Survival

by David Fletcher

  He was still pondering this conundrum when he and Debbie returned to the lounge to listen to a presentation by Nick, the bird man, on Birds of the Falklands and South Georgia. They both had more than a passing interest in birds, but they both also knew that their knowledge of the birds of this region was sadly lacking. And especially in respect of those that are inconsiderate enough to spend most of their lives at sea and are therefore really difficult to observe. They needed a crash course in identifying the relevant species, and that was just what Nick was about to provide.

  He was a natural. He was a good speaker, and he was so knowledgeable about his subject that he could well have been on autopilot. The lecture just seemed to stream out of his mouth without any effort at all, and in a way that made it particularly memorable. How he did this, Alex was at first unsure. But then he spotted the trick. Put up an image of Bird A on the two screens at the front of the lounge, talk about it for some time, explaining how to identify it and where it is likely to be found, and then and only then reveal its name. It was an excellent way to capture your audience’s attention and to keep it captive. And Alex thought it should be promulgated within the entire teaching establishment back in Britain as a way of (possibly) capturing the attention of the rather younger audiences they had to deal with there.

  Anyway, stuffed with an abundance of knowledge about storm petrels, southern giant petrels, cape petrels and three dozen other birds, Alex and Debbie retired to their cabin to don what they thought might be the required amount of cold-weather gear to allow them to conduct some bird-spotting from the rear of the ship. They would install themselves on the sheltered area beyond the library on the Marco Polo Deck, and attempt to find and identify some of the pelagic birds that Nick had assured his students were to be seen in this area. Fortunately, when they arrived at their chosen location, it was not only as sheltered as they’d hoped it would be, but it was also equipped with that knowledgeable ornithologist. Nick was there with four other passengers, pointing out – and naming – a whole range of avian escorts. There were four sorts of petrels, the occasional shearwater and albatross, and even the very occasional penguin, carving its way deftly through the water. And these last chaps were probably from a colony somewhere in West Falkland – hundreds of miles away. The natural world, concluded Alex (again), was just remarkable beyond belief. So too was the spotting ability of one of Alex’s fellow passengers at the back of the ship. His was up there with Nick’s.

  His name, it transpired, was Roy, and Roy was a single traveller who, as Alex would soon discover, had the singular good fortune to possess a gigantic brain that contained a whole library of facts not only about birds, but also about butterflies and many other sorts of insects – and about plants, literature, world music, world politics – and flags. Here was a man, in his late sixties and with the build and the face of a retired prize fighter, who could follow an instructive discourse on snowy sheathbills with an explanation of the colour choice for the Argentinian presidential flag, and how its design had subtly changed since its first manifestation in the summer of 1812. Fortunately, his encyclopaedic abilities didn’t preclude him from having a sense of humour and an interest in just about everything. And Alex and Debbie discovered this when they had lunch with him – in the lido restaurant. They would have to try to get him to join them for their evening meal, and introduce him to Derek and Elaine.

  Before then, however, there was some more unpacking to do and another presentation to attend, this one given by a real-life professor called Colin – on the Antarctic Treaty System. Alex had particularly wanted to see this, but the travels involved in getting to Ushuaia and their busy first day aboard the ship had left him feeling a little tired, and he wondered whether it might be better to just rest in their cabin. When he made this known to Debbie, she reminded him that all the ship’s presentations were carried on one of the TV channels, and if one chose to, one could listen to the presentations and even see the visuals being used without leaving one’s cabin or even one’s bed.

  Perfect! Alex would learn all he needed to know about the Antarctic Treaty System while propped up on a pillow. Just as soon, that is, as he’d identified which channel on the TV he should use. And it was as he was doing this that he discovered that, as well as the in-house presentations channel, there was another that showed the view from a camera on the prow of the ship, three more that showed films and various nature programmes and two more that were still carrying twenty-four-hour news coverage! How on Earth he had forgotten his experience in Melanesia – where similar news portals were always available – he could not understand. But, of course, technology had now progressed to the point where it was actually more difficult to be out of the range of world events than it was to be within their range. And no doubt CNN – and BBC World News – would accompany the Sea Sprite even if it decided to drag itself over the icy expanse of Antarctica to the South Pole itself. There was, therefore, only one thing to do: accept that ‘the news’ was still very much there, and resort to his normal habit of watching far too much of it. Even down here in the southern world. And he would start with a healthy dose of BBC World.

  Not surprisingly, he soon discovered that he could have written the news himself. President Assad was still busy dropping barrels full of high explosives and assorted nuts and bolts onto small children, and was well on his way to reducing a country that Alex and Debbie had once visited to a blood-soaked wasteland. President Trump had just tweeted – with little in the way of grammar but with lots of capitals – another pile of garbage. President Xi Jinping had released an announcement that China’s latest homegrown flu epidemic was now succumbing to the power of his all-powerful Communist Party. And President Putin had reiterated his claim that the Malaysian Airlines airliner downed over the Ukraine quite some time ago was the work of a bunch of inebriated, trigger-happy Ukrainian soldiers, and that Russia had always made a point of never pointing any of its armaments at anybody, let alone at a plane full of innocent people. Oh, and neither had Russia ever engaged in any sort of cyber warfare.

  Alex touched on these remarkable Russian revelations when he was seated for his evening meal; a meal that would be shared with his and Debbie’s carefully selected companions: the forthright Derek, the charming Elaine and the human database, Roy. This fifth conspirator had been welcomed into the fold by Derek and Elaine with open arms. They must have spotted almost immediately that he would make for very good company, and that he might also prove to be a fount of information on any number of things. In fact, soon after Alex’s brief dissertation on the innocence of Russia and a brief round-table exchange on the afternoon’s presentation, Roy won the attention of all those around the table by pronouncing on the comparative risks of dying on a cruise ship versus on an airliner. This wasn’t one of his normal areas of interest, he explained, and he hadn’t been able to perform a rigorous check on all the relative data. Nevertheless, he was still able to reassure them that reputable cruise ships were safer, in unscheduled mortality terms, than even the super-safe aircraft in service today. Although he did go on to provide a caveat concerning the heightened dangers arising from any floating vessel’s proximity to an iceberg.

  It should be emphasised that, whilst he clearly knew what he was talking about, his revelations were presented as a light-hearted contribution to the table talk and in no way came over as nerdy. Roy might know his facts, but he also knew how to relate to other people and how to amuse them. Furthermore, he knew when to listen; as, for example, when the conversation had wound its way around to human rights – via the threatened rights of Falklanders to live in peace – and Derek was being his now predictably forthright self.

  ‘They’re a bloody menace. A bunch of ridiculously ambitious, apparently inherent entitlements that exist in a vacuum and are about as anchored in reality as Alice in effing Wonderland. I mean, let’s be clear. Just like every tiger, civet, worm and cockroach, no human arrives in this world with any inherent rights. To
suggest so is just as stupid as saying that they arrive in this world with some sort of Original Sin. And we all know how bloody stupid that is. No, what happens is that the society into which they’re born confers on them some civil rights, and it is these sorts of rights that actually mean something.

  ‘I do accept, of course, that certain societies confer a lot more rights than others. I wouldn’t, for example, wish to make my way through life with a set of Libyan civil rights, and certainly not with a set of North Korean civil rights. But that doesn’t detract from my main point, which is that, to mean anything at all, rights of any sort whatsoever have to be conferred – and policed – by a nation state. To expect a whole set of nebulous human rights, detached from reality and from any sort of real legitimacy, to actually work is just wishful thinking. Remember, these rights are not rooted in any real society, and they often conflict with a particular society’s legitimate civil rights. I mean, just think of some of the dafter human rights and then think about how they prevent us from deporting some bleedin’ terrorist. It’s just bloody stupid.

  ‘And one last thing. By constantly emphasising the importance of human rights, we successfully ignore the importance of human responsibilities. And this is because the existing UN canon of improbable human rights requires in reality no responsibilities on the part of those who demand them. After all, they’re inherent, remember. Whereas with civil rights… well, they involve all sorts of responsibilities, not least the responsibility to maintain the societies in which they exist. So, in short, human rights encourage people to think selfishly about their entitlements, often at the expense of others. Civil rights promote an understanding of the responsibilities that all rights entail.’

  Alex was impressed. He could have scripted that little speech himself. Albeit he might have waited to deliver it when everybody at the table had taken a glass or two more. Serious issues of the sort just addressed were always more easily digestible, Alex thought, if they were preceded by more than a soupçon of lubrication. That said, he had enjoyed that further dose of Derek’s candid thinking, and it seemed to have gone down well with all the other diners at the table. Debbie, in particular, had drunk deeply from the well of Derek’s discourse, and as Alex was thinking, she was talking – to Derek – about the epidemic of human rights lawyers. She seemed to be questioning why they tended to spend so much of their time in benign jurisdictions such as Britain and not in places where their services might actually be welcomed, places, for example, where things like female genital mutilation were commonplace. Maybe, she herself suggested, the fees and the wine bars in those sorts of places were not nearly so attractive…

  Anyway, ultimately the dinner came to an end, and all five diners returned to their rooms, having promised that they would dine together again – given, of course, that, despite Roy’s careful calculations, the MS Sea Sprite hadn’t come to grief overnight. Even if it wasn’t yet near any icebergs…

  four

  When Stuart had applied for an overseas posting, he’d had in mind somewhere like the Caribbean or maybe somewhere in the Far East; somewhere that was the antithesis of boring old Gloucestershire. After all, his team leader had made it pretty clear that these were the two likely destinations. And he’d definitely said nothing about a desolate, windswept island in the South Atlantic; a place where the principal differences from Gloucestershire would simply be more sheep and more rain. And as for the opportunities for romantic encounters in this god-forsaken place… Well, they were just about as rare as encountering any excitement here. It really was the dull capital of the world, and he was stuck here for a whole eighteen months!

  His mistake had been to neglect that he was fluent in Spanish, and that this fact would hardly go unnoticed by those who organised overseas postings. It just made their job easy; as easy as Stuart’s present job was difficult to endure. As soon as he’d arrived here, he’d begun counting down the days. And not even the odd day in Joe’s eight-metre yacht would stop him doing that. He did love sailing, but taking account of the long hours he worked – and the vicissitudes of the local weather – he could indulge this love on only very rare occasions. Most of the time he had to entertain himself with just reading, listening to music, and drinking. And avoiding the blasted wind. If only he’d not applied in the first place, or had not learnt Spanish, or had used his degree in botany to become a botanist, or had taken up a career as a sign-writer. Or if he’d developed an allergy to sheep…

  However, he had learnt Spanish, he had taken up a career in intelligence and he had applied for an overseas posting. Without first developing an allergy to sheep. So, he just had to accept his present predicament and look for ways to make the best of it. Especially during his long hours at work. That would not be easy. There was, after all, little possibility that any of the intercepts he had to pore over every day would help him in any way. Most were just mundane, and some barely reached even that threshold. They were even duller than the dull capital of the world. But what could one expect? South America was still something of a backwater in terms of world affairs, and communications between even the Presidents in this continent tended to be just parochial in nature, and would be of very little interest to anybody in the rest of the world. They were certainly barely of any interest to anybody back in Gloucestershire.

  In fact, Stuart had decided that the only people who might find a genuine interest in everything he saw each and every day would be scholars; academics who had chosen as their field of research the comparative characteristics of different South American nations. Very soon, for example, they would have discovered that Uruguay’s character was that of a well-organised city gent, reflecting its status as the well-ordered Switzerland of the southern continent. Whereas that of Paraguay was that of a paranoid recluse. This country had yet to shed the isolationism – and paranoia – instilled into its very being by its first dictator back in the first half of the nineteenth century, one José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, whose political ideas were novel to say the least, but also very long-lasting.

  Then there was Brazil. Too big a country to be run effectively and coherently by any Brazilian, as was only too obvious from every intercept Stuart had ever seen. And then, of course, Venezuela; a country with ‘learning difficulties’ that Stuart could never imagine being able to live a normal adult life. Especially now that it was drowning in corruption; a feature of its character that was blatantly obvious in so many of its internal communications. Argentina wasn’t anywhere near as bad, but it was bad enough, and certainly bad enough to convince Stuart that it no longer represented the threat it had in the past. And what’s more, most of its population probably knew this as well. So, its claims on the Falklands would now probably ossify into the same lifeless corpse as Bolivia’s claims on Chile for a means of access to the sea. Where Bolivia now pays homage to its own cadaver by holding an annual Día del Mar (Or Day of the Sea), Argentina holds a Día de las Malvinas to honour just its fallen in the Falklands War, but not yet the demise of its hopes to annex this faraway prize. In due course, Stuart believed, it would. And then Argentina might even begin to sort itself out.

  Mind, that certainly wouldn’t happen before Stuart had done his time in dullsville and returned home to Britain. And meanwhile it was just 8.30 in the morning, and now he was ensconced in his boxlike office he had some intercepts to deal with. In fact, he had a whole library of the buggers to get to grips with, and with not even the prospect of finding something interesting to look at. Just more of the mundane, more of the duller-than-dull and maybe the occasional ‘entirely incomprehensible’. As in his own entirely incomprehensible behaviour that had brought him to this windblown, sheep-infested rock. It was no good. He would just have to forget his self-inflicted misfortune and get on with his work.

  Maybe Bolsonaro had dropped another bollock, and Stuart would be the one to find it. Or maybe the flight coming in from Brize Norton today would contain a contingent of Pre-Raphaelite beauties, but not
necessarily with all their clothes. Or maybe the wind would just continue to blow and Stuart would simply become one day older and one day closer to getting back to Britain. Without much else happening at all. He was pretty damn sure he knew which of these three options it would be…

  five

  The walk-in wardrobe in Alex and Debbie’s cabin contained two of those impossible immersion suits and four life jackets. Two of the jackets were of the bulky ‘ship at risk of sinking’ variety, and had been test-worn prior to the ship’s original safety briefing. The other two were examples of lifesaving gear that was much less bulky, and that was designed to be worn by the ship’s passengers whenever they were aboard a zodiac. These had not been tackled before. But, as it was now time to prepare for their first zodiac ride, Alex and Debbie were currently trying to secure these two encumbrances over their shoulders, and over five layers of clothing. This was not easy, and it only added to the overheating that had commenced as soon as they’d each encased themselves in the full twenty-one items of clothing that made up their cold-weather kit – while still situated in a warm and cosy cabin. Alex could well understand how self-insulated haystacks could quite easily get so hot at their centres that they burst into flames. He didn’t, of course, think that he ran much of a risk of spontaneous human combustion, but there was definitely the risk of minor heatstroke. And grappling with these damn life jackets certainly wasn’t helping matters at all.

  Needless to say, as soon as they had both overcome the life jacket challenge, they decided to leave their cabin and station themselves at the rear of the outdoor lido restaurant. Here, in much cooler conditions, they would await the call to board one of the zodiacs when these had been readied for use. From their chosen vantage point they could observe these craft being prepared. All ten had now been craned down from the top of the ship and, including the two that had already been used to take the survival kit to shore, they were all now loitering around the stern of the ship. Soon, one of them had been stationed next to the landing stage three decks below, and the boarding call was made – for just starboard cabin passengers, in order to avoid an unseemly jam. So, Alex and Debbie began to make their way down, interested to see what the loading procedures would entail. They soon discovered that they entailed a check of their life jackets, the stepping into a bath of some sort of disinfectant, and then the presentation of their electronic ship-passports to enable Jane to ensure that, in due course, all those she had let loose ashore had eventually returned to the ship before the ship steamed away. It was apparently regarded as poor cruise practice to leave a string of abandoned cruise passengers in the wake of one’s passage across the seas.