‘Och, ah see. There’s two of you bluidy bastards, is there?’ Macgregor drew back from Stevenson, and Taylor stood aside. ‘Ah’ll see you when . . .’
But neither of the two officers heard Macgregor’s threat as he descended the ladder. Stevenson stood beside Taylor as they watched Macgregor go aft. At the after end of the boat-deck he turned and they saw his hand jerk obscenely.
Stevenson let out his breath. ‘Thanks; you arrived just like the cavalry.’
‘You looked as though you were going to kill him.’
‘That little sod was about to tell me he would get even with me Hong Kong-side.’
‘They always say that.’
‘Yes.’ Stevenson recovered himself and turned from the contemplation of the now-empty boat-deck. ‘Anyway, what’s the matter with you? Can’t you sleep? You were yawning when I relieved you at midnight.’
‘I’m all right. Got a bloody headache, that’s all.’ Taylor shivered.
‘You’ll have pneumonia if you hang around like that,’ Stevenson said. ‘There are some paracetamol tablets in my toilet cabinet; help yourself.’
‘Thanks . . . thanks, I will.’ Taylor turned back to the ladder.
‘Thank you, Chas.’
‘Good night then.’
‘Good night.’
In the radio-room at the after end of the boat-deck Sparks finished scribbling on a jotter, took off his headphones and began to copy out the message on a proper form in a fair hand. When he had finished he rang the telephone to the bridge.
‘Hullo, Alex. I’m getting a preliminary typhoon warning . . . What? Yes, from Hong Kong, though I don’t think . . . No it’s a good way off, er’ – he consulted the chit in his hand – ‘a hundred and thirty-three degrees twenty minutes east and six degrees fifteen minutes north. That’s the other side of the Philippines, isn’t it? Yes, thought so . . . No, that’s the lot for tonight. See you mañana, buenas noches.’
Stevenson pulled out a general chart of the Northwest Pacific Ocean, turning over in his mind the doggerel he had been made to learn as a young brass-bound apprentice: July, standby; August, almost; September, remember; October, soon over.
Just our bloody luck, he thought to himself.
Captain Mackinnon saw the message when he went on the bridge before descending to the saloon for his breakfast. It elicited no comment from him. The typhoon was only beginning to develop. Time, in the tangible form of further reports, would indicate whether it posed any threat to the Matthew Flinders. They were three days away from Hong Kong, and though they might not be the last three days the ship had left to her, they were most certainly the last three days during which Mackinnon bore the sole responsibility for her safety.
He filed the brief facts away in the recesses of his mind and went below to enjoy his breakfast. Three more days, three more breakfasts at sea . . .
He remembered the ship’s stay of execution. Perhaps he would remain for a few days, run her up to Shanghai . . .
But he might be expected to spend time handing over to her new master . . . a Maoist zealot half his age. He did not think he could bear that . . .
Perhaps after breakfast he would open that book about the Uffizi.
At smoke-oh time in the seamen’s mess Pritchard listened once again to Macgregor’s diatribe against the Second Mate. As he rolled his second cigarette and threw his feet off the corner of the table he looked at Macgregor, his patience exhausted.
‘Ah’ve had just about enough of your bleedin’ whimperin’. Why don’t you sod off?’
Macgregor’s mouth flapped open, then shut as he saw Braddock grinning his agreement with Pritchard. The Liverpudlian Welshman stood up.
‘The Sec’s okay,’ he said, flipping the cover back over his Zippo lighter with a metallic click. Then he stalked out of the mess. Braddock rose and followed him and one by one the remainder of the seamen did the same, sharing, like most folk, a desire to be left alone.
‘Aye,’ said Macgregor indignantly to the empty mess-room, ‘you’re a fine bunch of arse-licking bastards, for sure.’
On the bridge during the afternoon watch Stevenson recovered his good spirits. Taylor’s intervention had, he considered, effectively trumped Macgregor. It was true that in less than a week he would be facing the most crucial crisis of his career but the intervening days of routine suddenly seemed imbued with a desperate significance and he felt compelled to enjoy them with an unadulterated enthusiasm.
Ahead of the ship the navigation was straightforward, the standard hybrid mixture of dead reckoning and astro-navigation that had served the mariner since Harrison invented the chronometer and Cook proved its accuracy. They would pass between the Paracel Reefs and the Macclesfield Bank and finally raise Wang Lan lighthouse, Hong Kong’s southern outpost and the Matthew Flinders’s last landfall.
If happiness is that state of contentment which in retrospect seems ideal, then Stevenson was happy again that afternoon. Even the photograph of Cathy failed to disturb him as he took his pre-dinner shower. It was in the bar that he encountered the first shadow over his continued contentment.
‘Headache gone?’ he asked Taylor conversationally, sucking a moustache of froth off his upper lip.
‘No, I feel bloody awful, Alex,’ Taylor muttered, and Stevenson noticed the Third Mate’s pallor. It was obvious he had been sleeping badly, if at all, but there was something else about him that pricked the conceit of Stevenson’s happiness with the sharp needle of reproach.
For Charles Taylor wore the unmistakable look of a haunted man and Stevenson read in his eyes terror and premonition.
CHAPTER SIX
Encounter
They received a second typhoon warning from Hong Kong Radio during the first watch of the night, the evening eight-to-twelve. Taylor was on duty at the time and he made a mistake in copying down the position Sparks dictated from the radio-room. Preoccupied and introverted, obsessed by what was happening within him, Taylor carried out the task carelessly, his mind elsewhere. He plotted a position ten degrees east of the reported location of the typhoon’s centre. Upon the general chart of the North-West Pacific on which such disturbances were routinely monitored, Taylor, having transcribed the erroneous position, then drew a line from Stevenson’s first plot through it. Finally he extended this line northwards to the predicted recurvature latitude of twenty degrees. Thus projected, the eye of the typhoon seemed destined to pass up the eastern side of the Philippine Islands before swinging away into the vast wastes of the Pacific somewhere in the Luzon Strait. It would not threaten them in the South China Sea, lying west of the Philippines.
But at the moment Third Officer Taylor dismissively folded the chart away, ninety-knot winds were already roaring through the forested heights of the island of Mindanao; outriders of the typhoon tore the leaves of the atap palm from hut roofs on the shores of Palawan, while the land-locked Sulu Sea was heaving ridges of spume-crested waves to leeward like the grey North Atlantic in winter.
Nor, when Stevenson relieved the Third Officer at midnight, was there any evidence of Taylor’s misdemeanour. Only in the radio-room, darkened now that Sparks had hung his headphones up for the night, was the correct position displayed on the uppermost chit in a bundle bulldog clipped and hooked on the bulkhead.
They were approaching a bend in the river beyond which an outward-bound steamer could be seen. She was in ballast, on her way downstream towards the open sea from Shanghai. The brown waters of the Whang-Pu were littered with small craft and the steamer, like themselves in the James Cook, frequently blew its whistle. Short, impatient whoops were betrayed by the puffs of white steam escaping from the trumpet on her tall, stovepipe funnel long before the sound reached the James Cook two miles away.
Third Officer Mackinnon stood in the wheelhouse, beside the elderly Chinese Quartermaster at the wheel, at his station by the engine-room telegraph, monitoring the tachometer; on the starboard bridge-wing Captain Hooper and the Pilot jointly conned the ship and indu
lged in desultory conversation. The Pilot had boarded at Woosung and brought with him an air of uncertainty and excitement. The Communist Chinese were said to have crossed the Yangtse-Kiang in force and the Nationalist opposition was crumbling. It would not be long before the Red Army was at the gates of Shanghai. The city’s fall was only a matter of time. Looking out over the flat landscape that spread either side of the levéed banks of the Whang-Pu, little evidence of a violent civil war could be seen. Only a dull and distant rumble, like thunder, told of artillery far to the north-west. The dusty brown plain, reeking with the stink of human sewage used as fertiliser, faded with distance into a brown haze. Figures could be seen tending the fields, their sensibilities inured to the smell, their slow, patient actions with hoe and mattock indifferent to the far-away bombardment.
There was greater activity on the river. Apart from the stinking night-soil boats, sampans and rag-sailed junks worked up and downstream in an endless procession, impervious to civil war and even to the intrusion of the two large ships closing the bend at the lower end of Pootung Reach.
The approaching steamer blew a long whistle-blast announcing her arrival at the bend. Moving expectantly to the James Cook’s own whistle lanyard, Mackinnon waited for the Pilot’s nod, then tugged the wire. Above their heads the boom of the compressed-air-driven siren blared magisterially. The steamer swung into the bend, straight-stemmed and counter-sterned, her tall, woodbine funnel venting a heat shimmer and a column of black smoke into the warm, spring air. She was flying light, topsides and exposed boot-topping red with rust, half her screw thrashing impotently in the air under her counter.
‘Starboard easy,’ ordered the Pilot, moving the James Cook out of the centre of the channel. ‘We’ll have to watch that fellow,’ he remarked to Captain Hooper, indicating at a junk just about to tack under their starboard bow.
‘’Midships . . . steady . . . steady as you go.’ The James Cook’s bow pointed at the outside of the curve and the junk’s bearing drew slowly but steadily aft. ‘Slow ahead, mister.’
‘Slow ahead, sir.’ Mackinnon obediently swung the telegraphs, waited for the repeaters to jangle their acknowledgement from below, and recorded the instruction in the engine-movement book. Then he watched the tachometer needle drop back to thirty r.p.m.
‘Engine turning slow ahead, sir,’ he reported, and Hooper nodded, still in command and, in law, only taking the Pilot’s ‘advice’.
Master and Pilot straightened up from the rail and walked across the bridge through the wheelhouse. Hooper paused behind the Quartermaster. His eyes moved from the junk, whose hull was now disappearing under the flare of the James Cook’s bow, to the rapidly nearing steamer and then to his own ship’s head.
‘Nothing to starboard,’ he growled intimidatingly into the Chinese Quartermaster’s ear.
‘Not’ing starboard, sir,’ the old Chinaman confirmed. Hooper joined the Pilot on the port wing as the steamer swept past with a sudden apparent acceleration as the two ships came abeam. A pre-war relic, no noisy diesel engine thundered within her. Only the gentle hiss of escaping steam, the thrash, thrash of her screw and a shouted exchange between the pilots marked her passing. She had huge Union Jacks of stretched canvas on her topsides and her crew were spreading more, painted on tarpaulins, over her hatches. The James Cook’s crowd had just peeled their own back, prior to their discharging cargo on arrival at Shanghai. They were an indispensable safeguard in those troubled waters.
‘Hard a-port!’ The Pilot’s imperative command followed the exposure of the next reach beyond the passing counter of the steamer.
‘Hard a-port,’ echoed the Quartermaster, already spinning the teak wheel. The James Cook heeled slightly under the sharply applied helm.
‘Half-ahead!’
Mackinnon swung the telegraphs again and repeated the formal ritual of recording it. He was interrupted by Hooper’s sudden shout, ‘Mr Mackinnon – watch that junk!’
Mackinnon ran out on to the starboard wing. He could see the angled peak of the sail battens of the junk under the starboard bow moving down the ship’s side. The junk was close below him, its sails shivering, the rents in them fluttering distressingly as the huge bulk of the cargo-liner stole the wind. Already the junk pitched violently as the James Cook’s bow waves passed under her. On her deck an old man in a huge straw hat was wrestling with her heavy tiller, while a younger man forward clutched a shroud and shouted. He was joined by a young woman in black samfoo pyjamas. On her back a baby’s head bobbed, so that it seemed to Mackinnon, from above, that it was the child who screamed at them. On the high poop, squatting by the cooking fire, a toothless and balding old woman joined the venomous tirade. A cat clung to the top of the chicken coop in which two startled hens cackled, and a mongrel barked furiously.
‘Is she clear?’ bellowed Hooper, now standing in the wheelhouse door as though he could not bear to look. The ship’s stern swung outwards as the increase of speed took effect.
‘Nearly, sir,’ replied Mackinnon, craning over the rail as the junk seemed about to be overwhelmed by the James Cook’s quarter. He could see their own Chinese, off-duty greasers and a cook, grinning and trading insults, aware of their superiority and the prospect of imminent disaster overtaking the unfortunate occupants of the junk. Mackinnon’s heart thumped with acute anxiety. The junk disappeared under the stern and he ran across the bridge.
‘Port quarter, sir,’ he called to Hooper by way of explanation as the Master drew aside for him. The Pilot was already looking aft on the port side as Mackinnon leaned over next to him.
The junk bobbed clear, unscathed. Only the equanimity of her crew had been shaken, though her clearance had been a mere inch or two, but the piping invective followed them and the Pilot faced smartly forward.
‘Our red barbarian grandmothers apparently had intercourse with goats, Third Mate,’ he said, adding in a louder voice, ‘’Midships . . . steady . . . steady as you go . . .’ closing the incident with laconic imperturbability.
With his heart still thumping and adrenalin pumping in his arteries, Mackinnon lingered a moment, staring astern. A small black dot appeared above the junk’s sail. For a moment guilt made him associate its manifestation with the junk, for he was not unaware of the cavalier nature of the encounter, no matter how commonplace its occurrence in the crowded waters of the Whang-Pu. But the black shape seemed inexplicable, though it grew larger and was no longer a dot and then spread into a recognisable shape.
Mackinnon’s war-trained reflex was to yell in alarm, but he caught himself in time from making a fool of himself.
‘You’re not on daddy’s yacht, mister,’ Hooper’s voice chid him from the wheelhouse, recalling him to his duty beside the engine-room telegraph. ‘A miss is as good as a mile, they say.’
Rebuked, Mackinnon walked back to his station, aware that Hooper seemed to be manipulating something in his pocket. Mackinnon idly wondered if it was true the Captain always carried a rabbit’s foot for luck. He forgot about the aircraft as the Pilot ordered full ahead.
A moment later it strafed them. The shells tore up the immaculately scrubbed teak planking of the bridge-deck so that it splintered, standing like petrified grass. A series of holes were torn through the bridge bulwark and the gunfire smashed into the forward contactor house. The plane roared overhead, then banked sharply, the stink and smoke of its exhaust assailing them. On the bridge-wing Hooper and the Pilot stood up, miraculously unhurt despite the furrow of damage that marked the deck beside them. The Pilot was ashen-faced, but Hooper was bellicose with indignation.
‘That was a bloody Yank aeroplane,’ he ranted, ‘one of the Nationalist air force, the bastard!’ The Captain raised his glasses and attempted to identify the American-built fighter-bomber. The aircraft cruised round in a leisurely circle and then steadied on a second approach.
‘Fucking hell!’ roared Hooper, diving for the cover of the wheelhouse where Mackinnon was nervously standing over the shaken Quartermaster and stri
ving to keep the ship on course.
‘Come to starboard more,’ Mackinnon hissed, and the Quartermaster spun the wheel. Ahead of her, the junks and sampans drew aside, under the shelter of the raised riverbanks, leaving the fairway of the river to the foreign devils and the rogue aeroplane. Unable to take any avoiding action, the James Cook waited passively. Again came the stutter of cannon fire and the crash of the shells; again came the roar of the fighter overhead and the swift, malignant passing of its cruciform shadow. But this time it was different. The bomb dropped alongside them, missing the James Cook and plunging into the mud of the riverbed where, perhaps striking some wreckage, it detonated. The explosion shook the ship, causing her to whip from end to end like a schoolboy’s boxwood ruler. A column of brown water rose fifty feet to port, then fell upon the boat-deck like something solid. It seemed to the four helpless men on the bridge that, for a moment, they had difficulty catching their breath. As the roar of the aircraft’s engine diminished, they stared after it. It banked as it had before, then, to their relief, straightened its course to the eastward. Visibly shaken, Hooper and the Pilot emerged cautiously on to the bridge-wing. Trembling uncontrollably, Mackinnon answered the jangling bell of the engine-room telephone.
‘Chief’s asking what’s going on, sir,’ he said, a sheepish grin of reaction on his face.
‘Tell him a slant-eyed bastard has just peppered his bloody funnel and dropped a—’
But he got no further, for the Pilot shouted, ‘Hard-a-starboard,’ and the Quartermaster spun the wheel ineffectually.
‘She no steer, Tze-foo, he said, and with a barely perceptible movement in the deck under their feet, the James Cook ran aground.
‘Jesus Christ!’ blasphemed Captain Hooper, slapping his forehead and advancing on the wheelhouse with a malignant stare at the Quartermaster. ‘I fucking knew it.’
‘She no steer proper fashion, Tze-Foo,’ the Chinaman hissed desperately at Mackinnon. ‘I speak before.’
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