The Lost Flying Boat (20 page)

Bennett fought to get us higher, as if he had in mind a definite ceiling to the storm. Lightning danced along the wing, fixed by a trap of blue steel, which caused the plane to fall as if to get out of its way. ‘Who gave us that weather forecast?' Nash croaked along the pipeline. ‘I'll have his guts for garters.'

‘They won't taste good.' I passed on a forecast which I had not taken down:

= SOUTH INDIAN OCEAN FROM 40 TO 50 SOUTH LATITUDE BETWEEN 50 TO 60 EAST LONGITUDE FOR NEXT TWELVE HOURS STOP FALLING 933 VEERING NORTH FORCE 9 OR 10 STOP VISIBILITY I TO 2 MILES = +

A cumulo-nimbus fist struck the hull, as if we were on a rough sea meeting an anvil-rock thought to be hundreds of miles away. ‘There are tree trunks in the sky,' Nash said. ‘Or army lorries, I can't tell which.'

The craft levelled like a dead log, and flew miraculously for half a minute. ‘A monsoon in the wrong season,' Bennett said. ‘Nothing to worry about.'

I composed the telegram and sent it out:
Once fall in love do not give up,
I told her, skip-distance and sunspots notwithstanding.
Listen to own voice only, stop. Look into nightsky for your face.
My sending sounded like fingernails scraping along a washboard, but there was no chance of being heard. Only the proper rhythmical thump of a real transmitter could get anywhere.

Could words of love break through by will alone? I sent a mixture of four short and three long signs, the Lucky Seven of her name going into the storm and getting nowhere, as the flying boat skated through black rain.

The night part of our trip was shortened by going easterly, yet seemed endless. Electricity hovered in and out. I felt like a fly which, primed by the good pickings of a long summer, and sensing an autumn death approaching, is filled with the strength to live forever.

The craft charged on, pushed without mercy by the wind. To move the body was a hazard. A descent to the galley might break a limb. Ordered to stay by my receiver, I searched for a significant message and, getting nothing, knew I would have to invent one. As long as operational gen was passed to Bennett, I could pluck down any telegrams and scan them for myself alone. Greetings from Anne who felt the pain of our separation would come in clear out of Portishead or Rugby:

Missing you. Come home as soon as you can. You did wrong to go. Why ever did you?

I didn't, I tapped back.

You did. Remember? I had big trouble finding where you were.

The ether was livid with the gibbet-rope of the question mark. Do you love me? Will you ever come back? Are you serious? You never were, were you? I don't think you ever really loved me.

I did.

You didn't.

Well, I love you now.

Do you? How can you be sure?

I'm sure because I know.

Whipcracks of recrimination decorated the sky – till I put a stop to it. My hand on the morse key sent HAPPY BIRTHDAY. What did it matter whose? Only whales might hear, if they had the right antennae.

‘All stations are forbidden to carry out the transmission of superfluous signals. Messages must not be transmitted to addresses on shore except through an official station. Private communications are strictly forbidden.' The rule book was peppered with such heavy type, but we were too far out for hand or eye or the ear of authority to reach, and though the power was mine, natural forces governed its effectiveness.

Rose, before being impelled to more work when we came again into the clear, dozed with his head resting on the chart table. He had put into abeyance the dread that if the overcast was higher than our service ceiling for a thousand miles in front he wouldn't be able to get a fix and find Kerguelen. Without stars, dead reckoning would put us out by such a margin we would miss our landfall, in spite of its spread. Beyond the point of no return in fuel, we would be all but lost if the stars stayed shut. Radio bearings on Durban or Mauritius, over two thousand miles away, were no substitute for an astro fix. In any case, with so much static, I could barely distinguish call signs.

Someone had picked up my foolish telegraphic greetings to Anne, because a strong signal through the atmospherics asked who was calling, which could only have meant me. I switched the aerial to D/F, ready to rotate the loop and find his general direction.

There were longer intervals between eruptions of static. I waited for a signal from whoever had heard me sending, so as to get a bearing. Had he already taken one on me? My doodling had lasted long enough. Perhaps he had been too surprised to act and, like me with him, was only waiting to hear me send again in order to confirm our direction. My hand stayed off the key, as no doubt did his. If he asked again who was calling, I would know that he was merely curious as to who or where I was. But if he didn't send, and waited for me to do so, he was someone to beware of.

A cold sweat clammed my forehead, and my heart thumped as if belonging to a drunken man about to zig-zag over a level-crossing with an express coming. We were flying straight, and everyone on board sighed with relief. The ship was less at the the whim of back-draughts and upcurrents. As if a work bell had sounded, Rose picked up his sextant and took readings from the astrodome. Bennett's voice came over the intercom: ‘How's the radio silence, Sparks?'

‘Thought I heard someone, Skipper.'

‘Any idea who?'

‘Too much interference.'

‘What did he send?'

‘Wanted to know if somebody was calling him.'

‘And was anybody?'

‘Not that I heard.'

‘Did you hear, or didn't you?'

‘There's nothing I don't hear if it's hearable. I'm waiting for him to come back. If he's somewhere close I'll get a decent bearing.'

‘Let me know as soon as you can.'

I said something about the ungodly behaviour of skip-distance, to which he responded that, if we did but know it, skip-distance, like everything else, was anything but ungodly, though I was no doubt correct in assuming there was no method by which such phenomena could be tamed.

He left the controls, and stood close, the angles of his face emphasizing a funereal determination to push on at all costs, though it was plain that he wasn't as fit to pilot a flying boat on an exploratory haul over the ocean as he had seemed before setting out. I had never seen anyone with a deadly illness, which fact may have suggested that I was doing so now, but the glare of his right eye made it appear dead, as if struck by blow after blow from the inside. He's for the sick bay, I thought, but since we were still flying I supposed I must be wrong. My news of a ship somewhere ahead may have been a shock, but he kept the composure that was expected of a skipper: ‘Nail him with a bearing if you can. I'm going to the galley to see who's working on breakfast.'

Fully determined to do as I was told, I fell asleep.

14

I lay by a stream with no clothes on. Neither had Anne, and we laughed on the grass in the sunshine as she tried to pull a rusty blade out of my stomach. The water made a hissing sound, and tree branches crackled in the wind. The knife would not come loose, but I felt no pain. When the jaunty trilling of a bird said: ‘Who is calling me?' she stopped tugging at the knife-handle. Why should a bird ask such a question?

Neither body nor spirit, half gone and half not, I was cushioned by dreams, shorn of care or will. But I awoke instantly to hear morse singing CQ CQ CQ DE ABCD ABCD = QRZ? QTH? QRA? QRK? QSA? QRU? = + K K K and got enough of a bearing out of his garrulousness to tell that he was east-north-east, though without knowing the distance.

Perhaps I had inadvertently pressed the key while dozing, and he was trying to discover whether I had been calling him. Rose was working out star shots for our position, locking us in a box of airspace among broken bars of cloud. By the time he knew where it was we'd be some miles further on – as if we had never been there. But from that vital fix an alteration of course would make for an accurate landfall, and leave a reserve of fuel so that we could search for our alighting place. We had been airborne seventeen hours, and Wilcox had long since got the pumps working to bring the second instalment from tanks in the hull.

A bluebottle-green in the sky came and went. Nash bumped me on the back. ‘It's downhill from now on, Sparks.'

‘I hope it's not too steep.' I felt grime at the eyes that only proper sleep would cure. With daylight beaming in at half past four, the hole we made in the sky moved as we moved, leaving a vacuum tadpole tail behind, a warm envelope refilled by sub-zero cold. A welcome smell of coffee spread from the galley. Appleyard was at the stoves preparing breakfast. A healthy hunger prevailed, but the skipper sent back his platter of chops and beans, and Bull who played the waiter stood by the ladder eating it with his fingers, mess-irons sticking out of his pocket. He wiped his mouth on Bennett's linen napkin. ‘Two dinners are always better than one!'

The sky was empty, blue overhead but almost white to port where the sun stood on the horizon like the yolk of an egg looking cold enough to begrudge what warmth we might get when we landed. Morse rippled on every note of the musical scale, and there was nothing to do except let it settle, and wait for the nearby ship to ask again who was calling and why.

I had no will to track my tracker, if such he was, because the easy life was here, and for a few minutes, while breakfast was eaten, the duty I was paid to do lost its influence. If Bennett gave me a call to make I would sweat out a few pokes at the tapper, and the person I was supposed to find would no doubt come back loud and clear, wondering why the hell I had been sleeping my head off when we could have been playing an exciting game of wireless-telegraphic noughts-and-crosses.

The hollow-sounding signal began to bleed over my frequency, so I changed to the higher daytime band and reset the transmitter should I be asked to bleed back at him. I wanted to find out whether the other operator knew the day frequency. If he did, and called me, he was homing in and no mistake.

I listened, laughing to myself. The longer I waited, the more it was certain that he was exploring a few other frequencies first. We were sharpening our wits on each other.

Appleyard came up with breakfast, and a huge jug of coffee to fill our mugs. ‘We'll soon be at Kerguelen,' I said.

‘Where's that?'

‘I never know where a place is when we fly there,' I told him. Nash bustled up the monkey climber to join the queue: ‘Pull your finger out. I'm croaking.'

I winked. ‘Do
you
know where Kerguelen is?'

He cleared his throat, and paused before drinking. ‘I did ask the navigator, but he didn't know. When he asked somebody in Blighty, they told him all he had to do was to go to fifty degrees south latitude, then turn left for a couple of thousand miles, being sure to cut all meridians at the same angle. I expect he'll get us there.'

‘Sounds like something from
Alice in Wonderland
,' I said.

Armatage looked up. ‘I was born in Sunderland.'

‘Didn't know there was such a place,' said Nash. ‘Did you, Sparks?'

‘Thought it was blown up in the war.'

‘I left when I was eight,' said Armatage. ‘The old man died, so we went south. My mother lived with her brother, and so did I. He was a real bastard.' His lower lip trembled as he reached for the plate of toast and eggs that came as a second course for those still hungry. ‘Sunderland was a lovely place, all the same.'

Nash lifted his coffee mug. ‘I'll drink to it, then.'

‘So will I. It's near Cullercoats, isn't it? GCC, if I remember.'

After some talk, Nash set his empty mug on the tray and gave Armatage a nudge. ‘Come on, then, get your nose out of that trough and let's give the guns another lookover.'

When the clandestine sender again trespassed on my beat, I jumped as if 250 volts had shocked up my spine, made worse by expecting him. He couldn't know that he had made contact, but he had, though he seemed too wily not to realize. His morse was off-whistle, clicks like the rattle of a cup and saucer carried upstairs by a man who did not want to wake his wife until she could see his wonderful surprise. I brought him on frequency and back to the usual bird-whistle. He called every five minutes, cued in to the second, but he was fishing blind. When I passed an account of his antics to the flight deck, Bennett said: ‘Don't answer,' telling me that the ship certainly wasn't that which carried our fuel for the return journey.

15

Oil pressure on the starboard inner had gone down. Wilcox wiped a red inkblot from his mouth. The engine was healthy enough. Must be the gauges. Nothing to worry about on that score. He would check oil and all contacts when we were moored. You do your job, I'll do mine, he said. We were touchy on that point.

Bennett came up the ladder, after resting in his stateroom, but with hardly the energy to mount each step. I turned in time to hear the same ship calling for an answer. His hand shook, holding a message sheet before me. ‘Next time he fishes, send this.'

I was to use the callsign GZZZ, and make my position known as QTH 49 50 SOUTH 69 10 EAST. Bennett laughed, the dim light emphasizing his pallor. ‘They'll search for a ship, not a flying boat: on the south side of the island instead of the north.'

Radio countermeasures had begun. All the same, he seemed unhealthily certain that they would work. ‘They may get a bearing while I'm sending.'

‘It won't occur to them the first time. They'll wait for a second message, which we'll never send. So just transmit.'

And shut up. We'll make rings around them. He thrust the paper into my hand. I'll lose my ticket for spreading false information. He couldn't care less. He had lost everything already, though God alone knew what it was. The rest of us didn't matter. I'd rather walk on top of the fuselage while the plane was in flight than pump out an inaccurate position.