The Lost Flying Boat (15 page)

It was the wind, the shaking, the drone of engines as we changed height. The effect was to make you hear things.

‘Oh,' he said, ‘it was that, was it? Do you think I don't know? I've logged more flying time than you've spent listening for the first cuckoo in spring.'

He took another swig from the flask and, wanting a drink as much as anyone, I thought him more funny than dangerous. But I was angry at knowing there was liquor on board, and wondered who else was getting at it. ‘Does Bennett know the mess is no longer dry?'

He ignored my question. ‘I'm bloody freezing.'

I envied him having no work, unlucky as he was in being crippled with either drink or toothache. His expression of malice diverted me from worrying overmuch at his boozing. The only fit response was to do the impossible, and laugh. I pulled a blanket from the rack and let it fall.

He belched his thanks. ‘You're a babe unborn, Sparks.'

The floor of the plane dropped under our feet and, while I held on, Armatage crumpled into the bunk and was straightaway unconscious. I had no further weather reports to listen for, so had time to watch the others opening a packing case with crowbars. Bull fixed the claw under a batten, strained like a sailor at the capstan, shirt off, arms chevroned by elaborate tattoos, lips clamped as if knowing that the noise of the engines would drown any shanty. Nash and Appleyard held the crate from sliding.

‘Do you need help?'

‘We'll manage.'

I stood by, but kept clear. The cases were labelled ‘Engine Spares'. An outboard motor for the dinghies? Tents and equipment? Shining nails gave without trouble. A smell of oil and paraffin floated up as side planks splintered away, leaving plywood and thick card to pull free. ‘We should get Armatage on this stunt,' Bull said. ‘A bit of hard labour would do him good.'

Appleyard took the crowbar. ‘He's as pissed as a falling flare.'

‘He's down with the toothache.' Nash steadied the crate. ‘Leave him for a while.' They rested when the work was all but done. ‘We'll give him an hour to spruce up.' He turned to Appleyard, who was rolling down his sleeves. ‘Why don't you boil some water for coffee? Make a start on cobbling a meal together. You'll find tins of M and V, a bag of spuds, a wheel of rat-trap, and some fresh bread.'

Bull agreed. ‘Flying makes me ravenous. I once ate a whole packet of cream crackers over Berlin.'

‘Me,' Nash said, ‘I smoked fifty Players.'

‘I said my prayers,' Appleyard called before he went, ‘and bit my nails. Bull got drunk. He ought to pull his finger out and sweat like the rest of us.'

Beneath the cardboard, sacking was darkened by grease stains. Nash braced himself to pull one container free. ‘They're our stingers. Or will be when they're assembled. We'll sweat like pigs to get 'em up in time.' He cut into the coils of string with a black clasp knife. ‘Treat 'em nicely,' he said to Bull. ‘When the job's over we'll pack 'em up and sell 'em back. They cost a few hundred each. We can unload them on China for a lot more if we fly our kite up the Yangtse. Might as well make all we can out of the trip.'

‘I wouldn't care if we chucked 'em in the drink.' Bull cut the string into small lengths, then peeled away the sacking till bits and pieces of a Browning .303 machine gun gleamed on the floor.

Nash stroked the barrel. ‘We've a few hours to work like grease-monkeys and put four of these beauties in the tail.' After a rapid check on the various parts he laughed at my surprise. ‘You didn't have a clue, eh? If anyone comes up the fjord and tries to stop us, we'll rake 'em.'

In the guise of a mechanical skeleton, the gun looked ominous. ‘Maybe they'll have a similar shock for us.'

‘Maybe,' he said. ‘But listen, Adcock, the world's full of bloody
maybes.
You can't live on 'em, I'll tell you that. And in my experience one
maybe
is as good as another. All you've got to do is get yourself ready to meet one
maybe.
And if any turn up that you don't expect, you'll just bloody well defeat it, if you've prepared properly for the first
maybe.
That's the only system I know, and it hasn't failed me yet. Now we're out of territorial waters we'll gun the old flying boat up like it was always meant to be, and once they're mounted there'll be no trouble we can't get out of.'

The more the flying boat went on, the more I was disturbed, a condition strange and painful because I had been trained to create order from a multiplicity of signals. Confusion in myself was unfamiliar and therefore insoluble. The only way of staying calm was to close down the wireless, hold back from the one thing that might help me to bear it – which would be as impossible as pulling open a door and letting myself fall into the icy air. I envied Armatage his drunken sleep.

The headset back on, I immersed myself in an endless waterfall of static. Vital gen known to everyone in the plane would not be imparted to me. Latched to the outer atmosphere, I was certain to stay innocent. It was not a matter of knowing nothing, but of believing that what I did know was not worth knowing, and of assuming that what I didn't know was the only thing worth knowing. The balance was crucial, yet as gentle as the motions of the flying boat following that invisible line of the Antarctic Convergence, where warm and cold water mixed to give high winds and thick cloud above the troubled surface.

7

A landslide of static was swept aside by a continuous signal. As my tuning needle went over it became an attenuating whistle, like a bomb falling into infinity and unable to explode. By the time I thought to take a bearing it had disappeared. It should not have been there. Someone had inadvertently leaned on his key, or was tuning his transmitter. If the latter, who did he expect to contact? To judge by the intensity of that accidental signal, if that's what it was, and allowing for skip distance and freak reception, he could be up to a thousand miles away, in which case he was likely to be on or over the sea in the direction of Kerguelen. Perhaps he was interested in our whereabouts.

Such deductions might sound like so much magic. Intuition was not evidence. Assumptions were not facts. Feelings could not rate as intelligence by which to assess danger. In the imagined conversation, Bennett told me to pull my finger out and find clues he could work on. My job was to inform him, not worry him.

The green eye glowed. Atmospherics dominated. The universe of noise was like a house of many mansions latched on each ear, doors and windows firmly bolted against lunatics scratching inside. Maybe, like Armatage, I was hearing things. A long bomb-like whistle had no symbol for the logbook.

The knowledge of the Browning machine guns made every sound seem like a threat, and kept me extraordinarily alert. I had to do my job well, though sworn loyalty to Bennett hardly meant helping to find bullion which did not belong to him. Yet if I didn't chip in to the best of my ability the sudden onset of peril from any direction would be as much a threat to myself as it was to the others. Having signed my way into the trap, I must learn to live in it.

The flying boat moved on. Rose passed a new course of 138 degrees when we reached, by astronomical computation, 45 north and 40 south. The local time was 11.52, three hours and forty-seven minutes after setting out. A rippling stream of high speed telegraphy tinkled between Singapore and Home Base. My crow's nest could monitor half the world, but I only needed to beware of ships steaming in the area we were heading for. The first headland was over 1700 nautical miles away, though it wasn't too far if I kept my fingers at the corrugated tuning wheel as pertinaciously as a safe-thief trying to unravel the combination of a lock.

The second leg of the trip meant we were making progress, said Nash. ‘The Alpha Rats are on their way.'

‘Skimming along at 120 knots,' said Rose.

‘How much is that in Dolly Mixtures?' asked Appleyard.

‘Damn near a hundred-and-roaring-forty, if you're talking about statute miles,' said Bennett. ‘The speedier this old bird shivers along, the better for my blood pressure.'

‘Do you measure that in millibars?' Wilcox wanted to know.

‘Mars Bars,' said Appleyard.

‘Don't mind if I do,' said Armatage.

‘If you aren't careful,' said Rose, ‘I'll sing “The Navigator's Lament”.'

‘I put men on a charge for less,' Bennett said, ‘when I was Orderly Officer.'

Rose took another look at the sun, and Nash hoped he wouldn't drop his Mark IXA Celestial. My eavesdroppings were brief. I roamed to either side of three chosen frequencies, and static sounded as if the world was wrapped in a scarf of water, heightened crackles like rocks or fallen trees in the way of the liquid's headlong route. I caught news-agency morse from Tass in Moscow, crackpot claims about life in Stalin's paradise. Silence on my own frequency was more golden. ‘The less heard, the better, Sparks,' Bennett said. ‘We want to be the only ones in a thousand-mile radius when we get there.'

‘As long as we have no trouble from the Gremlins, Skipper,' said Wilcox.

I cursed the jungle of static. ‘Or the Marcolins. They eat the filaments out of the valves, and chew at the connections, and gnaw the impedences.'

‘I'll sing “The Navigator's Lament”,' said Rose.

Bennett at the controls lit a cigar. ‘Let rip, if you like. We can be happy till it's time to dig up the doings, pull out the plum, refuel our tanks, and fly away like good little blackbirds. God is with us, don't forget. He'd better be.' His laugh swamped all rejoinders.

Rose was so busy that his Dalton computer was in danger of seizing up – he said. But maybe he could spare a moment. Appleyard was duty cook: ‘Like me: both burners going, and a stack of plates to fill.'

‘Gangway!' Nash called. ‘I hear a throat being cleared.'

Rose tapped his tuning fork against the Bygrave slide-rule.

‘Stap me if I too didn't hear the dull click,' said Wilcox. ‘He can use the tattooed gunners for a chorus.'

‘Shut your soupbox,' Nash growled. ‘If you put him off you'll be confined to the port float on bread and seaweed. Jankers has nothing on that.'

‘Navigators never lament. If they can't get a fix they break down and cry.'

‘You remember “O My Darling Clementine”?' said Rose. ‘Well, my song sings to that banshee wail. I didn't write the music.'

Armatage came up from the depths of his boozy snooze. ‘You bloody wronged it, if I remember.'

‘It was the highlight of the old squadron concert party. The comb-and-paper melted in my mouth at the thought of how many of us would be gone by the morrow.' When he could get space on the intercom he put out his melody, in which the others joined without waiting for the chorus:

Taking bearings on a lightship,

Don't know where the hell we are –

Flying round in oblate spheroids

Will not get us very far.

O my darling, O my darling

O my darling Clementine

Book of Tables full of misprints,

O my darling Haversine.

Take a sight on old Capella

From the leaky astrodome

Got two bubbles for my trouble

Will this sextant get us home?

Don't known how far is Polaris

Lost my pencil and my rule

When I get back (if we get back)

You can send me back to school.

Deviation, variation

QDMs and QTEs

If you've got 'em, I can't plot 'em

Can't you see, I'm on my knees?

Lost my stopwatch, broke my sextant

Torn my logbook, burnt my map.

I've gone blind and lost my fingers:

Skipper, can I take a nap?

God will help us, God will help us

God will help us, don't you know?

For we're lost and gone forever

To the land of ice and snow …

Bennett broke in: ‘Cut it out. Nash, get those guns into position.' A lace-curtain network of high frequency stations came to pieces before an onslaught of atmospherics. Blinded by so much din, I put down the volume, detached the headphones and stood by Wilcox to look into the dazzle of oncoming sky that was like drink to my spirit. Space we needed, space we got. Four engines propelling the weight of our flying boat, we rode the air smoothly, however the boiling sea behaved two miles below. I had known no other life. The rest was a dream. Nothing and no existence prospered beyond our fuselage.

Wilcox held the controls so that Bennett could go to a meal in his room. By rights on a long journey over the sea there should have been a double crew. A nineteen-hour stretch or more at the wheel, wireless rig, navigation table, or engineer's panel was too long a time for comfort or safety. But a double crew, as well as entailing double cost, would also mean double weight, and almost equal that which we expected to load on board.

Below, on another floor level, Nash manoeuvred a Browning towards the front turret. We would defend ourselves from all directions. Elaborate rearmament was not carried out unless to stop others taking the gold. ‘We should run up the skull-and-crossbones.'

Wilcox coughed his cough to the end. ‘If we get into a jolly-roger scrap, we'll blow 'em out of sea or sky. We haven't come this far to take chances. Anybody tries to stop us, and they'll walk the plank.'

I was a prisoner of their harebrained scheme, and had too much pride to express regret at the speed of my conversion to the general cause.

8

The skipper wanted to see me, Appleyard said, so I climbed the ladder and found him at a table laid not with odd knives and forks but a silver set resting across the remains of his meal on a large dinner plate – a pitcher of water and half filled glass by his elbow.

‘Hearing any funny noises on your box of tricks, Sparks?'

‘Not so far.'