by CL Skelton
‘Down,’ Mick howled, reaching for him, but Sam was going down already, and the two of them hit the wet deck side by side. Overhead there was an eerie, airy shriek as the broken end of hawser whipped back in release, slicing through the air a foot above the rail at which they had stood. There was a ringing clash of metal as it struck the side of the wheelhouse and a tinkling of falling glass from a shattered port. Then it thudded heavily on to the stern rail like a sullen snake, and slithered off into the sea.
‘Haul ’er,’ Mick was shouting, already on his feet, but the winchmen, rising from their own bits of sheltering deck, were sprinting for their machinery already. They knew, as much as anyone, that the loose end of cable swirling into the sea could foul their propeller in an instant and leave them as helpless as the freighter in mountainous seas. The winch rumbled and hummed, barely audible above the wind, and the tug plunged forward yet, to keep the line outstretched behind. Its frayed and shattered end whipped up, dripping, on to the after deck. Mick signalled the wheelhouse and Pete Haines slowed the tug and brought her round in a lumbering circle, turning her blunt prow down wind, in search of her renegade charge.
It took a full half-hour just to find her. The search was visual; they lacked radar, and the visibility in the shifting sheets of rain and sleet was virtually nil. They had gone on some distance, while retrieving their tow-line, and even the manoeuvrable tug took a wide circuit of sea in which to turn. The freighter, when they sought the shortened horizon for her at last, was nowhere in sight. As they circled, bouncing and plunging across huge seas, Sam went around his crew, checking no one had been hurt by the broken cable and finding to his relief that they’d all run fast enough this time. The damage to the Mary Hardacre was cosmetic, a missing railing or two, a ten-foot scraping of her paint, and the broken port. They had been lucky, he knew, and he said nothing to Mick or anyone, grown at the moment as superstitious as all the rest. He was forward again, at the prow of the tug, when he saw her.
‘There she is,’ he shouted to Mick, three feet away, to be heard over the gale. Mick looked over his pointing arm and at first saw nothing. Then he grunted, nodded, and said, ‘You’ve got good eyes, any road,’ as if that were maybe Sam’s sole contribution to the whole procedure so far. In a way it was. It was his tug, his salvage company, and his lost freighter out there, but he was still, at least in Mick’s eyes, an amateur along for the ride. He didn’t resent it, acknowledging it as true enough, though he had an itchy longing to prove himself to Mick, somehow. He wasn’t likely to get the opportunity just now. The tow was in trouble, and there was no time for amateurs to play. The professionals, Mick, Pete, and the rest had their work cut out as it was.
They’d found the freighter now; but the question was, what were they going to do with her. As they approached, they found her lying, as they expected, dead in the water and broadside to the pounding waves. She rolled heavily with each strike, and though the heavy mist of blowing rain made it hard to see her clearly, Sam felt she was listing, if slightly, to port. Her ballast had shifted, perhaps, in her helpless state, or she’d begun to take on water from the patched hole in her port forward quarter. As they watched, a heavy sea took her, rolling her right over forty degrees, and she came up sluggish, her decks streaming. They’d need to get her into the wind, fast, and that meant getting her under tow.
The normal procedure, not easy in the best of conditions, and difficult in heavy weather, was to shoot a light pilot line aboard with their Lyle gun, and bend increasingly heavier manilas, and then steel cables to that. But that all presupposed that there was someone aboard the disabled ship to take the line. And there wasn’t. Sam still only half-regretted the lack of riding-crew. They’d have been there now to take his line, but the unsteady look of the wallowing hulk made him more than half-glad he had no one aboard. They might not have found her, after all.
‘We’ll have to let the wind drop, afore we can board,’ Mick said at his elbow, looking with a practised, anxious eye at the tumultuous sky. Sam nodded, wondering if it would. They circled the floundering freighter, looking for the lowest point, and then stood off and waited, praying for a break in the weather. It was squally, with luck it would give them a chance. Late in the afternoon the steady north-east gale backed slightly to north, and then north-west, and slowly moderated. The sky was no lighter, the rain only slightly lessened; it would be a brief respite, but the best they were likely to get. Pete brought the Mary Hardacre to windward of the hulk, and closed her bow in facing the bow of the freighter. At the stern, they lowered the dinghy, with a boarding party of five. Mick was at the tiller and he let Sam ride along, probably more because there wasn’t time to argue than any other reason. They had grappling hooks and lines for scrambling up the side, and a heaving line of manila to lead in their cable. Mick headed the little boat into the wind and sent her plunging through the huge seas like a chip of wood. She skipped about and slid sideways, but he held her as steady as he could and brought her in as close as he dared. Above them, the side of the stranded freighter was huge and black, and their little boat was tossed a dozen feet up and plunged the same distance down with each swell.
‘Now,’ Mick shouted. One of the crewmen, a young Whitby lad called Kevin Hawes, stood, balancing on the lee rail, and swung the grapple once around his head and flung it. The dinghy dipped as he did so and the grapple clattered against the side of the freighter and tumbled into the sea. Kevin Hawes jerked it back and tried again. Sam took up the other grapple. This was something he could do; he was tall, and athletic. He swung the grapple and flung it, the manila whipping through his hands. It went over the freighter’s rail, and he pulled it tight at once, feeling the hook slithering across metal and catching fast.
‘Good,’ Mick shouted. Then a heavy sea caught the freighter and dinghy, and they heeled over, nearly capsizing, their rail crunching to bits against the huge bulk of the dead ship. The rope whipped from Sam’s hands. Mick revved his engine and scudded her away to safety. Sam picked himself up from the bilges, where the sudden roll of the dinghy had flung him, and looked back. Through the rain he could see the grapple still holding, and the boarding rope blowing uselessly free against the side of the ship.
‘Go in again, we’ll try the other hook,’ Sam said.
Mick shook his head. ‘She’s getting up again.’ The rain was slashing down so hard once more that the two men could barely see each other at opposite ends of the small boat.
‘Once more, Mick. I’ll get on her this time.’
Mick grinned, through the hail. ‘No, sir.’ He turned the prow of the dinghy back to the waiting tug; the dinghy might be just a little ship, but he was its master, no matter who owned her.
Soaked and exhausted, they climbed back aboard the Mary Hardacre, and glowered back across the gap of roiling sea that separated them from their tow. The afternoon was darkening; evening was coming on. There were many hours of daylight left in the long summer evenings of the North Sea, but the storm was bringing a darkness of its own. It was settling in for a night-long blow, the wind veering north-east again, and quickening as the light faded. They’d not launch their boat again before morning.
‘She’s listing, Mick,’ Sam said, peering out into the horizontal sheets of hail. ‘She’ll go over.’
‘Happen she will,’ Mick said, chomping on his pipe-stem. ‘Bugger eff-all we can do about it now.’ It wasn’t his first job to go wrong; nor would it be his last. Not unless he launched that bottle-cap of a boat again. He softened a little. ‘Let her go, lad. She’s just a hunk uv scrap iron.’
‘Let’s give it one more try,’ Sam said. ‘Before the light goes.’
‘More sea now than there ever was. She’ll flip that chip uv wood afore we get half-way.’
‘I don’t mean with the boat, Mick,’ Sam said. He was still peering into the storm studying the height of the freighter’s rail with careful intensity. Mick looked at him warily.
‘What’s on your mind?’ he asked, with a canny narr
owing of his salt-reddened eyes. Sam still studied the freighter, watching where her now-heavy list to port had brought her lee rail down near the crest of the rolling white-splashed waves.
‘How close can Pete bring her in?’ he asked, not taking his eyes from the freighter. Mick shrugged, water splashing from the shoulders of his oilskins as he did.
‘Close as ye like, happen ye don’t mind bumping into her. Mind, that’s what she’s built for.’ He gestured to the padded prow of the tug. ‘Long as we don’t do it too hard, or get caught by a sea and smash our stern up against her, lose t’bluidy rudder.’ Sam nodded. That wouldn’t be fun, he knew.
‘Ask him to do it,’ said Sam.
‘Just fer t’fun?’ Mick asked, his bushy eyebrows raising slightly. Sam grinned.
‘Give me a heaving line, up forrard,’ he said. ‘I’m going to jump it.’ Mick just laughed, a big sound in the heavy wind.
‘Oh no you’re not,’ he said.
‘She’s so low in the water now, I’ll be jumping down. No problem Mick. I can do it.’
‘Happen you could. Happen you couldn’t as well. Eitherwise, you’re not finding out.’ But Sam was already making his way forward with a length of manila over his shoulder. Mick followed him. The young Whitby man, Kevin, watched curiously as Sam, his eyes hardly leaving the freighter, positioned his line by a forward bollard.
‘What ye doin’, Mr Hardacre?’ Kevin Hawes asked.
‘Nothing,’ Mick snapped, from behind Sam’s shoulder, but as Sam turned to explain, he caught sight of Pete Haines, down from the wheelhouse, making his way across the rain-swept deck.
‘What’s up?’ he asked, eyeing the rope, and before Mick, who was occupied in discouraging Kevin Hawes from volunteering to join Sam, could intervene, he spoke quickly.
‘Look, Pete,’ pointing to the lowering port rail of the freighter, ‘I’ve got to get aboard and get the pumps running if nothing else. I want you to bring her right in by that rail, just for a moment, and I’m going across with this line. There’s a snatch block on the bow, by the shed,’ he pointed to the small wooden and sheet-tin construction that they had used as a shelter on the open deck while they were cutting away the superstructure. ‘You bend a bight of manila on the end of this, as soon as I’m across, and I’ll put it through the block, so we can use our own capstan to haul the cable across.’ He might very well jump alone with the light rope, but there was no way he was going to haul cable aboard by hand. It weighed five pounds a running foot. The freighter was powerless, of course, though below decks they had left three portable petrol-driven pumps.
Pete, unlike Mick, listened carefully, and actually looked at the lowered deck of the freighter as he did so. He said, ‘Risky jump.’
‘Risky?’ Sam grinned, raising one dark eyebrow. ‘For the long-jump champion of Beaumont School, 1935? Surely you jest?’ He was laughing.
Pete didn’t laugh. He said, ‘That was a long time ago. And I doubt they chucked you between two steel hulls in t’ North Sea, when ye missed.’
‘I won’t miss,’ Sam said, gathering his manila line in careful loops. He was confident. He knew his abilities, and his limitations. It was the corollary to what Pete had called lack of nerve. When he was unsure of things he left them alone. When he was certain, he had all the nerve in the world.
‘Okay,’ Pete nodded curtly. He was worried and showed it by quiet and lack of humour, the way Mick showed it by fuming and storming. But Pete, not Mick, was the Master of the Mary Hardacre, and it was his word, only, that was law. Mick gave Pete a filthy look but he said nothing. Instead, he gathered up the end of Sam’s heaving line. Its tending was crucial. If it snagged, or caught, or simply dragged, it would break Sam’s jump and pull him into the sea. Mick, even with his artificial arm, was the best hand with a rope around, and he wasn’t trusting it to anyone else. Pete went back to the wheelhouse and the tug lurched into her new course, bearing down on the wallowing freighter. Sam shed his oilskins, too cumbersome to jump in, and climbed up on the rail, and as he did so Kevin Hawes did the same and scrambled up beside him.
‘Get out t’ way,’ Mick grumbled, but Kevin said, coolly, ‘I’ll jump wi’ ye, Mr Hardacre. Ye’ll need a hand with t’ cable.’ Sam looked across. The lad was eighteen, long-legged and fit. He’d probably make a better job of it than he’d do himself. He grinned.
‘Okay.’
‘Oh, gradely,’ Mick grumbled. ‘Two idiots. Ye stay clear uv the line,’ he shouted to Kevin, ‘or ye’ll both end up in t’ drink.’ Kevin nodded, unimpressed by Mick’s temper, and moved a foot or two down the rail, to give Sam and his line more room. The freighter loomed up near, rain half-obscuring her yet. Sam glanced down at the white curl of their bow-wave, foaming back through broken seas. The black gap between the two ships narrowed, and seemed to deepen as it did.
‘What t’ hell do I tell yer bleedin’ family?’ Mick shouted. The gap narrowed to nothingness, the rail of the crippled freighter skimming by with astonishing speed below. Sam waited for the moment when he felt the tug’s engines go hard astern, and the whole vessel lurch as Pete, with stunning skill, sent her just skidding by, with a narrowing ten feet to spare. Ten feet across, ten down, and closing.
‘Tell them it’s all in my will,’ Sam shouted back to Mick, and he jumped.
Brushes with death are notorious for their mental irrelevancies: the only thing in Sam’s mind as he launched himself over the terrifying, narrowing black gap between the two ships was the sudden quixotic question, would the immediate inheritance of all his worldly wealth at last cure the daunting financial pains of Hardacres? Then his foot struck the rail, breaking his jump and throwing his balance out. He twisted in mid-air, flailing with his free hand, throwing himself forward, clear of the rail. He made it, barely, but landed all wrong, hard and awkwardly on his back and shoulder on the sloping wet deck. Still, years of Rugby at Cambridge and then at Ampleforth had at least taught him how to fall. He rolled over, frantically loosing the rope coils from his shoulder as he did so. If Mick failed to play the rope out fast enough, it would take him back into the sea. The deck of the freighter lurched as she rolled into her list, and he slid down it, grabbing for holds, trying to regain his footing. Beside him, he saw the eighteen-year-old Kevin, already on his feet, running to take up the rope. As Sam had thought, he’d jumped better and landed better. Sam got his footing, staggered down the pitching deck, and snagged the manila once round a bitt, letting it run out as smoothly as he could towards the departing tug. He could hear, over the wind, the roar of her engines, yet hard astern, as Pete tried desperately to slow her before she drew the rope to its limits and snapped it, undoing half their purpose. He and Kevin braced their feet against the railing, lying back on the deck which rolled to an angle of forty-five degrees before lumbering back to its list of twenty, and both fought to slow the flying manila as it played out through their burned hands. They had ten feet of bitter end left when it stopped. The rope slackened. The Mary Hardacre stood off, holding steady in the water. Sam got shakily to his feet and the lad Kevin bounced up beside him.
‘Got the bugger,’ Kevin exulted.
‘Shut up,’ said Sam, filling in for the absent Mick. He signalled to Mick with a wave of his arm, and saw the old one-armed fisherman set about securing their pilot line to a bight, or loop, of heavy manila, the lead-in for the cable. Together, in the driving rain, he and Kevin drew the loop across from the tug, over the roiling gap of darkening sea. The rain was heavier than ever and without the oilskins they were getting very wet indeed, but were too busy to feel the cold. When they had the bight of three-inch manila aboard, they hauled it across to the snatch block at the bow, where Sam raised the hinged side of the iron sheets that held the pulley and they eased the loop into place. Again he signalled to Mick through the sheets of rain, and distantly heard the powered capstan start up and saw the double lines go taut. Mick would have run the manila through it and fastened the free end to the heavy U-shackle of the towing cable
. They watched, huddled against the slight shelter of their workshack on the bow, as the manila dragged the cable across the gap of water. The freighter rolled again, heavily, and seemed to regain less of her trim as she righted. She was listing worse with every swell, and Sam was desperate to get below and get her pumps running, and willed the cable to reach them faster. But there was no way the job could be hurried.
The cable thudded over the railing, flopping heavily on to the deck, pulling up tight against the snatchblock. Sam signalled Mick again, and the capstan ceased turning. He and Kevin released the heavy hawser from the manila lead-in and wrestled its icy steel length towards the bitts at the bow of the freighter. It was immensely heavy, and they were both now very wet and very tired. Sam seriously doubted for a moment they could do it. The slanting deck of the freighter made their progress virtually a climb, and he felt his strength failing. But the youngster Kevin was tough, and heartily determined, and between the two of them they managed at last to make the cable fast to a forward bitt. For a moment they just sagged across it grinning at each other, and then Sam straightened up and made his final signal to Mick. He and Kevin got back out of the way. They’d broken one hawser on this tow already and, although this was a heavier one, the sea was heavier too. They went well aft, and watched the Mary Hardacre turn her nose north-east and take up the slack.
The cable rose, tautened, and held. The bow of the wallowing freighter came round into the weather and she quivered below them, if not with life, at least with purpose. She was again under tow, no longer mere flotsam on the sea. She still rolled with each wave and still listed, and after a moment more watching the steady length of hawser, Sam tapped Kevin Hawes on the shoulder and led him below.
The damage below was no worse than he expected. He was relieved to find the concrete patch holding, though two lesser holes, patched temporarily with steel, had been battered enough to let water in, and no doubt other damage of the original collision was showing up under the strain. Three of her holds were partially flooded, explaining the list. He and Kevin manhandled the pumps into position and with difficulty got two of them running. The third proved recalcitrant, and eventually they were obliged to give up with it. The two remaining chugged away faithfully, sucking up hundreds of gallons of water and cascading it over the side. By midnight she had righted to a mere ten-degree list to port and was riding easily, once more, under tow.