Southtrap

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  He lied sullenly. 'It was my night off last night.'

  We drove on in silence.

  I glanced up at the bulk of Table Mountain. A streamer or horn of cloud was starting to work its way round one side preliminary to forming the famous 'tablecloth'. It reminded me of Prince Edward Island. I'd seen the same thing happen there a score of times. A cloud horn suddenly appears against the windward quarter of the mountain peaks of the great western escarpment. Then it works round to the north, shrouding the black summits. I hoped Botany Bay would steer clear of Prince Edward. Too many fine ships have gone.missing without trace in its wild waters. Some last century and some this. Well-found vessels too, like the Danish training ship Kobenhavn perhaps.

  Prince Edward Island. I'd be back there again within the week if the cruise was still on. But in what capacity? That depended on what I was going to find at the hospital. 'Severe head injuries but not a car accident.' That's all the hospital had said. He wasn't the right type, nor the right age to have gone on a pre-sailing bender ashore and got mixed up in a brawl in some sleazy joint. Could he have been mugged?

  I pulled upright in my seat as the thought struck me. How had Wegger known about Captain Prestrud? He'd seemed very anxious to address me as captain, to feel mat I was authorized to take him on in Quest. He'd also been hanging around the Quest ever since she docked…

  I slammed on my mental brakes. I was being suspicous without reason. Maybe it was because the intensity of the man was still with me. I had made no secret of Captain Prestrud's injury around the ship — everyone had known within minutes of the hospital's telephone call. If Wegger had been anywhere close on the dock-side, he could have heard it from one of the crew. There was nothing to connect Wegger with Captain Prestrud. Nonetheless, I decided to ask Captain Prestrud about him if he were fit enough.

  The taxi turned on to the De Waal Drive and picked up speed in the direction of Groote Schuur Hospital. The driver pretended he was too occupied with the road for any further talk.

  If Captain Prestrud were too badly hurt to carry on with the cruise, what then? Had Quest's voyage simply been a tourist trip, it could have been called off. Linn Prestrud, Captain Prestrud's daughter, was due with the main party of passengers by jet from Europe that afternoon. They would be disappointed, but it was the scientists who were the real problem. The Quest had given a hard-and-fast commitment — no, it was more than that: it was a contract involving a time factor.

  Quest was a key cog in an international meteorological project known as the Global Atmospheric Research Programme in which one hundred and forty-five nations were taking part. She had been commissioned to launch, in the seas of the Southern Ocean where ships hardly ever go, a sophisticated drifting instrumented buoy which would gather marine and weather information. This would be transmitted via satellite to the American National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado.

  Quest also had the task of releasing a special high-altitude stratosphere balloon which would supply similar automatic data. Captain Prestrud himself had informed me that this was the bread-and-butter which would finance the Quest's cruise — the passengers were secondary contributors. An intricate web of international communications — satellites, radio, telexes, computers — were already in operation in anticipation of Quest's lonely voyage.

  I wondered for one brief moment if I should risk taking Captain Prestrud along, if he were not too seriously injured. I immediately discarded the idea. The Roaring Forties are no place for the unfit, let alone the injured. That meant I had to have another officer. Quest had got to sail tomorrow and that didn't leave much time to find one. But Wegger had turned up as if in answer to prayer. His papers had seemed in order. It looked as if I was going to have to take Wegger.

  We turned into the hospital grounds.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was like hearing a mummy speak from out of its wrappings. His voice was so distorted by pain and the bandages that I hardly recognized it.

  'John — is that you, John?'

  Yes, sir. This is John Shotton.'

  I stood in the hospital ward and looked down at the figure in the bed. My comparison with a mummy persisted — the bandages which swathed his head were white, what was visible of the tanned face was off-white, and the faintly pungent, acrid smell of the medicaments was throat-catching, faintly sickly, like the odour of a mummy. The gallows-like iron thing — for patients to haul themselves upright, if they could — might have doubled for the device ancient Egyptian embalmers used for handling corpses. I could have used a brandy, even at that time of the morning.

  'Is the Quest ready for sea?'

  I hesitated before answering. Captain Prestrud reached out a hand and gripped my arm. I was surprised at the strength in it. Then I realized there were no injuries except on his head and face. All the damage was concentrated there.

  'Is she?'

  Pain dimmed his eyes, sunk deep in their sockets. He tried to focus on me past the helmet of bandages. Five minutes only, the nurse had warned. Now I realized she was being generous.

  'John,' he said more strongly. 'I liked you from the moment I clapped eyes on you. You were the sort of man I needed for the Quest. An officer who could take over from me, any time, any place. Almost my second self.'

  The feeling had been mutual. I had never met anyone I came to admire so much in such a short time. That was what had induced me to throw up my own ship and sign on as his second-in-command. That, and the fact that Quest was going to those far Southern seas that I longed to explore.

  Before I could stumble out a reply he went on, 'I want you to take the Quest to sea tomorrow.'

  That's what I've come about,' I said.

  He tried to pull himself up into a sitting position. His face clouded with a spasm of agony. He fell back, eyes shut. I reached across him for the emergency bell.

  He must have guessed what I was doing. He raised his arm and chopped weakly at mine.

  'Leave it, John. Leave it. Give me a moment. I've got to say something to you. Alone. Quickly.'

  I waited. His eyes came open again. He was breathing in sharp spurts.

  'What's holding up Quest?' he gasped. 'Is Linn delayed? The buoy…?'

  'Linn is due with the bulk of the passengers this afternoon,' I assured him. 'The first of the scientists came aboard just as I was leaving the ship. The Weather Bureau's buoy is due this afternoon by special trailer from up-country. I'll have everything ship-shape and Bristol-fashion and ready for sea by this evening.'

  He said in a firmer voice, 'Then there's nothing to stop you sailing first thing tomorrow.'

  Except — I thought, but I didn't say it — that Quest was his own ship. He had sweated and saved his whole life to buy her, and now someone else was to take over his dream.

  I said gently, We can't sail without you.'

  He lay silent with his eyes closed for so long that I thought he had passed out.

  He spoke at last. 'Yes, I'll be missing, John. I think you know what Quest and this cruise mean to me, don't you?'

  'Yes, I know.'

  He went on so softly that I had to lean forward to hear. 'Sometimes a man does something which seems right at the time, seems justified by events. But it changes his whole life. It comes back and haunts him. And it snatches away what he wants most of all.'

  It sounded to me as if his mind was wandering.

  Suspected brain damage, the nurse had warned me outside. Could be a piece of smashed skull bone pressing on the brain. They'd have to operate. It was only has will that was keeping him conscious.

  I remembered her words. I let his answer go.

  He opened his eyes and fixed me. 'I want you to promise, John, that you'll take the Quest to sea tomorrow. And tell my daughter Linn that I want her to sail whatever happens to me.'

  If that's the way you want it.'

  'It's the way I want it.' Quest will sail tomorrow morning,' I assured him.

  He gave a couple of jerky little sighs and tried
to smile. His pulped lips weren't meant for smiling. I saw they'd smashed some of his teeth too.

  He said, 'It was like a dream, John. You know the way the light is, far South in high latitudes, in the middle of the summer? The night was all blue and silver. The mist was on the water like ghostly icebergs — you couldn't tell which was which. There'd been snow a little while before — squalls coming in from the south-west. Then it cleared about two in the morning. The first we knew of her was her searchlight lighting up the two factory ships and the catchers all moored round her, like puppies drinking. We couldn't see her six-inch guns because the searchlight blinded us. We had a few oil lights strung in our rigging. I remember thinking how warm they looked, and how icy and deadly the searchlight was — just like the Germans.'

  Brain damage. Bone pressing on the brain. Yes, I'd seen that blue mystic light in the middle of the short Antarctic summer's night. Like a dream. Captain Prestrud in his delirium had recaptured its beauty. I wondered whether I had just made a promise to a man so sick that I shouldn't hold myself to it.

  I got up to go for help. The windows in front of me showed a great sunlit view of far mountains; on my left were the sea and shipping of Table Bay. It was beautiful — and real. But Captain Prestrud's scene had the haunting quality of unreality.

  I moved to the door and his voice went on: '… I often wished I'd met Pinguin's captain. Kruder was first of all a sailor and a man. Only secondly a Nazi. He went down with HK-33 when the British caught up with her.'

  Pinguin — HK-33! One of the great surface raiders of World War II! Kapitan zur See Kruder, the legend!

  I turned back from the door. I simply had to hear what Captain Prestrud had to say, however incoherent it might be.

  His eyes opened when he sensed me back at his side.

  'Do you know what a quisling is, John?'

  He looked very bad: I knew I ought to go for help.

  'I've heard the word,' I said.

  'The quislings were the Norwegians who betrayed us to the Nazis.' He tried to smile but winced instead.

  'We got him, Torgersen, Jacobsen and I. He came strutting aboard us with the raider's boarding party. He didn't learn those manners from Kruder. But he'd done his traitor's job and he was feeling proud of himself.'

  It was like trying to piece together the bits of a jigsaw when you didn't know what the master-pattern was.

  'Who was he, Captain Prestrud?'

  He replied, very wearily. 'Kruder had three radio operators aboard the Pinguin. Two were German. The third was Norwegian — he had a German mother. He was the only one who understood the R/T chatter (between us Norwegian catcher skippers. It was he who homed Pinguin on us. We never knew Pinguin was near until she broke through the mist with her search-light on and her guns trained on us. She snapped up die lot — two factory ships and eleven catchers. The whole whaling fleet. Not a shot fired. That was the way Kruder planned it. No loss of life…'

  The quisling…' I prompted.

  He lay back, silent, and I was afraid that the nurse would appear before he'd told me more. I'd been there i shade over five minutes.

  'He killed Torgersen for it later,' muttered Captain Prestrud. 'He got a life sentence for the murder. John, you must promise me that the anniversary celebration will go on in Quest even though I'm not there…'

  What happened!' I demanded in a low voice. I thought I heard someone outside the door. 'What happened, Captain Prestrud!'

  He blinked in a dazed manner. 'Maybe I… we… shouldn't have done it. But it seemed right at the time. It was war.' He appeared to get a grip on himself. 'The quisling came aboard at the head of the Nazi boarding party. Torgersen knocked him down. We took him with us.'

  'You were captured, Captain Prestrud. Remember? You and the entire Norwegian whaling fleet.'

  'I kept warning the others we weren't safe, even deep down there in the ice,' he muttered. 'That's why we had the torpedo ready, night and day. It came down the greasy whale slip as easy as easy.'

  I turned away. He was mouthing words that made no sense.

  Then came a laugh so startling that I turned back to the bed.

  'We escaped, the three of us — Torgersen, Jacobsen and I. In our catchers. We went right past Pinguin, under her guns. Kruder didn't fire. He wasn't the sort to open up on little catchers.' He laughed again. 'He ordered me on the R/T, "Turn back or be sunk." I just said, "Can't. Engine stuck" — and I went ahead. Torgersen and Jacobsen covered me on both flanks so that Pinguin wouldn't spot the torpedo…'

  The door opened and the nurse made an imperative gesture with her head. 'Out!'

  Captain Prestrud opened his eyes. Perhaps he saw me, perhaps not. But he knew I was there, because he called out urgently, desperately: 'John! Stay away from Dina's Island!'

  The nurse was advancing on me. I hurried through the doorway.

  Two doctors, a younger and an older, gave way for me as they were entering.

  I said to the older man, 'He's in a bad way. He's been mugged.'

  He said, 'I know. I examined him earlier. He wasn't mugged. He was pistol-whipped.'

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dina the island was a non-event.

  Back aboard the Quest after my visit to the hospital, I spread open in front of me in the ship's chartroom a chart of the Southern Ocean.

  It showed Prince Edward as one of a handful of remote uninhabited islands of the Sub-Antarctic, tiny specks in the vastness of the wildest ocean in the world. The area into which Quest was due to venture was roughly a triangle with equal legs measuring 2300 kilometres, having Cape Town as the starting-point, Prince Edward as the south-eastern terminal, and Bouvet Island as the southernmost terminal. This is a wind desert without a history. It has never known the keels of battle fleets and if it had the sound of guns would have been puny beside its own thundering. It is colder than outer space; there are no stars because they are hidden by its ceaseless storm-wracks.

  I scanned the area on the chart for any annotation, any clue, which Captain Prestrud might have left to indicate Dina's Island.

  There was nothing.

  I stood there staring at the great blanks between the pin-points of islands. The West Wind Drift, it is called. Into these hostile seas the Quest would launch the drifter buoy with its sensitive instruments which would automatically relay via the orbiting satellite the hitherto unknown facts about currents, temperature, wind and drift. The stratosphere balloon would supplement its readings. It would be the first time man had attempted to put an electronic girdle round the Southern Ocean. The method to be used would be similar to the one which had succeeded in the frozen wastes of outer space — the automatic instrumented probe.

  I had had personal acquaintance with these waters; I knew more about them than anything Captain Prestrud's chart showed. I paged through some manuals which complemented the chart — the Admiralty's Antarctic Pilot, the American Manual of Ice Seamanship, and the US Navy's Marine Climatic Atlas. For anyone like myself who had actually stuck out a Southern Ocean blow they made nice safe academic reading. They contained no reference to Dina's Island.

  I decided, categorically, that Dina's Island did not exist.

  My attention strayed from the chart and books to the chartroom itself. It was a warm, friendly, dark-panelled place, more like a library than a chartroom. I had to carry out my search, but I felt as if I were intruding into someone else's home. Captain Prestrud had chosen the Quest for more than just her sea-going qualities. A Thor ship has that something extra. And Quest had it — the chartroom was an example. She was small — only 5000 tons — beautifully proportioned, with a fine raked bow. Despite nearly a quarter of a century at sea, her 5600 horse-power Sulzer engines were still in splendid shape. I did not intend to drive her, but I might need their full 15.5 knots where we were bound. The original excellent passenger accommodation had been for twelve in two double and eight single cabins. Cabins for the extra eighteen who were booked on the cruise had been added aft in the former No. 3 'twe
en decks.

  I began to put the chart away. As I did so, my eye was caught by some writing underneath the folio and serial numbers to be found on all charts. It was neatly printed in Indian ink.

  It read: Teddy. Atlantis-Pinguin-Sibirien. January 14th 1941.

  Pinguin — that was Kruder's raider! The name was still fresh in my mind. Why should it crop up again here? I stared at the other names. They meant as little to me as Dina's Island. The chart was an old one. For close-approach work to Prince Edward I'd been using a newer one, but if it was a typical day I wouldn't see the island until it was under Quest's bows.

  My train of speculation was broken by a knock at the door.

  'Come in!'

  It was McKinley, Quest's second officer. One of my reasons for wanting to get South was to see a 50-knotter blow McKinley's hair-style to rags. Had Captain Prestrud taken him on merely to squire the lady passengers?

  He said in a bored voice, There's a rough type here says he wants to see you.'

  'McKinley,' I said. This isn't the Royal Navy, but you'll address me as sir in future. Understood?'

  His limpid eyes flickered more with amusement than anger.

  'Understood — sir.'

  'Have you got that searchlight rigged for'ard in the bows?'

  I'd saved my skin before at night among the growlers and bergy bits — those chunks of ice smaller than an iceberg which break away from the parent berg and litter the sea — by spotting with a seachlight. Growlers float low in the water. Radar is helpless. In a storm, which happens often, whitetops look just like growlers anyway. I wasn't happy about the Quest not being ice-strengthened. I'd never used a ship before in the Southern Ocean that wasn't. I felt unprotected — like an Antarctican in underpants.

  'Well — you see, I was side-tracked by some problems with the forepeak tank so I…' He exercised his winning smile.

  'Listen, McKinley,' I said emphatically. 'When I give an order, I mean it to be carried out. Not some time or never but now. We're headed for dangerous waters. A man's life — the ship's life — can depend on everyone being on the alert. Understood?'