The Action

by Peter Tonkin

  Stone lay back and found that his head had been cradled in Miss Dark’s lap. He sat up a little, therefore, and began to move his legs carefully and experimentally. “All right if I stand up for a moment?” he asked. “I’ve got cramp from lying for so long.”

  “Yes, certainly.” Spooner’s voice. “Be careful though, it’s a bit choppy.”

  Stone put his hands on the shoulders of Miss Dark and the person seated next to her - Gant, presumably - and levered himself up off the bottom planks. The wind took him, clearing his head. It was stronger than it had seemed to be in the bottom of the boat.

  Suddenly his left leg buckled, twisting with cramp. Stone toppled sideways, hopped once, waving his arms wildly, trying to regain his balance, and crashed into the side of the boat. All around him came a chorus of screams and curses. His hands slammed against the gunwale and water washed over them. Then the boat steadied and Stone eased himself inwards. “Sorry,” he said.

  “That’s OK. No damage done.” Spooner, determinedly cheerful, keeping on top of the situation. And doing it well, thought Stone as he worked himself onto a bench between two of the crew. There was still no light, but Stone could vaguely distinguish 11 shapes in the boat around him. Aft, on the after locker, sat Spooner with the gold braid on his white cap glinting every now and then. He seemed to have the tiller under his arm. God alone knew what he was steering by - perhaps he had a luminous compass. Beside him sat one of the crew - the big silent Irish American they called Slattery, to judge by his size and the width of his shoulders. Before them sat Mrs Gash and Miss Buhl. Both seemed to be asleep. On the bench in front of Stone, who was facing aft, sat Wells and two more of the crew - the little whining Irishman, O’Keefe, and the wireless operator Bates. On either side of Stone sat the huge Liverpudlian Laughton and the square Chicagoan Slobowski. Behind, on the forward locker, sat Gant and Miss Dark. “Have we checked on the provisions yet - and the radio?” Stone asked Laughton.

  “Yes. This is the captain’s cutter, not a proper lifeboat at all, so it wasn’t equipped with a radio, but we’ve enough food for several days.”

  “No more?”

  “There is enough food for 12 people for a week,” said Spooner. “There is rather less water.”

  Stone turned back to Rebecca Dark. “What’s happened?” he asked.

  “After we got clear of the ship,” she whispered, as though she wanted to conceal her version of events from the rest of the survivors, “Mr Spooner took charge. He said he was senior officer surviving and we must all take our orders from him. Some of the crew didn’t like that but the rest overruled them and we agreed. Then we went through the things in the lockers at the front and back of the boat and sorted out all the things in them.

  “There were some life-jackets, some fishhooks and line, some diesel for the engine, the food Mr Spooner mentioned, and five big five-gallon cans of water.” She paused. The only sound was the lapping of the waves against the side of the boat and the heavy, rhythmic breathing of deep sleep.

  Rebecca looked around the dark boat. There was no way of telling whether or not they were all really asleep, or whether they were just pretending. Still, she wasn’t going to say anything they hadn’t all already thought of. “There were five five-gallon cans of water, you see, but someone had made holes in them all. There’s only about five gallons left that didn’t leak away.”

  Stone sat thinking for a few minutes. “Could it have been an accident?”

  “That’s what we thought at first but it does seem quite clear that someone pushed a spike through the side of each one.”

  “It couldn’t have been anything to do with the explosion?”

  “No. The cupboard was dry. It must have been done days ago.” She paused and then said, “I don’t know, of course, but I think that if you looked in the big lifeboats you’d find the same thing.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I think,” said Rebecca in an almost silent undervoice. “I think someone’s trying to kill us.”

  “Who? Why?”

  “I don’t know, but I am sure going to try and find out.”

  “But how?” asked Stone. “I mean we’re in a lifeboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean. How are you going to find out here?” And then a thought seemed to occur to him. He leaned over and whispered into her ear. “You mean, whoever it was might be here with us now?”

  She nodded.

  Stone whistled silently and reached into his pocket for his cigarettes. The gunmetal case had saved them from the effects of his brief dip in the sea. He offered one to Rebecca and lit both. In the glow of his lighter his face showed almost vacuous concern, but in the dark he smiled grimly.

  After they had finished their cigarettes they both slept. Spooner at the helm watched the brief shadowed light and the two sparks glowing and fading until they vanished into the night and the choppy sea. He was bone weary and would have given anything to be able to sleep, but he had forgotten to arrange watches - an oversight he could only excuse by reminding himself he was totally inexperienced in situations like this - and his penance was to keep watch himself. He might just as well sleep, though, for no ship would see them in this darkness and he was doing no real good just sitting here.

  He had no clear idea of where they were going, which was why he had not started the engine. There was no compass. Had there been stars he could have steered by them but there were none. Tomorrow, if it cleared, they might be able to work out a rough heading by using the sun. But really, of course, that too would be a waste of time. There was nowhere for them to go.

  They were perhaps 250 miles east of the African coast, but with the wind and the current steadily drifting them farther east they might as well have been 250,000 miles. To the north lay Socotra, 500 miles away, again out of reach because of the monsoon. South were the Amirantes and the Seychelles, 700-800 miles away utterly against the persistent curve of wind and current which drove relentlessly up the coast of Africa and then east across the Ocean to India.

  At any other time of the year, in any other month, they might have expected the north-east trade winds to carry them onto the horn of Africa in a few days, helped by the engine. Even with five gallons of water they might have made it. But not now. Not with the south-west monsoon pushing them on to the Indian coast. If it kept up they would be swept ashore near Bombay but none of them would know anything about it. Bombay was 1,750 miles away. Even if they used the engine they would be lucky to make it in under three weeks and none of them would live more than 72 hours.

  As he went to sleep there were tears in Spooner’s eyes and he was angry with himself for wasting their moisture.

  The storm broke just before dawn. Gant was the only person awake in the lifeboat but it took even him by surprise. What had woken him he did not know but he suddenly sprung from deep sleep into full wakefulness and sat up straight. He was stiff and sore, bones ached and muscles cramped. Rebecca’s head had slipped from his shoulder into his lap and he carefully eased it onto the seat by his thigh as he turned into the pitching darkness to relieve himself over the side. When he turned back the boat was still quiet. “Mr Spooner!” he whispered, but there was no response. He debated with himself whether or not to wake the boy up for the wind seemed to be very much stronger and the waves a good deal larger. But there seemed to be nothing to be gained by making a fuss and the tall actor sat down again and was just about to try for sleep once more when the dark was shattered by the first flash of lightning, and the steady moan of the wind was lost at once in the immediate explosion of thunder.

  Then the rain came and the rain was the most frightening of the three. Gant had never been in a tropical storm and had supposed that it would be like a bad thunderstorm. He was wrong. This was unimaginably worse. The rain was coming down not in drops but in wave after wave, boiling off his instantly soaking body and into the boat at an alarming rate. He tried to rise but the sheer weight of water forced him back into his seat with a crash which set the boat
rocking even more wildly. He was finding it hard to breathe and had to cup one hand round his mouth and nose to stop the rain and spray drowning him.

  His lower eyelids seemed to bulge and bag, painfully full of water. Even through his heavy roll-neck, his back and shoulders were bruised and he groped feverishly one-handed at his feet for his hat or anything to protect his splitting head from the terrible assault. He searched blindly because his agonized eyes were tight shut now for fear the rain would do them permanent damage. He opened his mouth to yell but even with the protection of his hand he choked on the spray and went into a racking round of coughing, gasping and choking, which stopped only when he bowed his head between his knees and covered his mouth with both hands.

  Everyone else had been woken by the first clap of thunder and most of them sat awed by the power of the storm or, like Gant, fighting a terrifying battle for breath. Only Spooner saw the most immediate danger: “BAIL! For God’s sake, bail,” he yelled. One or two heard him and began to do so, but too few and nearly too late. Gant tore the forward locker open and pulled out one of the spiked watercans, hoping to fill it with fresh rainwater.

  Carefully amid the confusion he began to fill it from the water slopping in the bottom of the boat, keeping it always on its side with the hole, bunged by his handkerchief, uppermost. After a few moments Spooner noticed what he was doing and screamed down the boat, “Belay that and bail.” Gant began to bail. The water was almost up to his knees now and he saw with sick dread that the gunwales were so near the water that wave after wave was breaking into the boat.

  Stone had found an old tin cup and was bailing feverishly with that. At first he had been throwing the water anywhere so long as it went out of the boat, but he soon noticed that when he threw it into the wind it blew straight back in again. So he was half-sitting half-kneeling with his back to the storm letting the wind take the water away.

  The level in the boat slowly stopped rising and the waves stopped breaking in on them. Stone at last raised his head and eased the knotted muscles of his shoulders. There was a faint light now, enough to brighten the outlines of the whirling clouds but not enough to take the dazzling edge off the jagged talons of lightning which still reached down out of the sky tearing at tired eyes with their brightness. Stone could see the unsteady figures of Spooner and Slattery as they wrestled with the kicking tiller, trying to keep the boat from drifting sideways-on to the sea and, stretching into the haze behind them, row upon row of white-fanged waves. The boat rocked back and forth like an insane seesaw as the waves roared in under her stem and out under her bow. He watched helplessly as first Miss Buhl and then even the intrepid Mrs Gash lurched forward and was rackingly seasick. He felt sick himself and looked away.

  Then, infinitely wearily, he began to bail again. Bend back. Fill cup, hands shaking, water slopping over the sides of the tin. Straighten back: tearing pains from shoulders to cramped calves. Throw water: pain in his arms almost beyond bearing. Bend back. And so on. There was a rhythm to it and Stone, in spite of his weariness, began to fit the words of a half-remembered song around it:

  “I get no kick from cham-PAGNE

  Mere al-co-HOL

  Doesn’t thrill me at ALL

  So tell me why should it be TRUE

  That I get a KICK

  Out of YOU!”

  Slobowski looked at him strangely for a moment, and then his battered face split into a grin and together he and Stone bellowed the next lines:

  “I get no kick from a PLANE

  Fly-ing too HIGH With some BIRD

  In the SKY Is my I

  Dea of NOTHING

  To DO

  But I I I I

  Get a KICK

  Out of YOU!”

  By this time everybody, heartened, decided to join in:

  “I get no KICK

  From co-CAINE…”

  And then the tiller snapped.

  The boat lurched wildly and began to swing beam-on to the angry sea. She began to rock wildly from side to side and the waves tumbled in over the gunwales again. “An oar! Pass an oar!” yelled Spooner. The oars were stored along the length of the boat with the mast and sail under the three lateral seats. In a panic of action almost every person on board leaned down and grabbed at the smooth cylinders of wood.

  “This one!” yelled Stone freeing the oar beneath himself. Eager hands found it and pulled it forward towards the bow of the boat to free it. Gant and Rebecca took it back and up until its broad blade came out from under the third bench, then they both leaned far forward as Stone, Slobowski and Laughton passed it to O’Keefe, Wells and Bates. Even Miss Buhl and Mrs Gash helped guide it back to Slattery and Spooner in the stem. Thus every person in the boat was holding some part of its 13 ft length when it suddenly gave a violent twist. The blade broke free of Spooner’s grip and struck the young officer violently in the face. “Look out!” cried Wells, his voice a whisper in the wind. Slattery reached out with the reactions of a cat, but was far, far too late.

  Spooner had been half crouching on the aft locker, preparing to slide the oar past the sternpost for use as an improvised tiller. The flat, iron-bound edge of the oar’s blade smashed across his upper lip just below his nose. The force of it lifted him nearly erect in the pitching little boat. He took half a step backwards as tears flooded his eyes and blood was suddenly bright around his mouth and chin. His hands came up towards his face. Slattery’s fingers brushed the white cotton of his trouser-leg and he fell backwards over the side.

  Slattery tore the oar by main force out of their collective grasp and thrust it out to Spooner but it fell short of the struggling man. Gant wrenched a life jacket from the forward locker and hurled it into the raging water. Spooner’s wildly waving arm splashed down upon it and his left hand clutched at it but his body twisted until it was facing the waves and his mouth, still wide and gasping at the pain, filled with water so that he choked.

  In the boat, still frozen with horror, they watched him turn again, his face almost blue and twisted with the agony of burning throat and lungs, water spilling from mouth and nostrils as he made another almost dreamy attempt to swim towards them. But the gulf between the tossing boat and the drowning man was far too wide. Spooner stopped, distant now as the boat was swept away, and sank out of sight. For an eternal moment as they rode over the crest of a tall wave, they saw the yellow life-jacket with his hand still gripping its webbing straps. Then even that slight hold was broken and Spooner was gone.

  With a vicious crash that jerked them all out of their immobility, Slattery slammed the oar down by the tree of the broken rudder. “Bail, God damn you!” he roared, and he set about lashing the oar in place.

  “Dear goodness,” whispered Miss Buhl, her voice lost in the roar of waves, wind and rain. Nobody else said anything. They all began to bail silently and fiercely. Slowly the boat began to turn again as Slattery’s makeshift tiller took hold until eventually the great grey waves were once again combing in from her stern.

  They kept it up for the next few hours as the thunder quietened and the wind moderated. At about midday the wind died altogether although there was still a high sea running. They took the sudden calm as a signal to stop bailing and break out some food. As they sat, mindless with fatigue, numbly munching sodden biscuits, Gant said, “What we need is a successor for poor Mr Spooner.” He spoke quietly, but his voice carried easily to every ear in the boat.

  “I ain’t taking no orders from no one,” said O’Keefe. This time it was Slattery who told him to shut up.

  “I think Mr Slattery is the obvious choice,” said Wells.

  “Yes,” said Stone.

  “I agree,” said Gant. All the others nodded except for O’Keefe and Slattery himself. And so it was agreed and they all looked to Slattery for the next word. “Right,” he said at last, “I see no point in rationing the food but if we’re to stand any chance of surviving I’m afraid I will have to ration the water. We have five gallons.”

  “Nearly seve
n, I should say,” said Gant, holding up the can he had part-filled during the storm.

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” said Slattery regretfully.

  “But I. . .” Gant was prepared to argue.

  “If you would just taste some of it, sir,” suggested Slattery wearily. Stone passed Gant his tin cup and the American carefully poured out a little of the rain water. Then as they all watched him he took a sip. His face twisted and he spat hurriedly over the side. “There would have been salt in the spray, salt in the bottom of the boat, salt water everywhere, you see, sir,” said Slattery apologetically.

  “God!” said Gant. “I didn’t realize.” And they all watched him with burning eyes as he poured two gallons of clear sparkling water over the side.

  “If I might have the remaining five gallons and the cup up here,” asked Slattery. They were passed rapidly down the boat. “I think we’ll allow you all a cupful now,” decided the big Bronx Irishman, “but while the clouds are running and it’s still cool we’ll keep it to a minimum. When the sun comes out we’ll need every drop we’ve got and more.” One cup each used up half a gallon. “Remember,” said Slattery as they finished, “we can do that nine more times. That’s all.” There was silence then for a few minutes and then Wells said, “I thought I saw a water-maker in there. Shouldn’t we set it up?” He gestured to the after locker.

  “There’ll be no use setting that up until the sun comes out,” Slattery explained. “It works by sunlight you see, sir. It uses sunlight to evaporate the sea water in the first tank so that distilled water can be condensed into the second tank - the small one. But when the sun does come out I’d be glad if you will set it up. Every little helps.” Wells nodded.

  “There are some fish-hooks and line too,” said Stone.

  “Yes, sir, I was thinking of that. When the sea moderates we’ll break them out. I think we’ve a tiny oil stove so we might have a fry-up later. In any case, if we just sit here doing nothing I think we’ll all find the boredom a wearisome thing, but if we sit here doing nothing holding on to the end of a fishing line - well, that’ll be fun.” He beamed round the boat, enthusiastic, extremely Irish. “Isn’t it a terrible thing what a difference a few fathoms of string and a hook will make, when you’re sitting doing nothing at all?”