San Andreas Page 6

  ‘You have it, of course, Bo’sun, you have it to rights.’ Patterson looked at the two guns. ‘One for me and one for you.’

  ‘If you say so, sir.’

  ‘Don’t be daft, who else would have it?’ Patterson picked up a gun. ‘I’ve never even held one of these things in my hand, far less fired one. But you know, Bo’sun, I don’t really think I would mind firing a shot once. Just one.’

  ‘Neither would I, sir.’

  Second Officer Rawlings was lying beside the wheel and there was no mystery as to how he had died: what must have been a flying shard of metal had all but decapitated him.

  ‘Where’s the helmsman?’ the Bo’sun asked. ‘Was he a survivor, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know who was on. Maybe Rawlings had sent him to get something. But there were two survivors up here, apart from the Captain and Chief Officer—McGuigan and Jones.’

  ‘McGuigan and Jones? What were they doing up here?’

  ‘It seems Mr Kennet had called them up and posted them as look-outs, one on either wing. I suppose that’s why they survived, just as Captain Bowen and Mr Kennet survived. They’re in the hospital, too.’

  ‘Badly hurt?’

  ‘Unharmed, I believe. Shock, that’s all.’

  The Bo’sun moved out to the port wing and Patterson followed. The wing was wholly undamaged, no signs of metal buckling anywhere. The Bo’sun indicated a once grey but now badly scorched metal box which was attached just below the wind-breaker: its top and one side had been blown off.

  ‘That’s where they kept the Wessex rockets,’ the Bo’sun said.

  They went back inside and the Bo’sun moved towards the wireless office hatchway: the sliding wooden door was no longer there.

  ‘I wouldn’t look, if I were you,’ Patterson said.

  ‘The men have got to, haven’t they?’

  Chief Radio Officer Spenser was lying on the deck but he was no longer recognizable as such. He was just an amorphous mass of bone and flesh and torn, blood-saturated clothing: had it not been for the clothing it could have been the shattered remnants of any animal lying there. When McKinnon looked away Patterson could see that some colour had drained from the deeply-tanned face.

  ‘The first bomb must have gone off directly beneath him,’ the Bo’sun said. ‘God, I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ll attend to him myself. Third Officer Batesman. I know he was the officer of the watch. Any idea where he is, sir?’

  ‘In the chart room. I don’t advise you to go there either.’

  Batesman was recognizable but only just. He was still on his. chair, half-leaning, half-lying on the table, what was left of his head pillowed on a blood-stained chart. McKinnon returned to the bridge.

  ‘I don’t suppose it will be any comfort to their relatives to know that they died without knowing. I’ll fix him up myself, too. I couldn’t ask the men.’ He looked ahead through the totally shattered windscreens. At least, he thought, they wouldn’t be needing a Kent clear-view screen any more. ‘Wind’s backing to the east,’ he said absently. ‘Bound to bring more snow. At least it might help to hide us from the wolves—if there are any wolves around.’

  ‘You think, perhaps, they might come back to finish us off?’ The Chief was shivering violently but that was only because he was accustomed to the warmth of the engine-room: the temperature on the bridge was about 6°F—twenty-six degrees of frost—and the wind held steady at twenty knots.

  ‘Who can be sure, sir? But I really don’t think so. Even one of those Heinkel torpedo-bombers could have finished us off if they had had a mind to. Come to that, the Condor could have done the same thing.’

  ‘It did pretty well as it was, if you ask me.’

  ‘Not nearly as well as it could have done. I know that a Condor normally carries 250-kilo bombs—that’s about 550 lbs. A stick of those bombs—say three or four—would have sent us to the bottom. Even two might have been enough—they’d have certainly blown the superstructure out of existence, not just crippled it.’

  ‘The Royal Navy again, is that it, Bo’sun?’

  ‘I know explosives, sir. Those bombs couldn’t have been any more than fifty kilos each. Don’t you think, sir, that we might have some interesting questions to ask that Condor captain when he regains consciousness?’

  ‘In the hope of getting some interesting answers, is that it? Including the answer to the question why he bombed a hospital ship in the first place.’

  ‘Well, yes, perhaps.’

  ‘What do you mean—perhaps?’

  ‘There’s just a chance—a faint one, I admit—that he didn’t know he was bombing a hospital ship.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Bo’sun. Of course he knew he was attacking a hospital ship. How big does a red cross have to be before you see it?’

  ‘I’m not trying to make any excuses for him, sir.’ There was a touch of asperity in McKinnon’s voice and Patterson frowned, not at the Bo’sun but because it was most unlike the Bo’sun to adopt such a tone without reason. ‘It was still only half-dawn, sir. Looking down, things look much darker than they do at sea level. You’ve only got to go up to a crow’s nest to appreciate that.’ As Patterson had never been in a crow’s nest in his life he probably fell ill-equipped to comment on the Bo’sun’s observation. ‘As he was approaching from dead astern he couldn’t possibly have seen the markings on the ship’s sides and as he was flying very low he couldn’t have seen the red cross on the foredeck—the superstructure would have blocked off his view.’

  ‘That still leaves the red cross on the afterdeck. Even though it might have been only half light, he must have seen that.’

  ‘Not with the amount of smoke you were putting up under full power.’

  ‘There’s that. There is a possibility.’ He was unconvinced and watched with some impatience as the Bo’sun spun the now useless wheel and examined the binnacle compass and the standby compass, now smashed beyond any hope of repair.

  ‘Do we have to remain up here?’ Patterson said. ‘There’s nothing we can do here at the moment and I’m freezing to death. I suggest the Captain’s cabin.’

  ‘I was about to suggest the same, sir.’

  The temperature in the cabin was no more than freezing point, but that was considerably warmer than it had been on the bridge and, more importantly, there was no wind there. Patterson went straight to the liquor cabinet and extracted a bottle of Scotch.

  ‘If you can do it I can do it. We’ll explain to the Captain later. I don’t really like rum and I need it.’

  ‘A specific against pneumonia?’

  ‘Something like that. You will join me?’

  ‘Yes, sir. The cold doesn’t worry me but I think I’m going to need it in the next hour or so. Do you think the steering can be fixed, sir?’

  ‘It’s possible. Have to be a jury job. I’ll get Jamieson on to it.’

  ‘It’s not terribly important. I know all the phones are out but it shouldn’t take too long to reconnect them and you’re fixing up a temporary rudder control in the engine-room. Same with the electrics—it won’t take long to run a few rubber cables here and there. But we can’t start on any of those things until we get this area—well, cleared.’

  Patterson lowered the contents of his glass by half. ‘You can’t run the San Andreas from the bridge. Two minutes up there was enough for me. Fifteen minutes and anyone would be frozen to death.’

  ‘You can’t run it from any other place. Cold is the problem, I agree. So we’ll board it up. Plenty of plywood in the carpenter’s shop.’

  ‘You can’t see through plywood.’

  ‘Could always pop our heads through the wing doors from time to time, but that won’t be necessary. We’ll let some windows into the plywood.’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Patterson said. The Scotch had apparently restored his circulation. ‘All we need is a glazier and some windows and we haven’t got either.’

  ‘A glazier we don’t need. We don’t need to have c
ut glass or fitted windows. You must have rolls and rolls of insulating tape in your electrical department.’

  ‘I’ve got a hundred miles of it and I still don’t have any windows.’

  ‘Windows we won’t need. Glass, that’s all. I know where the best glass is—and plate glass at that. The tops of all those lovely trolleys and trays in the hospital.’

  ‘Ah! I do believe you have it, Bo’sun.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I suppose Sister Morrison will let you have them.’

  Patterson smiled one of his rare smiles. ‘I believe I’m the officer commanding, however temporary.’

  ‘Indeed, sir. Just don’t let me be around when you put her into irons. Those are all small things. There are three matters that give a bit more concern. First, the radio is just a heap of scrap metal. We can’t contact anyone and no one can contact us. Secondly, the compasses are useless. I know you had a gyro installed, but it never worked, did it? But worst of all is the problem of navigation.’

  ‘Navigation? Navigation! How can that be a problem?’

  ‘If you want to get from A to B, it’s the biggest problem of all. We have—we had—four navigating officers aboard this ship. Two of those are dead and the other two are swathed in bandages—in your own words, like Egyptian mummies. Commander Warrington could have navigated, I know, but he’s blind and from the look in Dr Singh’s eyes I should think the blindness is permanent.’ The Bo’sun paused for a moment, then shook his head. ‘And just to make our cup overflowing, sir, we have the Andover’s navigating officer aboard and he’s either concussed or in some sort of coma, we’ll have to ask Dr Singh. If a poker-player got dealt this kind of hand of cards, he’d shoot himself. Four navigating officers who can’t see and if you can’t see you can’t navigate. That’s why the loss of the radio is so damned unfortunate. There must be a British warship within a hundred or two miles which could have lent us a navigating officer. Can you navigate, sir?’

  ‘Me? Navigate?’ Patterson seemed positively affronted. ‘I’m an engineer officer. But you, McKinnon: you’re a seaman—and twelve years in the Royal Navy.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if I had been a hundred years in the Royal Navy, sir. I still can’t navigate. I was a Torpedo Petty Officer. If you want to fire a torpedo, drop a depth charge, blow up a mine or do some elementary electrics, I’m your man. But I’d barely recognize a sextant if I saw one. Such things as sunsights, moonsights—if there is such a thing—and starsights are just words to me. I’ve also heard of words like deviation and variation and declination and I know more about Greek than I do about those.

  ‘We do have a little hand-held compass aboard the motor lifeboat, the one I took out today, but that’s useless. It’s a magnetic compass, of course, and that’s useless because I do know the magnetic north pole is nowhere near the geographical north pole: I believe it’s about a thousand miles away from it. Canada, Baffin Island or some such place. Anyway, in the latitudes we’re in now the magnetic pole is more west than north.’ The Bo’sun sipped some Scotch and looked at Patterson over the rim of his glass. ‘Chief Patterson, we’re lost.’

  ‘Job’s comforter.’ Patterson stared moodily at his glass, then said without much hope: ‘Wouldn’t it be possible to get the sun at noon? That way we’d know where the south was.’

  ‘The way the weather is shaping up we won’t be able to see the sun at noon. Anyway, what’s noon, sun-time—it’s certainly not twelve o‘clock on our watches? Supposing we were in the middle of the Atlantic, where we might as well be, and knew where south was, would that help us find Aberdeen, which is where I believe we are going? The chronometer, incidentally, is kaput, which doesn’t matter at all—I still wouldn’t be able to relate the chronometer to longitude. And even if we did get a bearing on due south, it’s dark up here twenty hours out of the twenty-four and the auto-pilot is as wrecked as everything else on the bridge. We wouldn’t, of course, be going around in circles, the hand compass would stop us from doing that, but we still wouldn’t know in what direction we were heading.’

  ‘If I want to find some optimism, Bo’sun, I’ll know where not to look. Would it help at all if we knew approximately where we were?’

  ‘It would help, but all we know, approximately, is that we’re somewhere north or north-west of Norway. Anywhere, say, in twenty thousand square miles of sea. There are only two possibilities, sir. The Captain and Chief Officer must have known where we were. If they’re able to tell us, I’m sure they will.’

  ‘Good God, of course! Not very bright, are we? At least, I’m not. What do you mean—“if”? Captain Bowen was able to talk about twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘That was twenty minutes ago. You know how painful burns can be. Dr Singh is sure to have given them painkillers and sometimes the only way they can work is by knocking you out.’

  ‘And the other possibility?’

  ‘The chart house. Mr Batesman was working on a chart—he still had a pencil in his hand. I’ll go.’

  Patterson grimaced. ‘Sooner you than me.’

  ‘Don’t forget Flannelfoot, sir.’ Patterson touched his overalls where he had concealed his gun. ‘Or the burial service.’

  Patterson looked at the leather-covered folder in distaste. ‘And where am I supposed to leave that? On the operating table?’

  ‘There are four empty cabins in the hospital, sir. For recuperating VIPs. We don’t have any at the moment.’

  ‘Ah. Ten minutes, then.’

  The Bo’sun was back in five minutes, the Chief Engineer in fifteen. An air of almost palpable gloom hung over Patterson.

  ‘No luck, sir?’

  ‘No, dammit. You guessed right. They’re under heavy sedation, may be hours before they come to. And if they do start coming to, Dr Singh says, he’s going to sedate them again. Apparently, they were trying to tear the bandages off their faces. He’s got their hands swathed in bandages—even an unconscious man, the doctor says, will try to scratch away at whatever irritates him. Anyway, their hands were burnt—not badly, but enough to justify the bandages.’

  ‘They’ve got straps for tying wrists to the bed-frames.’

  ‘Dr Singh did mention that. He said he didn’t think Captain Bowen would take too kindly to waking up and finding himself virtually in irons on his own ship. By the way, the missing helmsman was Hudson. Broken ribs and one pierced his lung. Doctor says he’s very ill. What luck did you have?’

  ‘Same as you, sir. Zero. There was a pair of parallel rules lying beside Mr Batesman so I assume he must have been pencilling out a course.’

  ‘You couldn’t gather anything from the chart?’

  ‘It wasn’t a chart any more. It was just a bloodstained rag.’

  THREE

  It was snowing heavily and a bitter wind blew from the east as they buried their dead in the near-Stygian darkness of the early afternoon. A form of illumination they did have, for the saboteur, probably more than satisfied with the results of his morning’s activities, was now resting on his laurels and the deck floodlights were working again, but in that swirling blizzard the light given off was weak, fitful and almost ineffectual, serving only to intensify the ghoulish effect of the burial party hastening about their macabre task and the ghostlike appearance of the bare dozen of snow-covered mourners. Flashlight in hand, Chief Engineer Patterson read out the burial service, but he might as well have been quoting the latest prices on the stock exchange for not a word could be heard: one by one the dead, in their weighted canvas shrouds, slipped down the tilted plank, out from under the Union flag and vanished, silently, into the freezing water of the Barents Sea. No bugle calls, no Last Post for the Merchant Navy, not ever: the only requiem was the lost and lonely keening of the wind through the frozen rigging and the jagged gaps that had been torn in the superstructure.

  Shivering violently and mottled blue and white with the cold, the burial party and mourners returned to the only reasonably warm congregating space left on the San Andreas—the dining and recreational
area in the hospital between the wards and the cabins.

  ‘We owe you a very great debt, Mr McKinnon,’ Dr Singh said. He had been one of the mourners and his teeth were still chattering. ‘Very swift, very efficient. It must have been a gruesome task.’

  ‘I had six willing pairs of hands,’ the Bo’sun said. ‘It was worse for them than it was for me.’ The Bo’sun did not have to explain what he meant: everybody knew that anything would always be worse for anybody than for that virtually indestructible Shetlander. He looked at Patterson. ‘I have a suggestion, sir.’

  ‘A Royal Naval one?’

  ‘No, sir. Deep-sea fisherman’s. Anyway, it’s close enough, these are the waters of the Arctic trawlers. A toast to the departed.’

  ‘I endorse that, and not for traditional or sentimental reasons.’ Dr Singh’s teeth still sounded like castanets. ‘Medicinal. I don’t know about the rest of you but my red corpuscles are in need of some assistance.’

  The Bo’sun looked at Patterson, who nodded his approval. McKinnon turned and looked at an undersized, freckle-faced youth who was hovering at a respectful distance. ‘Wayland.’

  Wayland came hurrying forward. ‘Yes, Mr McKinnon, sir?’

  ‘Go with Mario to the liquor store. Bring back some refreshments.’

  ‘Yes, Mr McKinnon, sir. Right away, Mr McKinnon, sir.’ The Bo’sun had long given up trying to get Wayland Day to address him in any other fashion.

  Dr Singh said: ‘That won’t be necessary, Mr McKinnon. We have supplies here.’

  ‘Medicinal, of course?’

  ‘Of course.’ Dr Singh watched as Wayland went into the galley. ‘How old is that boy?’

  ‘He claims to be seventeen or eighteen, says he’s not sure which. In either case, he’s fibbing. I don’t believe he’s ever seen a razor.’

  ‘He’s supposed to be working for you, isn’t he? Pantry boy, I understand. He spends nearly all his day here.’

  ‘I don’t mind, Doctor, if you don’t.’