The Lost Flying Boat

by Alan Silltoe

  ‘There’s even coal to cook on,’ I said. ‘And you don’t have to get it from underground in a bucket. We’ll find a whaler’s hut for shelter. Stranded or not, we’ll be snug.’

  ‘I prefer civilization,’ said Rose, ‘on the whole.’

  ‘Why not speculate on all possibilities?’

  ‘Speculate, my arse,’ said Bull.

  Rose rinsed his irons in the bowl, dried them on the teatowel hanging from its hook, and put them into the top pocket of his jacket. ‘I’ll say no to that one, if you don’t mind.’

  I went back to the wireless with my mug of coffee, and wondered how we would survive if the flying boat couldn’t take off. I was not so appalled at the idea as I should have been.

  10

  The plane was a workshop. Shottermill had obviously left a few packs of gaudy banknotes in the right places, otherwise how could we have set off with such lethal goods? I turned to see people lifting and carrying, serpentine belts of ammo around their necks. Curses were frequently shaped on their lips because the interior frame of the flying boat was lined with sharp corners.

  Nash levered an assembled gun towards the rear turret. The Aldebaran was being set for defence, and it did not matter against whom or what. ‘Something’ll turn up, you can be sure. And if it don’t, we ought to make it. Otherwise, what’s life for?’ But he was sweating and breathless, and put the gun down after a few feet. ‘We had armourers to do this in the war, and I’m not as young as I was.’

  Bennett need not have left the flight deck to see that work was up to scratch, because Armatage was sufficiently competent as an armourer to forget toothache, overcome his disability from drink, and rig twin guns in the mid-upper. The crew had been chosen well, and in our pre-lunch talk the skipper had made sure of me. Bull went to assist Nash, and they managed the labour between them.

  I could make no sense out of the distant twittering on eight megacycles but, thinking that contact might come from that quarter, scoured to either side of the band. There was nothing for us. The plane was losing height. Cloud melted away except for what seemed like a line of grey bushes to the south. Hard to think of the Pole as being a point from where any straight line away from it went north. The cobalt sea glowed in the sun. My ears popped, playing a tune. Taking off the headset, a deep breath brought engine noise roaring back.

  I looked out in the hope of seeing a ship. So much water was a transparent envelope around the earth, waiting only to be pierced by a spike of land. Maybe ships had been visible while I listened at the radio, but the world had now gone back to water, and our contraption was a flimsy habitation that might crumble any moment into a tangle of wreckage from which none of us would swim.

  I returned to the friendly embrace of atmospherics, from whose noise some message of support might come, an item of interest or mystery to rejuvenate the brain. After a while cataracts of static became a form of elemental life, like being in the stomach of an animal big enough to contain the universe. If I closed my eyes there were colours, cobalt and magenta stippled with pale orange, a complicated pattern battling against itself, unharmonious because no morse impinged. The noise of the atmosphere was channelled into my headset via the aerials and receiver. In order to miss no signal lurking among the noise, I kept the volume high, the din almost overpowering.

  I began to hear signals that did not exist, perhaps the bleep of a transmitter tuning in, or a string of dots and dashes that made no sense, coming and going but only to tantalize. The next stream resembled bars of music, of no recognizable tune, and too fast to be intercepted. I was amused at how they could deceive an old hand like me. Rose glanced in my direction because he imagined I was listening to a broadcast of ITMA.

  Figures and letters appeared on the notepad, my hand willing to write anything rather than be inactive; but all I produced was a dozen signs at most, and wondered what marcolin on the tailplane scratched signals into the atmospherics with webbed feet or clawed fingers. Perhaps a pair of stations on the Antarctic coast fifteen hundred miles south worked their two-way traffic, using callsigns in no handbook. Had they spotted us on a sophisticated form of long-distance radar? Only the continual brain-battering static could create such ludicrous ideas.

  A garble of faint squawks resembled voices. I turned down the CW switch, but could not bring them clearer. My receiver, superheterodyned for wireless telegraphy, was not ideal for getting speech. Feedback and distortion made readability difficult. Given the static that deadened my eardrums and induced a kind of half sleep at my set, why did I think they were voices at all? And if I didn’t hear them, what put the idea into my head? Craving company, perhaps I had conjured them out of the ether, suggesting I was losing my attachment to reality after barely six hours out. Voices or not, they were too garbled to decipher. If they had been understandable, what effect would they have had on our flying boat? That was the crux of the matter, if there was a crux, and if any matter existed, which I was beginning to doubt. Perhaps they were too far off to read, and it was only a question of time before the words became plain.

  When I heard them again, slightly off frequency, I listened as if a needle had pierced my eardrums. I turned up the volume in the hope of surprising a word before the static became equally loud. It couldn’t work, of course. But art is often artfulness. A distant voice sounded like a slobbering idiot in the corner of a bare room trying to sing something he had heard twenty years ago. No amount of fine-tuning could get him to remember it. You try everything, however.

  I couldn’t delay informing Bennett of a mysterious harmonic or frequency echo from some far-off broadcasting station that had a twang of the radio-telephone in its tone. He left Wilcox at the controls, and stood near me. ‘How far away?’

  ‘Can’t tell, Skipper. A few hundred. Or a thousand.’

  Electric waves travel at 186,000 miles a second, so what’s the odds? I thought.

  ‘More than a thousand?’

  ‘It could be.’

  He gripped the receiver so tightly I thought he would yank it out of the fixture. ‘It must be near the islands.’

  ‘Might not be.’

  ‘Did you get a bearing?’

  ‘I tried. It’s all over the place. Could be behind us – along the reciprocal.’

  Sweat ran down his face. ‘Why tell me, unless you’re sure?’

  ‘You asked me to notify you.’

  He listened. The voices had gone. Pulling out a handkerchief to mop his forehead, a screw of paper drifted towards Rose’s table. ‘Keep at it. Next time, I want something definite.’ He went back to the controls.

  Would I tell him as quickly? He wanted to know. So did I. Then he’d know. God knows why he wanted to. The air around the world was full of noises. Pitting himself against that kind of play would get him either into a dead-end or a million fragments. The same with me, but I had to try, detach myself from the flying boat, become disembodied, attain a state of equilibrium, power of manoeuvre, and discrimination so that I would appear as an enigma to any outsider who might be trying to fox me with his intermittent sending. The difficulty in achieving any kind of success enthused me. To attempt the near hopeless induced humour, which gave way to a spirit of beneficial calm.

  I must not seem anxious to begin measures for our defence. Hurry would create suspicion. I had to separate the imagined from the real and, having decided what was real, assuming I was in a fit state to do so, try to make sense from what I heard. If I hurried to find out, by tapping my morse key and asking direct, I would have little chance of success, and play right into their hands. Success was a term by which nothing could be measured, at this stage.

  After a sunshot, and working out his spherical triangle – Rose sometimes liked to do things the hard way – he stood up and stretched himself. By a quarter turn I noted his movements, for any twitch within eye-shot was a marked event in our progress. There was a naval tidiness about a flying boat and, seeing the paper that had fallen from Bennett’s pocket, Rose picked it up.
/>   I measured time by my wrist watch set to Greenwich, other indications being the number of meridians crossed. Stations popped up from a quarter of the world but, being on radio silence, time ceased to exist as far as events were concerned. Locally, it was midday, but we were not due to sight Kerguelen till five in the morning. With a favourable wind we travelled south easterly at 120 knots air speed, the crackling ether so loud it sounded as if a giant saw was cutting the earth in two. No instructions tied me to my set, only a congenital burden of having to pass the time usefully, so when static threatened irreversible deafness (except when a message of ‘Z’ time landfall at Bombay was picked up from a Royal Mail ship) I went down to the galley for a stroll, where I expected to see Rose, because he was no longer at the chart table.

  Armatage was putting the finishing touches to the mid-upper. Bull was completing installations in the front turret, and Nash was doing the same in the tail. Bennett and Wilcox were on the flight deck. Appleyard slept in his bunk, a copy of Lilliput fallen onto his chest. I flipped through to the nude, then put it back.

  The galley was empty, and on touching the handle of the door to Bennett’s room I heard a noise. I acted like a somnambulist. My eyelids had two mattresses pressed on them, and sleep was my only wish, but as soon as the door began to open I awoke as if I had already dreamed of pushing it hard and had come out of the dream without knowing. Inside I saw Rose by the table holding a notebook and a sheet of paper. Both of us shivered as if stricken instantaneously with malaria. The good side of his face was as white as the paper, and I guessed he must have thought I was Bennett coming in.

  He had only to say he had been sent to get something, and I would have retreated, for I was hardly inside. His shock was bigger, and a jolt underfoot made him lean on the table, and put the book back under the chart. But he kept the paper, and clutched my arm. His lips trembled, and he almost pushed me.

  ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘We’ve got to talk,’ he said.

  I clambered over heaps of stores and followed him halfway to the rear turret. We crouched by a pile of sacks, boxes and mooring tackle. ‘What about?’

  He waited, as if to get his breath after running half a mile, then he showed me the paper, on which the only thing written was a crew list. ‘You can hear, but you haven’t got eyes to see.’

  I didn’t understand till he pointed to three names with crosses pencilled against them. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘This paper fell from Bennett’s pocket.’

  ‘I know. I saw it.’

  He took the paper back, as if afraid I would eat it. ‘He’s put a cross against your name, mine and Wilcox’s.’

  I lost patience. ‘The bloody flight crew. But so what?’

  ‘Not against his own.’

  I still didn’t get it.

  ‘We’re the ones he’ll dispose of.’

  Wireless operators face an occupational hazard of going off their heads for no known reason, but I had not so far seen anything similar happen to a navigator. ‘Too many sunsights have done for you. Kick somebody out of their bunk and take an hour’s snooze.’ I felt I was in a flying lunatic asylum. ‘He can’t do without us, and you know it.’

  ‘I thought so, too. But he’s also a navigator. In that notebook it says we fly north to Ceylon. He wants to get rid of us. Maybe the gunners as well – even Nash. With all of us out of the way, no one will be able to say where he got his gold. There won’t be any but him and Nash to share it with.’

  I laughed. ‘He used that notebook to work out every hypothetical getaway route, and it doesn’t mean a thing. He’s not a Roman emperor. You forget those who financed this expedition. He can’t do them down – nor would he.’

  He wondered, from his glare, what else you could expect from a Group Two Trade wireless operator. ‘He’ll give them the slip, as well.’

  I was rocking. The scheme would make sense, if I could become sufficiently insane to believe in it. He said calmly: ‘It fits as neatly as a cocked hat – the whole scheme.’

  ‘Let’s get back on duty.’

  I needed to think. A wireless operator listening to static can do so, but a navigator can’t, otherwise he makes mistakes, adding where he should subtract, or putting his pencil on the wrong column in the Book of Tables. He pushed me aside, and made his way through the plane.

  In order to spare my brain the deadening drumfire of static I wondered if Bennett’s idea really was to get home with only one other member of the crew. If so, who was the lucky man? The slip of paper need not have given any indication. Perhaps the final duo would be Bennett and Rose, or Bennett and Wilcox, or even Bennett and me. Even the person he marked down to live would not finally survive. The golden hoard would be Bennett’s alone. If Bennett had chosen a gunner in taking over the flying boat, the obvious candidate was Nash, who could keep a secret better than any of the others.

  The game might be carried a stage further. Should Bennett cease to exist, Wilcox could fly the plane. Rose also had the ability. Both could at least make some kind of pancake landing. But I doubted whether Rose or Wilcox had any notion of reducing the crew, sure that Bennett had wondered the same – if he had wondered anything at all. They were not that kind of people. Wilcox was ill, in spite of hectic optimism, and in no state to fly the plane for long. The others would not try to take the plane because they did not have the experience of command. They couldn’t care less. As a crew they kept their feelings close, and lacked the personality to forge such a plan. Neither would they be accomplices of Bennett’s.

  Such a wonderful self-told tale kept me occupied while my ears flattened against the crackling emptiness of the ether. In no way was I distracted from listening. As a counterweight to deadness, the possibility sharpened the keenness of my ears. Once on civilized dry land, and the job finished, I would smile to recall such suspicions from inside and out, and laughingly remember it as if some tap-chatting card of the morse code fraternity had transmitted the latest joke about ice-cream vans at the South Pole.

  My hand shook as it hovered over the key, knowing that an unnecessary contact might bring disaster. I was caught in the trap of being the only one able to open a window of our enclosed world and alter the turning wheel of fate. My suspicions were ludicrous, yet I couldn’t let go the idea that I must take note of my feelings. The warnings from both sides were as clear as if they had come in at strength five from some guardian wireless station deep in myself, whose existence I had not known till this moment. Whatever words I keyed out, no one else on board would know what they meant. They read morse, but not at the speed I could send. The language was mine alone, and the responsibility belonged only to me.

  But the sending could not be done in secret. I was visible to Rose and Wilcox, and my relays might be heard clicking over the intercom. I had to keep silent, but what did that matter when such feverish and lunatic speculations meant that there was no reason to send anything at all?

  11

  We were in a sunspot: duration unknown, dimensions beyond the scope of mensuration, not even a far-off coast station on which to focus the old needle, a feeling of timeless loss which made it easy to wonder whether Rose was out of his mind, or Bennett quietly loco, or Wilcox dying of TB, or Armatage about to pop down the chute from too much booze – or whether I ought to have my brains tested for trying to decide how many of us were, in fact, beyond the blue horizon. The eternal sandpaper of static rubbed the eardrums with little variation. The doldrums were in the ether rather than half over the sea.

  Wilcox’s cough was sawing through his windpipe. His eyes glittered, and a smile of confidence in God’s benignity when the hacking paused made him appear that he would be almost grateful to go when the time came. Armatage was often drunk and hearing voices. Bull tended to be surly and quarrelsome, while the normally stolid Nash had been reinforcing his spirit with benzedrine pills since installing the Brownings, so that at least he and Appleyard seemed sufficiently level-headed to be trustworthy in
a crisis.

  For myself, the messages I intercepted went in circles, a snake whose tail was in its mouth, saying that if what Rose surmised turned out to be true, our worries were as good as over. We would be dead when the circle broke. Yet there was many a step between imagination and reality, though how could you expect anyone with a persecution complex to know that? The question I put to myself lacked subtlety. Born of distrust rather than enquiry, answers were unrewarding. Would we be killed on shore at Kerguelen? Or would the flying boat take off and leave us to fend for ourselves? Again, who was Bennett’s accomplice besides Nash? More important, would I, Rose or Wilcox be the first to go?

  Credence was not as firm as it ought to have been that Bennett would refrain from slaughtering his old crew on the last great flying boat journey for something so paltry as a bigger share in the profits. To ignore the evidence was stupidity or laziness, a way of hiding fear. Rose had passed his trepidations on to me, in whom continual static induced nightmares, and I wondered whether I should transfer them to Wilcox, and observe his reaction – supposing he wasn’t too ill to notice.

  The flying boat slipped, lifted, fell into another of God’s pockets, then righted itself. I looked out of the port hole. Bennett descended through rain cloud to sea-level, overtaking the green and rolling combers to each crest and then down again. No wonder I couldn’t get much range on the wireless. My guts were turning, but after a few minutes of such flip about, he held us straight, while the altimeter was checked for zero, leaving nothing to chance for the landing. Then we gained height.

  I could only smile at Rose’s fantasy that the best of flying boat skippers would put such a scheme in hand. But if Rose was mad, how far would we get with him in a straitjacket? All the way, if we worked hard. The paper had accidentally fallen from Bennett’s pocket. I thought he had done it deliberately. Rose disagreed, apt to regard his own mistakes, however trivial, as mental deterioration. Even if temporary, no one was exempt, but when you dropped a clanger there was always a subtle warning to tell you that you had, and with concentration you could find it out. He whispered as much to me when we were back at our stations. When the sunspot over Bennett’s consciousness cleared, and he discovered the loss of the paper, he would assume that one of us had picked it up.