Scend of the Sea

by Geoffery Jenkins

  I read it again.

  When .

  Waratah's secret lay perhaps within my grasp an hour or two away, I was ordered to get right out of the area as quickly as I could. It wasn't only advice the signal offered: the fact that the C-in-C was included meant business.

  'Acknowledge, sir?'

  I hesitated. If I said I had received it, they could pin me down later . ..

  I pointed to the superscription. 'It's not addressed specifically to Walvis Bay. It's a general warning ...' 'And order,' added Feldman.

  ‘. . . to all shipping. There's no reason why we should acknowledge.'

  'We're a weather ship, and we belong to them,' went on Feldman, eyeing me. 'The Bureau would probably appreciate an on-the-spot appraisal from their own people. It could be extremely valuable.'

  'They took the decision without asking us,' I replied. 'If we're as valuable as you say, they'd have signalled us before sending out that general warning.'

  Feldman was silent for a moment. Then he gestured to the signal in my hand and said, 'What new course and speed, sir?'

  I took the decision which had been crystallizing in my mind from the moment the warning message came in, the decision which was to have such momentous consequences for her life, for someone whom I had met for only a few minutes, whose name I did not know.

  I said harshly, 'Course, south-west true. Hold her that way.'

  I stepped over quickly to the voicepipe. 'Nick? Revolutions for thirteen knots. Hold her that way.'

  'I wasn't thinking of doing anything else,' said the surprised engineer. He had heard the tone in my voice. 'Anything wrong up there, skipper? That gyro's not gone, is it -1 fixed it with an improvised spring to hold the platform down against the roll...'

  'No, Nick, nothing wrong,' I replied. He was the man I wanted with me tonight, not this lily-livered civil servant behind me. Smit, too, I could count on-already my mind was on what lay ahead.

  I turned to challenge Feldman. He indicated the signal.

  'Would you mind signing that, sir?'

  I scrawled my signature at the bottom. 'You've left the "h" out of Agulhas,' I said sarcastically.

  'It's very difficult to write plainly with this sea running,' he answered. Feldman had cleared his yardarm all right. My signature on the message told me what his attitude would be if he were questioned afterwards.

  He took the paper from me. 'No reply then, sir?' He was being meticulously correct I could imagine him going to his cabin and logging our conversation, word for word, just to keep the record straight.

  'No, Number One, thank you. Nothing at present'

  I could detect Jubela's puzzled expression at my change of tone. Feldman must have no more ammunition than he already had.

  The sea would give the answer tonight.

  Walvis Bay crashed towards the heart of the storm.

  I kept her remorselessly at thirteen knots.

  The bridge remained tense. None of us spoke.

  The tumult inside me grew. Would Alistair come? Would the Air Force risk flying? The warning sent out by the Bureau contained no mention of aircraft. Were the commercial jets flying, or grounded? My guess was that conditions were reasonable over the land; the sea held the key to the weather tonight. Had it not been for Feldman's attitude I would have used the ship's radio to listen in on the passenger jets' frequency to lay the ache in my mind; if I tried it now, it would be another black mark against my name.

  Only the event would tell. I must be at the rendezvous in case Alistair came.

  Somehow, too, I must warn off the Buccaneer. How? An ordinary signal lamp would be useless. A pilot approaching at nearly the speed of sound would not be able to read it, even if I could train it on a plane travelling so fast and keep it aimed. He would be past before the shutter had clattered out more than a letter or two.

  A distress rocket? Walvis Bay carried some big four-inchers which would light the whole sea in red. But could a rocket get into the air quick enough to intercept that speeding jet? Say it rose a mere 100 feet before exploding-how long did that take? How close would the jet be before I spotted it? The Buccaneer might leave the thing half a mile behind by the time it became effective.

  I had a Very pistol that fired a red flare from a cartridge. It would be quick enough, but would a thin red streamer be sufficient in itself to scare off the confident Alistair? He might think it merely an addition to the brotherly greeting . . .

  I knew!

  When we had taken over the weather ship she had been fitted out as a whaler. She had been bought complete, ready for sea. I had found myself in possession of a miscellaneous collection of equipment, some of which I had decided might come in useful.

  In the hold were six big whale-marker canister flares.

  Catchers signalled the position of their prey at night with them to mother-ship helicopters. They were fired electrically.

  Alistair might realize when he saw such a dramatic flare that something was seriously amiss. It would stop his onrush towards-what?

  Yet-one fired on board would be a danger. The flaming burst could well set the ship alight . . . the radiosonde balloon platform! We had deliberately isolated it from possible entanglements to give the weather balloons free ascent. It was the ideal flare launching pad .

  'Number One! I want the bo'sun and three good men up here-at the double!'

  Feldman looked startled, but he jumped at my tone.

  'Fourie!' I told the inquiring bo'sun who stood with his team in streaming oilskins. ‘I want one of those whale-marker canister flares from No. 1 hold. Get it up aloft and lash it to the radiosonde platform ...'

  'What ... !' exploded Feldman behind me. I ignored him. I could not trust myself in front of the crew.

  Fourie grinned. 'Guy Fawkes' night, sir? Remember when we tried out the first one down south - a real tit of an explosion . . .'

  The men were grinning too.

  'Don't blow yourself up on the way,’ I responded. Take it easy and hang on to the bloody thing-all of you. The ship's bouncing like a drunken impala in these seas. That detonator . . .'

  Fourie threw a shabby little salute. 'Not to worry, sir. She's as good as fixed.' The team made off. Six-thirty.

  Half an hour to the rendezvous!

  The sea had built up terrifyingly. The wind simply tore the water up. All the devils of the deep were unleashed in the darkness. It was this malignant quality of the sea, something I had never witnessed even during the worst storms in the Southern Ocean, which awed the three of us on the bridge into a still more frigid silence: even through the icy, pouring rain the frost-white of tormented water would show when Walvis Bay rose to the top of a wave, before making a slewing, sickening descent into the trough. She seemed more under water than afloat; yet, as far as I could judge, we had so far lost only a few stanchions and some loose gear which had not been securely lashed. I had had no further damage reports from the two technicians, Miller and Taylor; perhaps Nick Scannel's ingenuity had saved the delicate apparatus. The flimsy radiosonde hut abaft the funnel was still standing, mainly, I think, because we were taking the run of the sea slightly on the starboard bow and the heavy bridge structure formed a protection against the hundreds of tons of water which continually swept the whaler.

  The battle was on in deadly earnest.

  After sunset, I had had a curious, mainly instinctive feeling that Walvis Bay had been actually travelling faster over the ground than the thirteen knots I had ordered. I had nothing specific to account for this feeling. Any land observations were out of the question: the strip of maelstrom between Walvis Bay and the land held up an impenetrable curtain of darkness, rain and driving spray. The Agulhas Current was credited with a five-knot maximum, but I had felt earlier that it was pushing southwards faster than that, battling the counter-current and the gale, bearing Walvis Bay along with it, and masking my dead-reckoning still further.

  Walvis Bay gave three short staggering leaps across three white-tops and then, like a m
an losing his balance, after a frantic attempt to keep his feet, collided with her starboard side into a fourth, huge roller. I felt the shuddering wince of metal high up aft. The vibrations rippled through the superstructure. I could see only sea through the bridge windows.

  Feldman turned to me, his face mottled with fear. There was no need to voice his unspoken question. Miller or Taylor would be here soon enough to tell us.

  It was Miller. The radar antenna's gone!' His voice had ' a hysterical edge. 'We hit something ...'

  'Something hit us,' I retorted. 'It was the sea - just plain sea. Pull yourself together, man! Where is Taylor?'

  Miller took a grip of himself, but he could not look beyond the bridge windows.

  'Lying on the floor-out,' he said. 'I think he needs a doctor . . .'

  'He doesn't,' I snapped. Try him with a shot of rum from the ward-room locker.' I wanted Feldman out of the way too. If the two men's hysteria got loose among the others, it could mean the end of the ship.

  'See to it,' I yelled to Feldman above the noise of the gale. Take a look at the wind gauge as you come back.'

  Feldman was back sooner than I thought. The bridge smelt of rum. He had interpreted my orders liberally.

  'Force 10 - gusting 65 miles an hour,' he reported.

  A whole gale, that rare animal, a whole, whole gale!

  Now there was a new alignment of sea and gale, by contrast to what I had felt before: the wind was able, by its power alone, to hold back the progress of the weather ship, unlike her previous forward rush under the current's impulse. The powerful bridge and enclosed forward superstructure became a metal sail held up against the wind. As she reared to the crests I could feel the gale take hold and thrust the small ship bodily backwards and sideways; Jubela's shirt was soaked, despite the iciness outside, as he tried to hold her on course. It was impossible to see the length of the foredeck because of the rain and breaking seas. Had another ship loomed up ahead, we could not have seen it in time to avoid a collision. 1 comforted myself that all shipping had cleared out of the area by now. The run of the sea had changed, too: it struck strongly from the south-west into the teeth of the master Agulhas stream, breaking up its customary southwards flow into a tumult of jerking seas which became progressively higher and steeper. Judging by the ship's motion, it seemed likely that she was actually standing still in her progress over the ground, despite the unreduced engine speed.

  I checked the clock.

  Six-forty-five.

  Barely fifteen minutes to the rendezvous!

  The quarter of an hour was about the Limit I could go on flogging Walvis Bay. I would have to slacken speed soon; at any moment I expected to hear that the complicated satellite observing gear had gone. It was not the gear alone: the very fabric of the ship was under pressure. On occasion I wondered whether she would dive headlong into the next wave and never come up again. She was not riding and throwing her head clear any more, but ducking into the sea with a tiring action, a growing unwillingness to rise.

  I did not hate the south-west wind that night. Not as I do now. Nor did I hate the south-westerly run of the sea. I did not fear when the wind gusted over sixty knots. At that time they had still not touched her, Tafline. I was seeing them for the first time as nakedly and unfettered as Waratah had seen them for the last time. I was a sailor at sea that night, and she was safely ashore in Cape Town; we had not, she and I, joined our forces to challenge the scend of the sea. I was seeing professionally, detachedly, how much strain a hull, two engines and a crew could stand in the face of the worst storm I had ever encountered. I was pushing all to the limit, but I knew there was a limit, and that it was in sight. Douglas Fairlie and Captain Ilbery would also have judged what the limits were-or did they ever have the opportunity to do so? That is what I had to find out tonight.

  Now, as I think of it, the south-west wind carries its message of fear and I cringe away from it because of her, and my heart misgives me when the wind scale rises. I fear because of what it did to her, and the cold terror comes to me, as did the ice then on the driving rain.

  That night, however, I was sure, confident: I had weighed the opposing forces, so I thought, and although the margin was small, there was still a margin.

  I ordered Feldman, 'Put on the upper deck floodlight. I also want every light in the ship switched on.'

  He gaped incredulously, simply repeating my order without inflexion in his voice. 'Put on the upper deck floodlight. All fights on the ship to be switched on - aye, aye, sir.'

  There was a kind of cold automatism in my actions. I even debated quickly whether I should not fire a second flare. It would be madness to fly over the sea..,

  I knew he would come.

  I had no real idea of Walvis Bay's position. My dead reckoning was pure guesswork. On the chart it looked businesslike, but I myself considered that we had been driven much farther south than it indicated and that the whaler was now somewhere between the Clan Lindsay Rocks and Cape Morgan, a treacherous headland whose shallow waters stretch out to sea for about half the distance-five miles - Walvis Bay was supposed to be from the coastline. It was impossible to compute how near or far we were from land.

  I had to inject some morale into the jellying Feldman. He might do anything with the ship while I went up aloft to signal Alistair.

  'No. 1,' I said, trying to keep the contempt out of my voice. 'You've been wondering why I have pushed the ship on a night like this, and why I disregarded the storm warning.'

  He simply gazed owlishly at me.

  I had to make the escapade look good, on the surface at any rate. My results would have to justify this lie - later.

  'I have sealed orders, which I am permitted to reveal at 1845 hours,' I said. I almost laughed at my own pompousness. I sounded like Feldman himself.

  'The Buccaneer squadron is due to make mock attacks tonight on the main South African ports. My brother will lead the attack on East London shortly after seven this evening ...' Feldman was taken aback. I could almost see the slow tumblers clicking into place in his brain.

  'Alistair and I discussed the possibility of a storm when he came aboard in Durban. We-that is, the authorities, my brother and myself - arranged that this ship would be used as a datum point for the East London attack. I had to have her in position by seven o'clock, whatever the conditions. It's nearly that now. My brother will pick up the ship on his approach run. Hence the lights. Because of the storm, I decided on the canister flare, just to make sure he spotted us.'

  Jubela grunted as though the wheel were hurting him.

  I added quickly, 'The Buccaneer will be flying very low, very fast. He intends to come in under the radar defences.'

  Feldman glanced at the clock. Five-to-seven.

  'I'll get the lights on right away, sir.'

  I breathed a sigh of relief. At least, he was acting now like a seaman and a man. The lie had been necessary, I told myself, to get him back on his feet.

  Feldman returned. 'All lights on, sir. Upper deck floodlight on. Flare plunger ready.'

  My anxiety slipped out before I could check myself. 'I want you to keep a tight eye on the plane, once he's passed over.'

  Feldman had regained his poise and correctness. 'If he comes from any quarter but ahead, I won't see him from the bridge, sir. Especially in this.'

  Two minutes to seven.

  Hurry!

  'Come up aloft with me,' I said. 'Let's move!'

  It was impossible to keep one's feet on the cramped section of deck near the radiosonde hut - miraculously still standing - without hanging on. The orange canister flare, the size of a football, was still firmly in position. Firing wires led back to the hut. The wind had taken on a solid roar: speech was out of the question. We could not hear the remains of the radar sweep bashing itself to fragments directly above our heads. The whaler was completely awash and it was easy to see the reason for her lethargy: she could not shake off one wave's burden before the next overtook her.

  I
needed both my hands free to fire the flare. I gestured to Feldman. He grabbed a bight of rope to lash me to the lifelines. A lurch brought us crashing together shoulder to shoulder, throwing us to the deck. I managed, somehow, to keep the firing plunger from smashing on the metal deck. I pulled myself upright and splayed myself against the wall of the hut, clasping the plunger against my chest.

  It was Feldman who saw the Buccaneer first.

  'There she is! ‘

  His words were blown away by the wind, but his gesture was plain. I thought for a moment it was a ship, but Feldman was right. The lights were coming in fast, winking and blinking under the plane's belly and atop the high tail which is such a distinguishing feature of the Buccaneer.

  It was Alistair all right.

  I jammed down the firing pin.

  The ship, the mast, the funnel, the sea - even, it seemed, the pencil-like shafts of rain-stood out in soft rose, not red. The giant Roman candle effect appeared to colour the swirl of low-flying cloud. With a silence that was uncanny, the aircraft hurtled at the ship, so low that as it swept overboard the streaming wet fuselage was suffused in rose light, through which I caught a glimpse of the blinking red aircraft light and the five-pointed symbol of the South African Air Force, representing the five bastions of the Cape of Good Hope

  Castle. The Buccaneer was certainly living up to its reputation as the lowest-flying strike aircraft in the world. The high tail flashed past.

  Feldman was excited, grinning. He shoved his mouth close to my ear. 'She's going to turn . . . coming back . . . look . . .'

  His words and the storm were drowned momentarily by a shattering roar. The noise of a jet engine, when a plane is travelling as fast as Alistair was, seems to be slightly behind it. The thin metal wall of the radiosonde hut vibrated like an eardrum.