Isvik (43 page)

They had cleared the entrance to the Beagle Channel and were abreast of Isla de los Estados by noon the following day, and with all sail set were making something over 12 knots. Because they knew he had experience of sailing ships, he was allowed on deck, and the navigating officer even permitted him to follow the course on the chart. ‘You see I am the only other man on board who has experience of navigating the old way so he let me have the stop-watch and fix the exact time when he is taking a sun sight. The same at night, too, with the stars. They have no Satnav or any electronic means of fixing their position. It don't seem to matter very much at the time, a massive group of islands like the Malvinas not being something you can easily miss.'

They lost sight of land shortly before dusk and by the time it was dark the sky had become overcast, the ship ploughing a lonely furrow over the long wave trains sweeping up from the Horn. They had already shortened sail, the wind being then south of west and increasing. The Argentine weather forecast, which they had picked up on their portable radio, gave the wind as strong to gale, possibly severe gale, and this was confirmed by a Chilean forecast.

Daylight was beginning to seep into the cabin. He leaned back in his seat, passing a hand across his face, suddenly silent. ‘Is that when they decided to dae it?' Iain's voice was weary, but insistent, and I knew he would go on questioning Eduardo Connor-Gómez till he had all the facts. Then what?

‘Do it?' The man's eyes were open and staring. Now that it had come to the point, and he knew that he was going to be pressured to remember the details, it was obvious he didn't want to talk about it.

‘When did they pump the spores into that hold?'

‘That same night.' He said it reluctantly. But then in a rush – ‘There is a conference, here in the cabin, and they call me in, the Captain wanting to know the time it would take between spore inhalation and death. I tell him it will probably vary – three, four days maybe, but the lassitude will begin during twenty-four hours, maybe thirty-six. At the speed we are running we have only another twenty-two hours before we are level with Cape Meredith. That is the most south point of West Falkland. After that it is only about six hours to Bold Cove.'

They had chosen Bold Cove, he said, because that was where the English had first landed in 1790. He even remembered the name – Captain John Strong of the
Welfare
. ‘They thought it very right, you know, the close-by settlement of Port Howard being one of the largest sheep stations in the Malvinas.' The plan was to ferry most of the infected sheep, and some of the humans, ashore in the wooden barge they carried amidships. The rest of the infected cargo would then be towed in a big rubber inflatable across Falkland Sound to Port San Carlos – again, something they regarded as appropriate. One of the very few bits of metal they had had on the ship, apart from the cooking stoves, was the big outboard for the inflatable.

He leaned back, closing his eyes. ‘That Scotch island – you know, where they make an experiment during the Hitler war. I have forgot the name –'

‘Gruinard,' Iain said.

‘Yes – Gruinard.' He nodded. ‘Is sealed off for over forty years and cost half a million sterling to decontaminate. There are some thirteen trials made in 1942. There was even a bomb full of spores released and sheep tethered downwind of posts where other tests had been tried. I remember a paper I studied –' He leaned forward, frowning. ‘1969, I think. There were annual inspections, but in 1969 they stopped because the soil and vegetation is still infected. There were other tests carried out in America, I believe, but it is only this test that I studied, and that because I was at Porton Down. So, you imagine what it would be like in the Falkland Islands, which is as big as your area of Wales – the sheep driven ashore, infecting other sheep, roaming all over the territory, and the humans nursed in isolated settlements where they don't know what the illness is and all inhale the infection. The whole of the Malvinas would be no-go.'

‘So how did ye stop them?' It was the question I had been about to ask. ‘Ye had a plan?'

He shook his head, slowly. ‘No. It is God, I think, who have the plan. The wind is rising, you see, and the movement is becoming more violent all the time as we head out from the Estrecho de Magellanes. So they decide to do it right then, before conditions get worse.'

Weapons and ammunition had been issued and all of them had donned chemical warfare protective clothing and gas masks. They had then gone for'ard on to the gun-deck, spread a heavy-duty tarpaulin over the gratings and opened up the big trap doors at each end of the deck. It was the humans that had woken first, crying for water. But when they saw the plastic-coated, masked men coming down into the hold with their guns and their spray containers, a sudden hush had fallen over the crowded hold. The only sound then had been the seas breaking under the ship, the straining of her timbers and the sheep ‘bleating like new-born
bébés
' – those were his words.

He had known when they had started releasing the compressed air from the spore-impregnated cylinders because of the sudden outcry from the humans up for'ard. Two shots had been fired. After that there had been silence, except for the cries of a man who had been wounded. But when the crew began coming up out of the hold again, drawing their ladders up after them, the outcry from the humans had drowned out the sound of the sheep until the thud of the heavy trap door muffled the terrified uproar.

He got as far as that in his story, his voice getting more and more choked as he recalled the details. Then suddenly he broke down completely, his shoulders wracked by sobs he could no longer suppress. ‘I knew – you see. I understood, how they would die.'

There was a long silence. Embarrassed, I turned my head away from him, towards the stern windows. The glass was cracked and dirty, boarded up in places, but through them I could see the north-eastern sky tinged with the first pink of sunrise. ‘Ye said somethin' about God,' Iain prompted him.

Eduardo nodded.

‘Ye had no plan yerself?'

‘No.'

‘And God? How does God come into it?'

‘Who else?' He suddenly crossed himself. ‘Who else but Jesu Christ would have so touched them that they had to get drunk.' And he added, his voice stronger again, ‘I think if it is just a matter of shooting it would not have concerned them so. They were hand-picked, the toughest, the most unimaginative and brutal … They were trained killers. But air from containers – that is something they don't understand. To them it is like handling dark magic, a thing that is cursed. So they want drink. They want to dull their senses and forget that hold full of men. The Captain in particular. He is a very hard-bit man, but he is not a fool. He know very well what he has done. There is twenty-seven men down there –' He suddenly grinned at us, and the change in his face sent a cold shiver through me. ‘They put me on the helm, you see. They gave me the course and left me there. That is what I mean about God.'

Every now and then either the Captain or the navigator had come up to check that everything was all right. And then time passed and nobody came. In the end he had left the wheel and gone below. They were still drinking and some were already feeling the effects. He told the Captain he needed a glass of water and went into the pantry. The sight of an open case of vodka dumped on top of the medical chest had made it easy for him. He had screwed the top off one of the vodka bottles, then emptied into it the contents of nearly a dozen ampoules of sodium amytal – at least, I think that's what he said, and Iain had nodded – ‘What we call Amy. Of course.' He had screwed the top back on, given the bottle a good shake, then walked out into the cabin with the bottle held behind him in such a way that the Captain was bound to see it. ‘There is a roar and I am seized from behind, the bottle wrenched out of my hand, and he is shaking me and calling me names so my teeth want to jump out of my mouth. That is how God came into it.'

Two hours later he had gone below again to find the bottle empty and all of them slumped unconscious on the floor. He hadn't thought it through, of course. It had been done on the spur of the moment. He could have dragged them up, one by one, and pushed them overboard. Instead, he roped them together with their hands tied behind their backs, inflated the rubber dinghy, and then, when they came round, had given them the choice of going down into the hold in place of the men he was about to release or taking a chance in the inflatable. Inevitably they had chosen the inflatable.

To get it launched over the side he had released two of them, men he regarded as less dangerous than the others. But when it was in the water the Captain had claimed they could not climb down with their hands tied behind their backs. An argument had followed and one of the men he had freed had finally made a rush at him. ‘So I shoot him. What else can I do? I did not mean it to be in the stomach.'

After that he had let them go, one by one, the Captain last, and when they wire all in the boat he had thrown off the securing lines. He asked us then whether they had made it to the Malvinas, and when Iain said, ‘No, not as far as Ah know,' he had given a little shrug, pointing out with a horrible stuttering defensiveness that he had given them every chance. He had even had the man he hadn't shot lower the big outboard and a plastic container of fuel to them.

‘It was the gale, I suppose.' Again that little shrug as he went on to describe the conditions that had made it impossible for him to raise either the trap door to the hold or the grating. He had tried, having first inoculated himself with the serum antidote, but the ship was by then moving so violently that it was almost impossible to stand, let alone work, on the gun-deck. The shambles, he said, was impossible with the gun carriages broken loose and charging the ship's sides at every plunge and roll. ‘It is like riding a great horse that is run away from you.' There had seemed to be nothing that wasn't moving to hold on to, and even when he had managed to rig the block and tackle, he was unable to shift the trap door. The timbers had jammed. And all the time he was having to rush back to the helm to save the
Andros
from broaching-to.

His plan had been to head for the southern shore of East Falkland. It had taken him all the rest of that day to rig tackle and trim the sails so that he could head her up towards the islands, and by then the wind had shifted into the north-west. The ship was over-canvassed and making considerable leeway, at times being thrust so far over to starb'd that waves were breaking right across the deck. The barge was the first to go. It had broken loose from its rope fastenings and gone careering around the deck, acting like a battering ram at the base of the mast. Finally it had been swept overboard.

‘By then I am so exhausted,' he said, ‘there is nothing more I can do.' He thought the wind force had reached perhaps 100 k.p.h. ‘The sails begin to go, and I don't care any more. I am too dam' tired. I don't remember how it was I strap myself into a bunk. All I remember is waking later to a terrible banging against the hull, the crash of seas and broken timber, the howling of the wind. Also, a feeling the ship is held down, as though she is sinking. And I don't care. I don't care about anything. I just want to cover my head and sleep for ever. I am like an animal creeping into a dark corner to die. You understand? I want the womb again. I am finished.'

How much of his story I learned in the small hours of that strange night, and how much in snatches on the long trek back over the ice to
Isvik
, I cannot be sure. The masts, all three of them, were overboard, still tethered to the ship by their rigging and banging against the hull with such force that he was afraid she would be holed. It was several days before the storm subsided and he found the strength to cut the wreckage free with an axe. Finally he was able to go down to the gun-deck and rig tackle to raise the trap door. The black horror of that hold was almost unbearable, the stench of excreta, both human and animal, so overpowering he said he would have been sick if he had had anything to retch up. There were bodies lying all over the place just as they had been thrown in the weakness of approaching death. There was nobody alive, and anyway if there had been, there was nothing he could have done to save them at that stage.

I found it very difficult to assess the damage he himself had suffered as a result of his terrible ordeal. The dirt and stink of the man, the unkempt hair and beard, the eyes seeming to stare at nothing, the way he went on talking and talking … I suppose we should have realised that nobody could have lived on top of that heap of frozen bodies without his mental stability being impaired; particularly as we saw evidence that he had been down there chipping away at the ice to get at the sheep, and since they were easier to get at, he had also been hacking in to some of the human limbs.

But to survive two and a half years, alone, with little or no hope of rescue, must be accounted a very remarkable achievement, whatever the means employed. It was for this reason, rather than the probability of political repercussions, that I agreed to Iain's suggestion that we say nothing about the ship's grisly cargo.

This was after Iain had opened up the hold and found Ángel Borgalini dead. He had shot himself. At least, that's what he told me. But how can I be sure? Somehow I did not think Ángel the type to commit suicide, and I had been in the pantry, checking over the stores with Eduardo, at the time Iain had gone down to look into the hold. If there had been a shot then, I don't think I would have heard it.

Whatever the truth, one thing was abundantly clear. His death would save everybody a great deal of trouble, and it was on this account that I agreed to keep quiet about the real nature of the
Andros
voyage and the cargo she carried.

Before we left, Iain produced a mini camera and began taking close-ups of Eduardo and the great cabin where he had lived for over two and a half years, also some quick snaps of the iced-up deck, and then he had gone down on to the ice, taking pictures of the
Andros
from all angles, some that would show how the stranded bergs had boxed her in. Finally – ‘fur the record,' he said – several shots of Carlos's body lying there under the bows, even unzipping his anorak and pulling up his sweater to get close-ups of the wound that had been the cause of his death. Then, after a hot meal of porridge and seal meat, which was the best we could rustle up, we started back round the shoulder of the southern iceberg, through the tangle of up-ended and overlaid pack ice, to the spot where Ángel and Carlos had abandoned the snowmobile.