Atlantic Fury (28 page)

I saw arms wave on the cliff opposite. There were three bodies there now, all waving in the excitement of imminent rescue. But there was still that sheer cliff and the men on the top could do nothing to help. It was up to Field now. Field alone could lift the end of that rope the 300 feet that would transform it from just the tail-end of a line into a connecting link, a bridge between the two masses of rock – a bridge that could act as a means of escape.

Field had crossed the gut barefooted, but in his battledress. Now, soaked to the skin, he leaned against the vertical rock and put on his climbing boots. That done, he fastened a belt round his waist that was stuffed with rock pitons like steel dog's teeth. An ice hammer looped by its thong to his wrist, the rope fastened around his waist, and he was ready. But then he stood for a long time with his head thrown back, gazing up at the cliff above him.

He stood like that for so long that I thought he was held fast by the sheer impossibility of it. Perhaps by fear, too. And I for one wouldn't have blamed him. Those shining panels of rock, trickling water – a spider would have its work cut out to find a footing. There were ledges and crevices, it was true. There are in almost any rock. But they were so minute and spaced so far apart. And all the time the sea swirled about his legs. The din of it was incessant, the gut streaming with wind-blown spray, gusts of spume, spongy masses of it flying through the air.

At last he moved; a flick of the hand holding the rope. Iain squatted tighter into his niche, waiting, both hands on the rope. The three men on the cliff-top opposite me leaned out and waved. Field saw them, for he lifted his hand. And then at last he began to climb, traversing out along a toe-hold crack that was a fractured continuation of the ledge on which he had stood.

It was fascinating to watch him. He must have been over fifty and out of practice, yet he balanced himself like an acrobat, hanging in space and moving steadily upwards, his feet doing the work, the rest of his body still and quiet. To the left at first, a long traverse, and then a quick gain of perhaps fifty or sixty feet up toe and finger holds I couldn't see; a short traverse right and then a pause. The pause lengthened out, his hands reaching occasionally and drawing back. Then for a long time he hung there quite motionless.

Had his nerve gone? I don't know. I asked him once, but he only smiled and said, ‘It was an ugly place. I thought it better to start again.'

I didn't see him jump. One moment he was there, and the next he was in the sea, and Iain was hauling him back to the ledge where he lay for a while getting his breath. Then he started up again.

The same route, but a left traverse at the top and then he was hammering a piton into a crevice, snapping on a hook for the rope, and up again using pitons from the clanking string of them around his waist, one after another. He must have hammered in about two dozen of them before he reached the overhang, and there he stuck with less than fifty feet to go – a fly on wet slate with the spume curling up like smoke from the cauldron below him.

He got round it eventually by going down about half the distance he'd climbed and working another crevice line to the right. This brought him almost opposite me, and right below him then was a deadly mass of rocks awash. He looked down once and I could imagine how he felt with only the rope running now through three pitons to hold him. The last 50 ft. seemed to take him almost as many minutes. The crevices were too shallow for the pitons and he was white with cold, his clothes heavy with water. But he did it.

His head came level with the cliff-top. Hands reached down and he went over the top on his belly. Then he suddenly passed out, lying there, limp. But the rope was there and that was life to those who'd survived. The tail-end, passed back down the cliff to Iain, was made fast to a heavier line, and so, with many goings back and forth to the camp, we rigged up a makeshift breeches-buoy.

It took us all morning in the teeth of the gale with five of the tug's crew and the Doc and the men who had survived the helicopter crash. Baulks of timber had to be brought up, heavy hawsers, block and tackle, and everything rigged by trial and error. Just after midday we managed to get food and clothing across to them. But it wasn't until almost 2 p.m. that we got the first man over the gut and safe on to Keava. And after that it was slow, back-breaking work, for many of them were stretcher cases, who, when they reached Keava, had to be carried down the slopes and along the beach to the camp. There was no vehicle, no means of transporting them other than by hand.

We took altogether twenty-three men off Sgeir Mhor, five of them unconscious, and several badly injured. All were suffering from exposure, their skin a leprous white from constant immersion in salt water. Wentworth was the last to come across, a different man now, burned up by the twenty-four hours he'd been in command. Stratton was dead – with the Cox'n he'd been getting the men out of the mess deck when the whole bridge structure had been crushed like a biscuit tin; and Pinney, who'd thought Laerg the best posting he'd had. Four men had died during the night, including the young steward, Perkins, whose ribcage had been stoved in by the slam of the water-tight doors. Field said there was no sign of the landing craft, only bits and pieces of metal scattered among the rocks.

The wind went round that night into the northwest and the tug came close inshore. By midnight everybody had been embarked. Everybody except my brother. It was the Doc who discovered he wasn't on board. He'd had a list made and a roll called, for the confusion on the tug was indescribable – thirty-five extra men, many of them casualties.

‘Where's Major Braddock?' I heard the question passed along the deck. ‘Anybody seen Major Braddock?' Voices calling in the darkness of the decks. And then the Skipper giving orders. Sergeant Wetherby piling into the boat again, the outboard motor bursting into life. I jumped in beside him and we shot away from the tug's side, slapping through the shallows over the low tide sand bar.

The outboard died as the bows grated and the boat came to a sudden halt. We scrambled out into a foot or more of water and ploughed over the sands to the beach. Wetherby thought he might have gone to check the remains of the transport that lay, battered and derelict, among the rocks behind the loading beach. He was an MT sergeant. Whilst he went towards the dim shape of the bulldozer, now standing high and dry on the sands, I hurried to the camp. Every now and then the wind brought me the sound of his voice calling: ‘Major Braddock! Major Braddock!'

The lights were out in the camp now, the generator still. I stumbled about in the darkness, calling. At first I called his Army name, but then, because it didn't seem to matter here alone, I called: ‘Iain! Iain – where are you?' I reached the hut and, fumbling in the dark, found the torch I'd used. The place was empty; the radio still there and all the mess and litter of its temporary use as a casualty clearing station. I went outside then, probing and calling.

I'd never have found him without the torch. He was standing in the lee of the cookhouse, quite still, his back turned towards me as though afraid his face might catch the light: ‘What the hell are you playing at?' I demanded. ‘Why didn't you answer?'

He stared at me, but didn't say anything for a moment. There was a twitch at the corner of his mouth and his face was deathly pale. ‘Are you ill?' I asked.

He moved then, came closer to me and reached for my arm. ‘Donald.' His voice was hoarse, little more than a whisper against the blatter of the wind. ‘Go back. Go back to the ship. You haven't seen me. Understand?' The urgency of his request was almost as startling as the request itself. He jerked at my arm. ‘Go – back.' Behind the hoarseness of his voice, I caught the tremor of his mood, something deep that he couldn't control. ‘As you love me, Donald, go back.'

‘But why? What's wrong? Is it Lane?' I asked. ‘Has he been worrying you?'

‘He's been on to me – twice from the mainland. But it isn't that.' His grip tightened on my arm. ‘Leave me now, will you?'

‘But why?'

‘Damn you, Donald! Can't you do what I ask?' And then, his voice more controlled: ‘Something I have to do. We left in a hurry – the tide and a change of wind. No time … and Leroux half dead, too weak to do anything. It was either that or be trapped.' His voice had died to a whisper.

‘You mean you were here?' I asked. ‘After the
Duart Castle
…'

‘Try to understand, can't you? Just leave me here and no questions.'

I hesitated. The torch on his face showed his mouth tight-set, his eyes urgent. ‘All right,' I said. ‘If that's what you want …'

But I was too late. As I switched off the torch and turned to go, a voice spoke out of the darkness behind me: ‘You've found him then?' It was Sergeant Wetherby. His jacketed figure loomed bulkily from the direction of the generator. And to Iain, he said, ‘Major Braddock, sir. The tug's all ready to go – everybody on board. Only yourself, sir. They're waiting for you.'

I heard Iain's muttered curse. And then in a flat voice: ‘Very good, Sergeant. Sorry if I held things up – just a last check round.' He came with us then. There was nothing else he could do for he couldn't hope to persuade the sergeant to let him stay. And so we embarked and at 01.15 hours on the morning of October 24, the tug steamed out of Shelter Bay with the last remnant of the Army Detachment.

The evacuation was complete at a cost of fifty-three lives, the loss of one landing craft, a helicopter and a great deal of equipment.

PART THREE

AFTERMATH OF DISASTER

CHAPTER ONE

WITCH-HUNT

(October 24–February 28)

Press reaction to the news of the disaster was immediate. The first scattered fragments had begun coming through within hours of our landing craft being wrecked. Radio and TV put it out in their newscasts as it filtered through and during the day the story moved from the Stop Press of the evening papers to the front page. The main body of the Press, however, had almost twelve hours in which to build the story up; and because it involved the out-islands, ships, the sea, the weather, they knew the impact it would have on the public. All that day telephones rang continuously in the press offices of the three Services and in the Meteorological Office in Kingsway. The Admiralty and the Air Ministry were helpful; the Army less so for they were inhibited by the knowledge that a commanding officer had ordered the arrest of his second-in-command. In an attempt to avoid this becoming known to the Press, they clamped down on all comment, closed the military line to Northton to all but official calls and confined their press releases to the facts of the situation. The effect was to make the Press suspicious.

An enterprising reporter on the local Stornoway paper got hold of Fellowes. His story of the flight to Laerg and Mike Ferguson's death was scooped by a popular daily. A Reuter's man, who had flown north from Glasgow that morning, reached Northton in time to get the news of Standing's death and watch the tug leave from Leverburgh quay. His dispatches went out on the Reuter teleprint service to all newspaper offices.

By that night the full extent of the disaster was known, the presses of the national dailies were rolling out the story and reporters and photographers were hurrying north. So many took the night train to Glasgow that BEA, who had cancelled the morning's flight to Stornoway, had second thoughts. The newspaper men had a rough flight, but by midday they were piling into Northton and Leverburgh. Others, mainly photographers with specially chartered planes, stood by at Stornoway from dawn onwards to take pictures of Laerg. Fellowes found his plane in great demand.

The fact that there were survivors gave a dramatic quality to the news and most of Britain had the story on their breakfast tables, front-paged under flaring headlines – a story of storm and disaster, of a colonel and his adjutant killed in the attempts to rescue men trapped on a gale-torn rock in the North Atlantic. And to add to the drama was the suggestion that the Army had something to hide. Editors' instructions were to get at the truth.

Two reporters in search of a drink landed up at the hotel at Rodil. They got hold of Marjorie. She was in a highly emotional state and prepared to talk. If Standing had been alive, she might have blamed him on account of Mike Ferguson's death. But Standing was dead, and because she was frightened for her father, she put the blame for everything on Major Braddock, and in attacking him, she revealed that he had been placed under arrest for ordering the LCT in to the beach. For those two reporters she was worth her weight in gold.

Other reporters, casing the Northton HQ and getting no change out of the Army personnel who had all been instructed to have no contact with the Press, transferred their attention to the Met. Office. They, too, struck gold. Cliff was a story in himself and nothing would have stopped that little Welshman from talking. He gave it to them, blow by blow, as seen from the weather man's point of view. One correspondent, reporting him from a tape-recorded interview, gave his words verbatim: ‘I tell you, the man must have been off his bloody nut, ordering a landing craft into the beach on a night like that. Oh yes, the wind was north then and they were under the lee of the island in Shelter Bay. But aground like that, she was at the mercy of the elements, you see, and when the wind swung into the south …'

There was more in the same vein and it all went south by wire and phone to the waiting presses in London. And by the following morning the public was convinced that the man responsible for this appalling loss of life was Major Braddock. They weren't told that in so many words, but it was implied, and this before he had had a chance to defend himself, when he was, in fact, still on Laerg organising the rescue operations.

Once the survivors had been reported safe, the excitement of the story dwindled and news-hungry reporters, looking for a fresh angle, began delving into the relations between Braddock and his Commanding Officer. What had happened at that interview in Standing's office in the early hours of the morning of October 22? Why had he placed Braddock under arrest? Cliff was interviewed on TV and radio. So was Marjorie. Laura Standing, too, and Fellowes. The evidence piled up and all this canned material was being rushed down to London whilst the tug was still battling its way through the aftermath of the gale.