The Lost Flying Boat

by Alan Silltoe

  I listened out on 500 kc/s and, hearing nothing, tapped Ks for ten seconds. The morse thumped loudly through the phones, its rhythm tingling both eardrums while my feet kept time. The gear functioned, all knobs set, dials and needles back in action. I reconnected the aerial and listened to ships calling the local coast station.

  The boat was turning, four engines going. Once we were in the air and hundreds of miles out over the ocean, who would we contact in an emergency? The wireless was, after engines and airframe, our lifeline. On medium wave, where there was reasonable hope that a ship would hear, the range by morse might be something like three hundred miles, assuming whoever was listening had a good receiver, and that the ether was free from interference. Short wave was a different matter. Provided the correct wavelength was chosen, my patter could be audible for up to several thousand miles, but might not be picked up if the operator wasn’t specifically tuned in. No station, either near or distant, had been advised to listen for my signals, and without prearranged schedules worked on short wave anything was possible and little was feasible.

  But I would listen, and beam my direction-finding loop on any ship’s message in case it contained his latitude and longitude, which would help our navigation should sun or stars not shine. Such a bearing might be useful in assessing our most probable position, but few ships would be in the area, and radio functioned best when close to shipping routes and coastal stations. I would also intercept met. information from any source concerning the South Indian Ocean. Even if for areas hundreds of miles away, they could be evaluated, providing we deduced the direction of the weather, though by heading towards a climatically unpredictable part of the world the results would be dubious.

  As the flying boat turned, I left my radio to look out of a porthole. The water was calm. Then I saw that the gull Nash had shot at must have fallen wounded, and then died, for it floated like a scrap of grey cloth under the wingtip. I regretted that the bird had been so wantonly used for target practice.

  19

  Bennett’s humour was always based on the scent of danger. The smile was youthful, even boyish, and his grey eyes lightened. His face, before he spoke, indicated a pleasant person, and the only time he seemed halfway human was when he was at one with his crew. But so far there was little of that informal wartime ‘Hi-di-hi!’ answered by a ‘Ho-di-ho!’ instead of a salute. Perhaps the crew hadn’t been long enough reunited, nor yet faced danger. An easygoing relationship had to be earned.

  He stood by the flight deck ladder and addressed us as if we were a bomber crew about to set off for Germany. The wall maps were lacking, but these our memories supplied. ‘Some of you know more than others about this operation. A few may have put two and two together already – to make sixes and sevens. Well, you can forget all that, and listen to the pukka gen.

  ‘We take off in the morning, and that’s official. There’ll be no last night ashore. I don’t want to lose you, especially after what you’re going to hear. Our reason for going to the Kerguelen Islands is to recover a ton of gold coins deposited by a German submarine at the end of the war. They thought it a good hiding place, until such time as they could recover it. A supply ship or raider must have refuelled the sub which, having concealed its load on the island, never got back to base, but was sunk by a flying boat. The captain of the submarine was the only survivor, and I took the map and notes concerning the gold after we picked him up from the sea. He died, and went overboard. You all know this except Adcock, though none of you realized what I took from the dying captain.

  ‘Some of you have been worried about whether we can ship enough fuel to reach the islands. We can, so forget it. And as for getting back, a steamer called the Difda, of some six hundred tons, will supply us with enough fuel to fly out. You may ask: why doesn’t the same steamer recover the gold instead of us? Speed, is the answer. And secrecy. We can be away quickly, and take the goods to market before any other interested party will even know it’s gone. In a week’s time your valuable services should no longer be required – and we are carrying supplies to last a fortnight.

  ‘The Kerguelen Islands lie on the Antarctic Convergence, where the northward moving cold water sinks below the warmer, which means uncertainty of weather. But we’re going at the best time of the year, and there are sheltered places where we can get down without trouble. The nearest fjord to the gold is sufficiently sheltered to hide the Aldebaran like a fly in a jar of blackcurrant jam. The snowline lies at about 1500 feet. In January there’s fog on one or two days, and the air temperature is between forty and fifty – bloody cold at night, but we have plenty of equipment for that.’

  He rolled white paper around one of his fragile cigars more, I thought, to help put on the expression of boredom he by no means felt, and also in order to discourage questions. ‘Getting there is the most difficult part, but Rose is familiar with the navigational problems, and Adcock will do his stuff with thermionic valves and bits of wire when it comes to making contact with the refuelling ship. The islands are uninhabited, though the French have talked of setting up a scientific station – a fair way from where we’ll be dropping anchor. We’ve got to get the gold out now because it may be more difficult later.’

  He went into his stateroom, and there was a lowered atmosphere among us. What had started as a job had become an adventure with too many imponderables. We were going to a place of which there were no adequate maps, and no radio aids, nor even, as far as we knew, any other human beings. The only ships would be whaling vessels, said Nash, which were as rare in any case as spots on a film star’s face. If we alighted in that desolation of glaciers and could not get off again, food supplies would be of prime importance. I felt wary, and daunted. ‘I’m getting cold feet,’ said Armatage, as we moved back to the galley.

  ‘You’ll be lucky if that’s all you get,’ Appleyard said in his quiet manner.

  ‘A touch of the old L of M F?’ Nash said. ‘It’ll pass. It always did. And if it doesn’t, what’s death? Just another blackout after a party.’ The primus stoves were lit, and Nash rolled up his sleeves to produce mugs of soup, followed by bacon, omelettes and potatoes that Appleyard had peeled. There was plenty of bread, and during the meal a pot of water was boiled for tea. Armatage scraped his leftovers into a bucket: ‘I wonder what we’ve let ourselves in for?’

  ‘Stop binding,’ said Nash. ‘You’re getting on people’s nerves.’

  I felt that one or two of us would like to back out, though we succeeded in hiding our misgivings. Slip through the hatch and swim. Drown if you must, rather than go on. Don’t, I told myself. We are committed, cocooned in lassitude. I fought paralysis by disputing its effect, point by point as if I were a lawyer rather than a radio operator. But the pall would not go away. I chatted with Nash, however, in as cheerful a mood as I was ever in.

  20

  When going to see his mother, Bennett would nurse his cigar for twenty-five miles of the road. She was turning senile, and called him by his father’s name. He stepped on that one: a monolithic skipper of the skies who believes in the future can’t afford such memories when boning up for a long stint over the ocean. A two-and-a-half-thousand mile track from all shipping routes could, by an error of one degree on either side, miss the island entirely, in spite of its size, and cause the flying boat to crash through lack of fuel, or loom around the Antarctic for eternity like a ghostly ship of old.

  ‘Unless we get good astro fixes,’ he told Nash, who saw no reason not to pass on such details which gratuitously came his way, ‘we’re heading for a watery grave. A cold one. If we can’t get angles on the stars, we’ll have to fly low to calculate drift readings for dead reckoning. We’ll get a little help from the radio. But nothing is as certain as the stars.’

  He sweated, at the risk, shaking more at such slender chances than he ever had flying through Trojan walls of flak towards Essen or Berlin. They’d ship enough fuel, but too much circling to find the bay and they might run out. Impossible to row those last few
miles. He erased the figures and worked them through again. When did not success depend on navigation? Rose was the best, a shining asset to this shower of a crew. If God looks kindly down, we’ll be rich. If he doesn’t, it’s Job’s boils for the lot of us, and cold water for our coffin.

  He felt the shock of the optimist who realizes that he has so far survived only by luck. But he did not then become pessimistic. The efficacy of calculations may not always reassure, but they held back mortal damage. Faith in mechanical reliability kept hope in an airtight capsule, like the vacuum of a barometer which enables the needle to show height above the earth when air acts on it. Years of operational flying shifted pessimism sufficiently for him to watch the smoke from his cigar roll over his coloured map of the southern hemisphere.

  A Mercator sheet of the South West Approaches would have been overprinted with the purple and green and blue mesh of the Loran grid, which made pinpointing a piece of cake, so that the spot in the north Atlantic where the sub had gone down was fixed for ever to within a mile or two. We would be safer if we had at least Consol to help, Nash my boy, but only the busy parts of the world are covered. Down here you have to pray to the heavenly bodies.

  We saw them struggling in the oil, Nash said, as we were about to set course for home: ‘No hope, poor bastards.’ If their gunners had been better we’d have been the ones to drink oily water. ‘I feel like raking ’em, Skipper. They do it to our chaps.’ Between thought and word was no space to Nash, but the route from word to deed followed zig-zags.

  Bennett knew his chief gunner’s malady: ‘Have a piss, and forget it.’ The turret full to starboard, Nash machined it back so that he could let Appleyard in. A steep bank to port rolled him over as Bennett, circling for another look, remembered his brother who died in India when his stringbag crashed. Too unorthodox for words: ‘We zap the gollies up the Khyber Pass, and when you press the gunbutton your old orange-box goes backwards!’ So he carried out the Prunish lark of picking up prisoners when you weren’t even supposed to go down for your own pals. The skipper’s intentions, said Nash, became your own.

  They were on the skids, like landing in a channel of rocks, halfway into the wind, bumping before able to turn. One survivor was the captain, wounded and full of oil. The copilot flew while Bennett looked them over, and Nash stood guard. The captain’s green face was only alive at the eyes. ‘We should make him eat that Iron Cross, and see if he can shit it out.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s in much of a state to do either.’ Bennett pulled at a string around the man’s neck. He cut off the celluloid packet and put it into his jacket, while Nash took a revolver and a bundle of wet cigars from the second survivor.

  A pattern emerges after a number of considered decisions. Having carried out an action which is divorced from all sensible rules, a split appeared in Bennett’s life, and he knew that it began while reading the U-boat commander’s papers standing by the toilet of the flying boat. They gave details for latitude and longitude, bearings and distances. There were sketches of bays and hills. The positions were precise to a fraction of a second, and must have been worked out by theodolite. He had heard of the islands, a complication of bays, rocky peninsulas, fjords and glaciers.

  The U-boat captain may have been on the active service side of middle age, but he died an old man. Without benefit of the Book, Nash delivered him and his companion to the deep. Back to the Waterland, said Rose. And Bennett’s log did not record either the taking or the demise of their prisoners.

  An inner voice insisted that he get as many of his old crew as possible to come on the expedition. The muster roll, more complete than expected, lacked only a wireless operator, and even he had been easy to find: ‘I heard this chap whistling morse in a pub, and knew I’d got my man,’ he said to Nash.

  The voice talked against the power of rain, louder when his lips didn’t move and the words turned inwards, and he heard the water no more. He was only really alone when he sensed his inner voice clearly. Even footsteps on the creaking floor as he walked from the chart-covered table to the door and back again did not break the sentences that came against him like files of soldiers storming a building. He had called the nucleus of his crew together because a scratch-gang of all-comers taken from any quarter would not have been reliable. He could not have created a team in the time available. On the other hand, the chances of success being about even, it would have been kinder to let any but members of his old crew take part. If without them there was no hope of success, to have them was halfway to murder. He was using them for his own ends, though by employing them he was putting more money in their way than they could earn anywhere in the same length of time. Those who invested the money would also benefit, and though Bennett knew he was not worthy of his crew’s devotion, such people deserved it even less. He felt tainted by the issue.

  Black market money floating about after the war was ready for investment in such projects. He had his proof, and they believed him. He went around clubs and hotels where food was served that he had not seen in a decade. Banquets with good wine and big cigars. He broached his scheme, promised evidence, and they listened. His eloquence turned into sharp business talk. Though he accepted their food and wine he wanted to wipe them from the face of the earth. His hesitation was their safety. Those who would have felt no such uncertainty were dead. Either that, or they would have been glad to see that the good life goes on, and take part in it.

  When Harker-Rowe gave him the nod, he knew that his worries were about to begin. The gesture marked another stage in life. There were periods when he couldn’t sleep. During the war sleep had been available the moment he returned from a raid. He almost fell into oblivion during tedious debriefings. Four hours of rest performed a miracle. Dreams, like the cities he had flown to, were wiped out and ploughed with salt. The day before was scorched from memory. Tomorrow never came. It was always today. Sleep was so close to the surface that he could stand up in his subconscious and not drown. But below that, the space was without limit. He called it sleep, which seemed, on waking, to be something you went into and came out of at the flick of a switch.

  When there was a memory which sleep could not erase, the ease of sleep abandoned you. No way of winning it back. The innocent person slept like a baby – so it was said. Others did so who were unable to admit that they were anything but innocent. Lacking the moral sophistication to understand that they were not innocents made them more depraved than those who knew very well why they were guilty. The crime that had initiated the expedition was such that it could not be condoned. The action had come out of a centre whose evil he had never suspected. Erupting flames had been impossible to beat back, short of burning both hands to ash.

  His hair had changed colour, but such iron-grey, when he visited business offices to arrange finance for his venture, had shown him as someone in whom they could have confidence. What he told them went across as honest and feasible. Once the gold was secure in the hold of the flying boat they knew it would not disappear into the bank vaults of Panama or Zurich. His half share would make him a rich man. Trust in him was firm, but even if it were not, his wife and children would guarantee a safe return. If the flying boat’s engines failed on the way back, and Bennett’s crew found the grave they dreaded, would Harker-Rowe and his consortium think he had followed some preconceived dead-reckoning plan and made a break with the known world? If he did not allow for the equally complete vanishing of his wife and children, might they not see his disappearance as merely an effective way of getting the final divorce from family life that every married man dreams about? It would be no more cruel than the way in which he had first come by his knowledge of the treasure, or than the steps he had taken to ensure that only he should know of it.

  A conscience was not the worst problem. The crime might not have been as final and efficient as he had assumed. A supply ship must have refuelled the submarine close to the island before the trip back to Germany could be attempted. Though not knowing exactly what the
submarine had carried, perhaps the ship’s captain took the tale to the known world, so that the secret of the golden hoard was in someone’s brain and yet to be acted on.

  ‘What reasons do you have,’ Harker-Rowe asked, ‘for thinking the stuffs still there?’

  Two men with bowler hats, rolled umbrellas, pink faces and impeccable accents were also at the meeting, go-betweens whose sense of humour was limited to the fact that they only laughed with Harker-Rowe. Because neither smoked, Bennett did not trust them. He said there had been one submarine. Not only had the captain of the U-boat and the other survivor separately informed him, but it was also written into the documents he produced. There could be no doubt. How do you know the gold was ever put there? Even Bennett laughed.

  But he hated their guts. ‘How do you know,’ he smiled, ‘that I’m not a confidence trickster of the most blue-eyed cunning? Not playing a hoax for money, you understand, because money would mean nothing to the kind of super con-trick which I’m trying to swing, which is to get my hands on the controls of a flying boat and hear the voices of my old crew over the intercom for the last time, because the doctor said I had cancer of the liver and only six months to live, and that before I die I want to go on the longest trip, from Cape Town to Singapore via the Kerguelen Islands and Freemantle, all at your expense, one last adventure before the disease gets such a grip that I can do nothing except drag myself into bed and die. I want to hear those four engines and see the endless sea from the flight deck at eighteen thousand feet. That’s the reason I cooked up this cock-and-bull yarn, so that you would charitably – although unknowingly – supply the finance.’

  He almost wished it were true. He would then have felt better when they stopped laughing. Humour had to be on their terms or not at all. Their pink skins gave an ugly tinge to such regular yet chinless features. ‘Perhaps you’ll now be good enough to sit down and tell me what you’ve heard,’ Bennett said from his armchair. ‘I want all the information, otherwise the expedition will be called off.’