Isvik (27 page)

Isvik
was on the slip again and we were feeding ashore, at a little ristorante-cum-bistro just back of the dockyard. That evening after supper, instead of talking about Carlos, Iris began speculating once again on the role the
Santa Maria
had been intended to play in the Falklands war, asking, first Nils, then Iain, whether the Argentine Navy had intended to use her to penetrate the military exclusion zone. ‘If she was intended as a sort of spy ship, she'd have been spotted in no time and boarded, or simply blown out of the water.'

‘She is wood,' Nils said. ‘She don't show up so well on radar.'

‘If the British warships failed to find her, then the Harriers were bound to.' She was looking at Iain. ‘Is that why you're so interested in the
Santa Maria
? You want to find out what her purpose is?'

He didn't answer, sitting there, his left elbow on the table, his shoulders hunched.

‘It doesn't make sense,' I said. ‘Those old ships may be built of wood, but there's still plenty of metal for the radar to pick up. Guns, anchors, all the fastenings, the metal bands round the masts …'

‘No.' Iris was suddenly quite excited. ‘The bands round the masts, all the deck fastenings, they were plastic. Everything that was originally iron had been ripped out and replaced with specially moulded plastic equivalents.' She had been talking to the dockyard workers, asking them about the
Santa Maria
. One of them had told her about the deck fastenings and she had confirmed it with a naval officer who had been in Punta Arenas when the frigate was towed in and who was now on his second tour of duty in the Magellan port. She had Iain's attention now as she added, ‘It must have cost a fortune to modify her like that. What did they do it for if not to use her as a spy ship? They never did use her, did they?'

He shook his head.

‘Then how did she come to be down there in the ice of the Weddell Sea? Is that what you have come to find out?'

He smiled, shaking his head again. ‘We don't know she's there. Not for certain. But if she is, and we manage to reach her …' He hesitated, still smiling, then gave a little shrug. ‘Then we'll know her secret, won't we?' And he added, ‘Ah'm inclined to agree with Nils. Ah think some naval officer with more imagination than sense dreamed up the idea of slippin' her inside the Navy's guard as a spy ship. And if that officer was high enough in rank …' He hesitated, then, still thinking aloud: ‘Nobody could tell him it wouldn't work. It's never been tried, not as far as Ah know – a wooden ship with no metal anywhere and the electrics safely cocooned. Same principle as the plastic domes that protect our coastal radar defences. But, of course, the war was over so quickly.'

‘But after the war,' she said. ‘They sailed afterwards. I checked when I was making enquiries in Ushuaia.'

‘Enquiries?' His head came up. ‘What enquiries?'

‘About Charles. I think I may be partly the reason Ángel was given facilities to fly down into the Weddell Sea.'

‘He was testin' the suitability of a Fokker plane fur work in the Antarctic.'

‘He found the
Santa Maria
. I know that. So he is flying two birds with one stone.' She gave a little giggle at her verbal mix-up. ‘He had a test job to carry out and at the same time he can see if what Charles said is true.'

Iain was frowning. ‘Ah thought he flew that test before there was any suggestion of an old ship caught in the ice down there. Did he tell ye when he flew over it?'

‘No.'

‘And if he flew over it before that plane yer husband was in crashed …' He left it at that, but the inference was obvious. If he had flown the test before the plane crashed, then he had had another reason to go looking for the
Santa Maria
. ‘When did she leave Ushuaia?' he asked her.

‘I don't know. I ask, but there is nobody there who had seen her leave.'

‘But a ship like that, a centre of interest, can't leave a naval dockyard without her absence being noted and commented on. There must have been somebody there –'

‘She was not moored at the dockyard. Nobody seemed to know where she was being hidden away. She was at the Navy Yard until just after the Falklands war ended, then she left, nobody could tell me where.'

‘Right after the end of the war?'

‘Yes, right after the war.'

‘Are ye sayin' that was when she went down into the ice – right after the war?'

But she couldn't be sure of that. ‘Some of them thought she was hidden away in one of the coves. There are hundreds of places she could have been beached or anchored. You have only to glance at the chart. All west of here is a maze of islands, channels and secret places.'

He picked her up on that. ‘Secret places? Why do ye use an expression like that – any particular reason?'

She gave a little shrug. ‘There was some talk. Rumours, you know. There are always rumours after a war. There was talk of an English commando unit. Marines. And of a camp.'

‘What sort of camp?'

But she didn't know. It was just talk. ‘And I was there because of my husband. I wasn't there to talk about the
Santa Maria
.'

‘Did anybody happen to mention anythin' about the
Desaparecidos
?'

‘I don't remember. Maybe. But it would have meant very little to me. It was Charles I was thinking of.'

The warmth of the bistro was making me drowsy. I must have dozed off, for the next thing I heard was Nils saying, ‘
Ja
, to make a good testing I need a full day.' And Iain's reply: ‘Thursday then.'

‘Okay. Ve start very airly so ve haf calm water. Then if the vind get oop is good again, so I test that
skrue
shaft with waves to throw her around.' He nodded. ‘Thursday, but you take a telephone to the weather man first. I am not wanting flat calm all day. And no gale neither. A good weather mix I want. That is good for Pete and his sails, too.'

I came fully awake then. ‘Sails? I haven't got any sails yet.'

‘They are finished,' Iris said. ‘I showed you the telex on Saturday. They are loaded on the cargo vessel
Anton Varga
and she left Valparaíso last Wednesday.'

‘Sea trials on Thursday then,' Iain said, looking across at me. He got to his feet. ‘And if the new sails haven't arrived by then ye'll hoist the old ones. Okay?'

I nodded. The old ones had been double-stitched and patched where necessary. They would be perfectly adequate to test the rigging.

He stopped at the cash desk to pay the bill, the three of us getting to our feet and shrugging our way into our oilskins. All through the meal the rain had been beating against the windows. Iris took my arm, a gesture of excitement, I think. ‘Thursday and our first sea trials. Thursday is my lucky day. If everything goes right …'

But I was already thinking about all the things that still had to be done. There were the old sails to bend on, and because they had been with a retired dockyard worker, who had been employed making and repairing awnings and hatch covers, I had not yet been able to check the sheet leads. And then there was the problem of handling the sheets when under sail alone, and if it suddenly started to blow and we had to reef … We were desperately short-handed, with Nils in the wheelhouse watching over his engine and only Iain available for deck work if Iris was at the wheel.

I tried to argue with them, but though they agreed it would be much simpler if we postponed trials until the Galvins arrived at the end of the month, Iain still insisted on Thursday. ‘And if the weather's bad?' I asked. ‘It's not just the sails. You both had a look at the chart. Somebody has to pilot the boat.' I had already discovered that I was the only one of us with experience in navigation. ‘And if the wind comes at us from off the mountains, the gusts could be katabatic.' They both knew what that meant, vicious down-blasts hammering the water almost vertically so that a vessel with full sail up could suffer a knock-down. ‘Just think what it could be like if we had to shorten sail in those conditions.' I talked to them about reefing then. There was no roller-reefing, it was rope down to the boom through the reefing cringles and tie-in reef pennants, and in the confines of the Strait I would have to be constantly taking bearings and marking up the chart.

‘We'll take it as it comes,' Iain said finally. ‘Ah want to see
Isvik
under way so we know what further problems we face. Okay?' He turned towards the door. ‘No more argument, Pete. Trials are set fur Thursday, 09.00, and if the weather's bad, then we'll confine it to engine trials.' And he ducked out, shoulders hunched against driving hailstones.

I caught up with him, almost shouting to make myself heard above the drumming of the hail on tin roofs, the sound of waves breaking against the quay, as I reminded him how fickle the wind could be, how quickly it could get up. ‘We could have full sail hoisted in relative calm and the next minute be roaring along with far too much canvas up and visibility about nil in a heavy rain squall. What do I do then?'

‘Shit yer pants, Ah should think.' He had rounded on me, his voice cold with anger. ‘Jesus Christ, man! Stop worryin'. Take things as they come.'

‘But –'

‘Shut up, blast ye! Ah don't want another word from ye on the subject. Thursday, 09.00. Sea trials. Got it?'

‘It will be all right, Pete.' Iris had caught up with us, pouring oil on troubled waters. There was something to be said for having a woman along. ‘He's right. Stop worrying.' I felt her hand on my arm. ‘I'll get Captain Freddie to pilot us,' she added. ‘I'm sure he would come. He would love it. There! Does that ease your mind?'

I said, ‘Yes.' But it didn't really, and though I was tired, I couldn't sleep that night. Maybe it was the coffee, but for hours, it seemed, I lay awake, my mind going over and over all the deadly, disastrous possibilities. A young woman with only a rudimentary knowledge of sailing and a man who was not only one-armed, but mentally attuned to mechanics and electronics so that he hardly knew one end of a boat from another. And though
Isvik
was essentially a motor-sailer, she still carried a considerable area of canvas. She was schooner-rigged, the main mast aft carrying a huge stays'l for reaching as well as the main, and the foremast an upper and a lower squares'l in addition to a boomed stays'l and a full range of jibs.

I had three days, that was all, and the sails were sodden. We had been using the Yard facilities and they had been laid out in the loft while the old man worked on them. He had finished on the Friday, and because there had been a sudden demand for the use of the loft, they had been dumped outside in the open. Nobody had told me, and as a result, they had remained there all weekend. It had rained throughout the Sunday night. They said it was unusual for rain to last any length of time, but it did that night and the sails were so full of water they seemed to weigh a ton as we shifted them on a borrowed trolley from the Yard to the boat.

Fortunately, the weather was fine from noon onwards with a nice drying breeze. With Iris to help me, I hoisted the jibs, main and trysail upside down, an old trick that ensured the biggest area of sail was at the highest point on the mast. Even so, I lost a whole day, the sails slatting furiously as the wind increased out of the west, funnelling north up the Strait and causing the heavy terylene to bang thunderously. The noise brought half the population of the port to the quayside. I don't think they had ever seen sails hoisted the wrong way up before, and anyway, they were as full of ‘curtiosity' as a baby elephant, asking all sorts of questions, but particularly where we were going, when and how many of us.
Isvik
had been moored to the quay so long they had obviously come to regard her as a fixture.

The day was not entirely wasted, for I spent most of it staring at charts 1281 and 1337 and trying to memorise the more hazardous details, also the transit marks, bearings and all the courses we would need to steer going either south or north from Punta Arenas.

We had come off the slip first thing that morning, a Yard launch towing us round to the quay, and Nils had gone to work straight away, putting first of all the heads together, then connecting up the galley taps which were all pump action. As a result I had the deckhouse with its chart table virtually to myself. It was very different on Tuesday when Nils had the engine hatch boards off and the big Merc diesel thumping away as he ran a detailed check on the prop-shaft and the auxiliary dynamo, slipping the shaft clutch in and out.

Tuesday was my day for hoisting the sails the right way up, checking the sheet leads to the winches, the quick clamps we had had flown in from BA, reeving the mainsheet through the big titanium and carbon-fibre block, which was also new, and working out the reefing drill. Iain would be at the mast paying the halyard out on the winch, I would be hauling down on the rope rove through the lead cringle, running it through the quick clamp and clearing it down, while Iris did the same for the luff cringle and then worked aft along the boom, flaking the sail down and tying it into position with the reefing pennants. I took them through the drill time and time again until Iain finally lost patience and said he had other things to do.

‘Well, just remember what you have to do when I yell
Reef
.'

‘Okay, okay.' I don't think he had an inkling of what it could be like at night in a gale with a big sea running.

I stood there for a moment, looking at him. ‘Something I think you should understand.'

He was on his way below then and he checked. He had caught the tone of my voice. ‘Well?'

‘You told me I was to be the ship's sailing master, right?'

‘Aye.' He had his jaw thrust out and I had the feeling he was preparing himself for trouble.

‘If I'm to be sailing master,' I said slowly, ‘then the deck is mine. I'm in charge up here and you're under my orders, you and Iris, Nils, the Galvins, everybody. You do what I say without question or argument. If not – if it isn't to be like that, then I won't sail with you. It would be too bloody dangerous. You understand? It's got to be like that or we don't survive when the gremlins strike.'