Endangered Species (19 page)

‘No. Some speak French.'

‘That's not good,' he said, ‘no one speaks French aboard here.' He was troubled, annoyed that he had found the ammunition and that it somehow spoiled things with this girl. For a moment he was moved by her plight and his power, then he chid himself for an arrogant fool. What was he thinking of? ‘You get some sleep now,' he said. ‘Okay?'

‘Okay,' she replied, smiling again.

But Stevenson was aware it was no longer a smile of spontaneity. He was wounded by the realisation.

‘For God's sake . . .' he muttered at his own stupidity as he made for the bridge.

Captain Mackinnon regretted the whisky the moment he stepped on to the bridge. Indispensable as it had been to his recent performance as a surgeon, it was a disastrous accompaniment to what was now required of him. Out on the bridge-wing as the
Matthew Flinders
staggered under the onslaught of yet another heavy sea, Mackinnon could see he was in for a long and lonely night. In the darkness he studied the height and period of the waves as the breaking crests, exploding with a malevolent luminosity of their own, roared down upon them. The near-gale he had left the ship hove-to in had become a storm, the wind above fifty knots, he estimated, Force Ten on the Beaufort scale.

Waves of fatigue had swept over him as he had cleaned himself in his cabin, washing the blood from his hands, staring at the lined and bronzed yet pallid features in the mirror.

In a moment of weakness he had leaned his face against the cool glass and groaned. Shelagh was flying out to Hong Kong: the recollection stiffened him. In a day or two she would expect him to bring his ship into the ‘fragrant harbour' of the Crown Colony. And the
Matthew Flinders
was
his
ship, despite the owners, despite the foreign flag
their prostituting minds had seen to gaud her with, for he bore the responsibility. He had dried his hands and climbed to the bridge.

But on the bridge his resolution faltered. It was pot-valour, he realised, and with the self-knowledge came the cautionary thought that he had better be careful. The drinking of the whisky had reminded him of a time when consolation for all things lurked in alcohol.

He stood, bracing himself against the wild motion of the deck, and drew air into his lungs. He had come up here where he belonged, where duty bound him in an almost mystical bondage, to nurse his ship through the typhoon. He turned and made his way into the chart-room.

He found Rawlings bent over the chart-table, his legs widespread as he flicked the pages of his nautical tables.

‘You got something then?'

‘Not very good, I'm afraid, sir,' Rawlings said, scribbling a final line of figures and reaching for the parallel rules. ‘The overcast was just about total and the horizon poor, but I managed three intercepts through gaps in the cloud, two of which were of Vega and similar enough to give me reasonable confidence in the fix.'

In view of the observational errors inherent in a poor horizon and quick glimpses of stars through rents in fast-moving scud, they could reckon the position to be accurate to within ten miles at the best. Nevertheless Mackinnon was pleased. It was better than nothing. Under the circumstances Rawlings had done very well, and he said so.

‘Thank you, sir,' said Rawlings, ‘there we are.' The Chief Officer stepped back and let Mackinnon peruse the chart and the neatly stencilled stellar fix. It showed the ship over one hundred and fifty miles south-east of Point Lagan on the coast of Vietnam.

‘Those poor bastards made nearly two hundred miles in that wreck,' he said, laying down the brass dividers.

Rawlings grunted. ‘Two hundred miles to
where
?' he asked.

‘God knows. Beyond the fact that they were free.'

‘This typhoon, sir,' Rawlings said anxiously, as if recalling Mackinnon to something he had forgotten, ‘I've been looking at the nav. warnings.' The Chief Officer reached out for the signal clip.

‘There's a mistake in the plotting,' said Mackinnon.

‘Oh, I didn't think . . .'

‘I spotted it earlier,' Mackinnon cut in, pleased not to have had Rawlings draw it to his attention and feeling it partially made up for his irresponsibility with the whisky bottle. ‘Then we sighted that junk and' – he shrugged – ‘the priorities shifted, you might say. Have we had any more warnings?'

Rawlings picked up a pink signal form lying under the lead weight holding one corner of the chart down. ‘This came in five minutes ago. I was going to plot it the minute I finished the star fix and let you know.'

Mackinnon read the pink chit out loud:

De Hongkong Radio to CQ
(all ships)

Severe Tropical Revolving Storm now Typhoon David centred on position 10° 30' north 115° east stop Winds within 200 miles of centre estimated cyclonic force 8 within 75 miles of centre force 10 to 11 gusting to force 12 stop Centre estimated moving NE at 12 knots stop Ships with information please report stop Ends

‘This is already two hours old.'

Mackinnon looked to the barograph on its small shelf on the after bulkhead. The aneroid-driven pen had drawn its violet line in a steep downward curve. Setting time against atmospheric pressure on the instrument's printed graticule, Mackinnon drew cold comfort from the fact that in the last three hours the air pressure had dropped seven millibars. He swore softly, feeling a physical sensation of his belly knotting up with apprehension. He turned back to the chart-table.

Rawlings was again plying parallel rules and dividers, measuring the distance between the estimated position of the typhoon's centre and his own stellar fix. The legs of the dividers spanned over four degrees on the vertical scale of latitude, each of which represented sixty nautical miles.

‘Two hundred and seventy-three miles away over the Tizard shoals, and the wind nor' nor' west, at force nine or ten.' Rawlings gave voice to Mackinnon's thoughts.

‘It's a ten already,' he said flatly. ‘It's either much closer than indicated, or much more severe.' He stopped and looked up as Stevenson joined them. The Second Mate stared down at the pool of lamplight illuminating the chart of the South China Sea with its two fateful positions neatly inscribed in Rawlings's pedantic hand.

‘If we continue to lie hove-to with the wind on our starboard bow,' Mackinnon continued, ‘we will probably find ourselves on the perimeter of the dangerous semicircle and in danger from the centre.'

His two officers were both nodding agreement, their faces grim.

‘And if it doesn't recurve a touch, sir, as seems probable at this latitude, we'll be in a very dodgy position.'

‘Dodgy would be an understatement, Mr Stevenson. Very well,' Mackinnon came to his decision, ‘we put the wind on the starboard quarter and run out of the path of the storm, then.'

‘We're as snugged down on deck as we can be, sir,' Stevenson reported. ‘The Chief Steward's got one of his staff on duty with the refugees.'

‘Good. Mr Rawlings, let the engine-room know. I've already warned the Chief we're in for a blow. Better tell the duty engineer to make sure the greasers use the shaft tunnel to get to and from their accommodation. The after deck will be far too dangerous.'

‘Aye, aye, sir.'

‘And ask Sparks to come up; we'll get a signal off to Hong
Kong. Carry on, then. I'll take the bridge for a while. I've sent the Third Mate to get his head down for an hour. You can put a man on the wheel, too. I don't care a damn what the makers of the bloody auto-pilot claim, I want flesh and blood on that wheel . . .' At the expression a vision of the Vietnamese woman's smashed legs swum into his mind's eye. He addressed Stevenson. ‘You turn in, son. Oh, by the way, you did well in the boat this afternoon.'

‘Thank you, sir.'

‘You've all done well,' Mackinnon said to Rawlings, as Stevenson disappeared. ‘Taylor surprised me. He did one of the amputations.'

‘Good God!' exclaimed Rawlings, bracing himself as the ship crashed into another monstrous sea and lurched into the succeeding trough. He followed Mackinnon into the greater darkness of the wheelhouse. Ahead of them the night was pallid with spray and it struck the windows with a lethal rattle.

‘How is the woman?' Rawlings asked.

He could just make out the shrug of Mackinnon's epauletted shoulders in the gloom.

‘I don't know really. We aren't bloody surgeons.' An edge of defensive desperation could be detected in the Captain's voice, but it had steadied again when he added, ‘If gangrene sets in she's had it, I'm afraid. How's her baby?'

‘Last seen being given the feed of its life in the seamen's mess.'

‘I'm glad of that,' said Mackinnon.

‘Are you all right, sir?'

‘We had a tot or two to get through the bloody business, mister,' Mackinnon replied harshly, realising his breath betrayed him, ‘but I'm fine, fine. Now, let's have a man on the wheel, get Sparks up here and let the engine-room know what we intend doing.'

And as Rawlings picked up the telephone, Captain Mackinnon jammed himself in the forward corner of the wheel-house
and waited for his orders to be passed to the engine- and radio-rooms.

This was not the first typhoon Captain Mackinnon had experienced, though he felt in his bones it was to be the worst.

‘Only two things really frighten me at sea,' he was fond of saying to his officers by way of a cautionary tale, ‘fog and fire.'

Heavy weather was rarely a real problem to ships as stoutly built as the
Matthew Flinders
, ships which had been designed specifically for these unpredictable waters; for old as she was, she had scantlings more massive than the welded boxes passing for today's new tonnage. But there was in this wind, Mackinnon thought, something malevolent. The spooky conviction that he had been a lucky man for too long hovered again on the margins of his sensible mind, dragged from the dark recesses of his self-centred subconscious by the overdose of Scotch.

Not that Captain Mackinnon believed in a vengeful God. He merely knew the sea and the wind to be indifferent, and his career to be a piece of monstrous arrogance, a puny, quite insignificant attempt to attain some sort of superiority over these mighty elemental forces in the name of John Mackinnon, human soul. When someone coughed behind him he realised he had been leaning, his forehead on the glass of the wheelhouse windows for some time. He grunted interrogatively and stirred.

‘Sparks, sir. You sent for me.'

‘Oh, yes.' He led the Radio Officer into the chart-room and dictated the signal to Hong Kong Radio, giving the ship's position, the barometric pressure and the speed and direction of the wind.

Sparks raised his head, Biro poised: ‘Anything else, sir?' he prompted.

‘No . . . oh, yes, better let them know we intercepted a junk of refugees. Have we had a head count?'

‘Freddie made it one hundred and forty-six.'

‘Good grief!' Mackinnon's surprise was genuine. He had not imagined there were so many, despite the crowded appearance of the junk's deck.

One hundred and forty-six additional human souls were laid as extra responsibility upon him. He looked at the bridge log recording the navigational movements of the ship. In Rawlings's script he read out an abstract of the dead-reckoning position, the time and the bald entry:
Embarked 146 Vietnamese refugees from derelict junk. No. 1 mlboat abandoned due deteriorating weather. Proceeded, C
°
015°T
.

‘Tag that information on the end of the signal then, Sparks.'

‘Aye, aye, sir.'

Mackinnon lingered a moment in the chart-room, bending to stare again at the barograph. It still plummeted: it was time to turn round. But a hundred and forty-six souls! A hundred and forty-six lives which fate had already decreed should not dwell in their native land and had then abandoned upon the indifferent surface of the South China Sea . . .

Did his intervention constitute some mild relenting on the part of fate? Or was it a fragment of the arrogance that gave John Mackinnon his identity as a ship-master? And if it was the latter, had fate regarded it as a challenge and hence sent the typhoon as chastisement . . . ?

He dismissed the preposterous thought with a mental shrug. What purblind bloody foolishness! He had no time for such introverted nonsense. True, the operation on the woman had unnerved him; true, he had taken too much whisky for prudence, and, true, he was tired; but he had been scared before and he had been drunk before, really drunk, so drunk that he had damn near lost everything. And, come to that, he had been so dog-tired before that he had not cared whether or not death crept upon him, and yet he had survived.

He drew in a deep breath and braced himself. For Shelagh's sake, he thought, Shelagh who was even then preparing to fly out to meet him, he could not weaken now. He was Captain John Mackinnon, Master under God of the motor vessel
Matthew Flinders
.

‘Come to take the wheel, Cap'n,' Able Seaman Williams said as both men met at the wheelhouse door. ‘Sorry I'm late. Took a bit of time getting along the boat-deck.'

‘That's all right, Williams,' Mackinnon said, glad to be dragged from his morbid introspection, bending to the auto-pilot controls and resetting them to manual.

‘She's doing a dido and the wind—'

‘Yes, it's bad,' Mackinnon cut in, in no mood for idle chatter. ‘We're going to turn round in a minute, so get the feel of her. Steer three-three-five.'

‘Three-three-five it is, sir.'

They were going to turn round, he had said so matter-of-factly, as if the manoeuvre he was about to carry out was nothing more than a simple alteration of course. In fact, to remove the ship from her situation of potential trouble, he would have to risk everything on a most dangerous evolution, for to turn meant swinging her broadside on to the seas, if only for a few moments . . .