship as the Matthew Flinders began to climb a long swell and roll lugubriously to starboard. All at once the relative peace of the ’tween deck was shattered. The three loose cement mixers moved towards Stevenson, approaching from the after starboard corner of the ’tween deck. To his left a tumbled and crushed heap of cardboard cartons, their contents spewed across the deck and burst by successive impacts of the rogue mixers, had formed a cushion and clearly saved the vulnerable shell plating of the ship from the worst damage the mixers might have done.

  ‘Here, Alex, quick!’

  Dragging his rope clear of two of the lumbering juggernauts, Stevenson edged round them as they crashed together. Instantly Stevenson perceived the Third Mate’s intention. One of the mixers had not quite broken free. A single strand of its original lashing had caught and it swung, not yet an agent of indiscriminate destruction. As he reached Williams and Taylor, they grabbed his rope and cast a double turn round the heavy vertical pillar that supported the deck above. After a few minutes exertion, interrupted by only a single threatening lurch of the other cement mixers, they had one of them secured.

  ‘Okay,’ Taylor yelled in triumph, ‘now for number two!’

  Freddie Thorpe propped the woman up and, with an arm about her shoulders, held the cup of hot, sweet and milky tea to her trembling mouth. He was sweating with the effort of the task, bracing his fat, overfed body against the bunk in an attempt to ease the buffeting of the ship’s motion as the Matthew Flinders climbed laboriously over a succession of low, wind-shorn waves. As she finished the woman spoke, searching his rheumy eyes for some knowledge. Instinctively Thorpe nodded, setting the cup down and lowering the woman back on to her pillow. She too was sodden with perspiration.

  ‘Your baby okay.’ He cradled his arms and swung them back and forth. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay,’ he thought the woman replied. As she closed her eyes he picked up the ampoule of morphine.

  Behind him the empty cup fell to the deck and smashed.

  When the officers had gone Mackinnon ventured cautiously from the wheelhouse to stare at the panorama daylight revealed. It was awesome. A world circumscribed in its visibility by the white mist, for salt spray transfigured the dark surface of the heaving sea, evidence of the titanic brutality of the wind as it scourged the sea’s surface. It was as though air and sea were fused together into a new element by the catalytic effect of the wind. In this new element he, John Mackinnon, master mariner, commander of the motor vessel Matthew Flinders, found it difficult to breath. A feeling of panic gripped him as he gasped for breath, until sense drove him back within the wheelhouse where the pressure on his eardrums was bearable and the curtains of spray constantly hitting the windows obscured his view from the dreadful desolation of the scene beyond.

  ‘Never seen anyt’ing like it before,’ Pritchard remarked and Mackinnon, unnerved by the experience, was about to squash the Able Seaman’s presumption when he realised Pritchard too was scared.

  ‘Quite a blow,’ he said, jamming himself into his observation post in the forward starboard corner of the wheelhouse.

  He had to face the fact that, until the men below secured the loose cargo, he must remain hove-to. Assuming they eventually succeeded in achieving what was, he knew, a damnably dangerous task, a task for which all legislation respecting safety might be thrown aside, displaced by the invocation of ‘the safety of the ship’ clause in the Articles of Agreement between him as Master and them as crew at the long-ago signing on, he had to turn round again. And that, in the present wind strength, was demonstrably impossible. Their bow would not turn further into the wind and to pay off the other way, to ‘wear ship’, as the old sailing men would have said, meant exposing her to more violent rolling with no guarantee that they could hold her stern to the wind or, failing all else, return the ship to her present position of relative safety. Another engine failure could not be contemplated and so it became paramount in Mackinnon’s mind to maintain the status quo.

  But that now meant, he was certain, risking the ship in the typhoon’s eye. The wind circulating the first upward rush of damp tropical air, the polewards spin of coriolis and the initiation of the whirling storm system were simple enough to grasp. As the warm air rose, it cooled, releasing moisture in the form of the rain they had experienced and this cooling liberated energy, shooting the mass of tropical air higher and drawing in beneath it the cooler, damp air around the storm’s path, fuelling its own violence and causing the great winds they now endured.

  But a thing spinning tends to fly outwards, so that the indraught of the vacuous centre and the centrifugal force balance. The winds about the vortex of so violent a storm as Typhoon David, had undoubtedly created this tempestuous equilibrium, forming a vast, invisible column, impenetrable to the inrushing air, but into which the ship could be drawn and in which the waves, once released from the immeasurable suppression of the winds, would clash from every direction of the compass.

  Then, only fate and her builders could save her . . .

  ‘Now!’

  Taylor, Stevenson, Braddock, Williams and the Carpenter circled the second cement mixer. As the men moved forward with the ropes looped between them, the ship lurched again. Instantly the disciplined cordon broke down and each man ran for the bolthole he had selected. Hanging back beneath the access hatch just outside the square of pale daylight and the view of the Bosun, Macgregor sniggered. No one appeared to miss him, so he told himself he had relieved Braddock as the link man between the ’tween deck and the Bosun above. He kept his head down.

  The two loose cement mixers skidded together with a crash and rumbled jerkily downhill, bringing up separately, one embedded in the crushed beer stow, the other against a pillar with a
jar that transmitted itself to Mackinnon again leaning his feverish forehead against the cool of the wheelhouse windows.

  ‘Funny how the bastard things hit together but don’t jam,’ Taylor called to Stevenson as they emerged from cover again, ready for another attempt. It was their seventh, though they were not counting.

  ‘Sod’s law,’ shouted Chippy as they jumped first one way and then the other in a hiatus of the ship’s motion.

  ‘Get away, get clear!’

  ‘No! No! We’ve got it! We’ve got it!’

  The confusion of shouts, their alarms and their triumphs sounded like battle cries in the sickeningly foetid air in which the dust rose beneath the imperfect lighting. The Matthew Flinders was pitching again, and rolling to leeward in a motion they had all by now become accustomed to, recognising the fact that her roll to windward was just sufficient to move the mixers back a little before the harsher, more violent roll to starboard sent them ‘downhill’. Here they were beginning to cause real damage, for the pulverised cartons were already broken through to the ship’s side.

  No one was very clear quite what happened. All Stevenson knew was that he and Braddock, attacking the mixer nearest them, caught a turn around its drum which this time did not slip off and had it instantly belayed in a manner that suggested they should have achieved the thing with ease long before.

  ‘Got the bugger!’ They howled with elation.

  ‘Now Chas . . .’ In the half-light they closed on the second mixer.

  Their triumph was short-lived. Taylor was infuriated by his failure to secure the cement mixers. He had almost done it three or four times, but a failure on the part of his team-mates to belay in time, or the twisting free of the bight he had caught about a section of the machine, or a simple missing of his throw, had maddened him to recklessness. It became paramount to his highly strung spirit to tame the things. They were as bestial as the germs he had debrided from the woman’s flesh, as horrible as the filthy gonococci that swarmed in his own blood, things to be fought to the uttermost point of defeat. He howled in his angry frustration as he assaulted the remaining cement-mixer yet again. It rumbled malevolently towards him as he stood his ground undaunted, a matador waiting to execute a flawless veronica.

  This time . . .

  Now!

  He skidded in the mess of beer and filth swilling about the deck and went down heavily on one knee. Williams saw what was happening and shouted a warning. Taylor struggled to rise, caught one foot in a coil of the rope that stretched across to the Able Seaman and the Carpenter who already had a turn round the adjacent pillar. The cement mixer struck him on the breast. Badly winded, Taylor grasped it instinctively to prevent himself falling under it, seeking to fling himself clear as soon as he had drawn breath. Instead he was borne on its front as the ship leaned to leeward in a heavy roll.

  Taylor’s voice pierced the gloom in a scream of agony.

  ‘Look to your steering,’ Mackinnon grumbled, turning from his window.

  ‘Haven’t moved the wheel, sir,’ Pritchard remonstrated. ‘Had her hard over all the time. That bugger knocked her down a bit.’

  Mackinnon grunted assent and Pritchard grinned, pleased with his own ability to match old Gorilla’s sangfroid.

  ‘She’s coming back now, sir,’ he said as the ship recovered from her heavy roll.

  The roll that pinned Taylor between the heavy industrial cement mixer and the ship’s side prevented them from extricating him. If ever they had wanted the mixer to slide back across the deck it was now, but the thing stayed immobile, though a torrent of invective accompanied the slithering and puny attempts they made to drag it off the Third Mate.

  Above the shouts, Stevenson became aware of Taylor’s voice and he bent to see the Third Mate’s face. It was a pale oval, held rigid by a rigor of neck muscles, distorted by pain and something else which he could not, at the time, put a name to.

  ‘Alex . . .’ Taylor’s mouth gaped in a rictus of agony, the syllables attenuated into a gurgle.

  ‘Chas, for God’s sake!’ Stevenson felt his own body shake, and then blood burst from Taylor’s mouth and it went slack as his head fell to one side. Into Stevenson’s mind slipped unbidden the phrase ‘gave up the ghost’, and the mystery brushed him in its passing. Then the heartless pragmatism of the seaman, fighting for the safety of his ship, asserted itself.

  ‘Get the lashings passed! Now!’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Now, damn it! He’s dead! There’s nothing else we can do.’

  The difficulty of holding the ship hove-to persuaded Mackinnon his assumptions were correct. They now had no alternative but to submit, nursing the ship through the coming hours as best they could. He hoped the working party could succeed before they entered the confusion of the vortex, and he peered down to where he could just make out a pair of figures moving aft, their oilskins beating their backsides as they crouched and half-crawled along. They had been toiling for over an hour and he was impatient for news.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Mackinnon turned to find Sparks behind him, holding a pink message form and with an ominous look upon his face.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Message, sir, from Hong Kong.’ Sparks threw a significant look at Pritchard and Mackinnon dragged himself reluctantly from the comparative comfort of his corner. In the chart-room Mackinnon cast about for his reading glasses.

  ‘I seem to have lost . . . what does it say?’

  ‘Basically, sir, they don’t want our passengers in Hong Kong.’

  ‘The authorities refuse us entry because we’ve picked up a load of boat people?’ Mackinnon exploded incredulously. He took the pink chit but the letters were illegible to his tired and long-sighted eyes and he handed it back.

  ‘Well, not quite, sir, not in so many words. The message is from Dentco but we’re ordered to Shanghai direct. Apparently most of the cargo was originally for transhipment and now our resale—’

  ‘God damn and blast the bastards! What do they actually say about the Vietnamese?’

  ‘Er . . .’ Sparks consulted the form. ‘In view your unauthorised acquisitions divert direct Shanghai whence bulk of cargo destined. They’ll save themselves transhipment.’

  ‘And dump those poor devils back where they started, more or less. It’s a bloody outrage. How the hell are we going to tell them?’

  ‘Hey, Cap’n . . .’

  Both men looked round. Dripping wet and with a strange look upon his face, Able Seaman Macgregor stood in the wheelhouse door. He was gasping with the effort of reaching the bridge first, maintaining the illusion of having been at the forefront of affairs both for his own and others’ benefit, and now he had his reward.

  ‘What the hell do you want?’ Mackinnon asked angrily.

  ‘It’s the Third Mate . . .’ Macgregor paused, suppressing his excitement with difficulty.

  ‘Well, man,’ Mackinnon snapped impatiently, ‘what about him?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  Time for Stevenson had slowed to a stupefied rate. The dissolution of the watch system and general disruption of the ship’s routine had been caused by the unusual events of picking up the boat people and running into the typhoon. These circumstances had in some measure contributed to this sense of detachment, but it was the physical intrusion of the typhoon itself, the altering of atmospheric pressure, the power of the great wind, the violent motion it caused the ship, which created an alien environment in which time, as a measure of relative solar progress, was dissolved.

  Everything took so long and was so exhausting: the struggle in the galley to get oil to drain from the sink; ordinary progress about the ship in which the very air was altered. The stale atmosphere of the accommodation with its taint of vomit and urine, of faecal matter and the noxious perspiration of fear, was at least breathable. And then the ’tween deck, like an anteroom of hell, had been full of mephitic gas in which they had performed prodigious exertions. The dim lights and the dust dist
urbed by the cement mixers and crushed beer cans sending out the sickly sweet effluvia of stale ale had torn at their lungs as they had finally secured the cement mixers with chains, working about Taylor’s bloodily mangled corpse. Then, back on deck an age later, with the shock of loss and the brush with death to clog the rational mind, the salt-and-water-laden medium in which they gasped was not air but the ocean itself, lifted and less dense than in its familiar state, but undoubtedly the ocean. Stevenson had seen for himself the great breaking waves and their decapitation by the taifun and he was under no illusion as to the whereabouts of that white mass of foaming and tumbling water. He, like Mackinnon above him, experienced the alien sensation.

  But, despite his exhaustion, it was chiefly reluctance that slowed his final climb to the bridge. He had found Rawlings reeling in the lifelines and met the Mate’s eyes. Rawlings already knew; had sent the odious Macgregor to the bridge with the news. Stevenson was the last man back into the shelter of the starboard alleyway. Words were unnecessary, for both officers felt a measure of guilt, their professional training making them receptive to such a reaction. Failure always carried its burden of responsibility and lodged easily in the souls of men bred to assume it. Macgregor felt no such constraint, hence his excitement in the presence of death. It had brushed him but chosen one of them.

  Stevenson nodded his head upwards, towards the bridge, and Rawlings had nodded too, dragging the lifelines into the shelter of the accommodation. On his upward trek Stevenson had stopped at the smoke-room door.

  The girl was sitting bolt upright, her back to the bulkhead, a look of abstraction upon her face. She did not see him, looking at her, and he was oddly bothered by what was in her mind’s eye.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Vortex

  At all costs, Mackinnon had told himself earlier, at all costs he must secure his ship. Now, with Ernie York already gone and another death to pay the old currency for the poet’s ‘admiralty’, he wondered if it was enough. He had tempted providence, too, when he had spoken to Shelagh: ‘We’ll be in Hong Kong the day after tomorrow.’