‘Stop her!’
They were a boat’s length from the junk as they lost way, the sea tossing the two craft wildly about.
‘Anyone speak English?’ Stevenson called and was surprised by a stir in the crowd. A girl in shapeless slacks and a cheap cotton blouse emerged from the press of humanity. She looked utterly exhausted.
‘Yes. I speak English.’
Stevenson’s relief was overwhelming. ‘Good. Listen carefully. I want the woman who is hurt first, then the children. Not more than twenty-five people at a time.’ He held up the extended fingers of his right hand five times. ‘You savvy?’
She hooked a strand of black hair back behind an ear. ‘I understand.’ She turned away, explaining. The refugees listened for a moment, then wailed and remonstrated in protest. The sudden movement on the junk made it wallow sluggishly, so that Stevenson knew it was not far from foundering.
The two boats bumped alongside each other. The castaways surged towards their rescuers and the junk again listed dangerously. Only the example of the injured woman, the relative motion of the two craft and the exhaustion of the refugees prevented disaster. This hesitation saved them from catastrophe. A moment later and the alerted boat’s crew were staving off a too-hasty evacuation of the junk.
‘I promise we come back,’ Stevenson shouted at the diminutive figure of the girl as the first group of Vietnamese settled in the tossing motorboat. ‘I want you,’ he said, pointing at her with deliberate emphasis, ‘to wait until the last time. Okay? You wait. Tell the people I will come back.’
It took forty minutes to make the first trip, ten of which were spent in hooking the lifeboat on to the long wire falls with their heavy steel blocks. Lifeboats were designed for evacuating a ship; they were not working craft to be hoisted back on board with any ease. Braddock, the bowman, nursed a gashed forefinger uncomplainingly for the remainder of that long, arduous afternoon. Lifted to promenade deck level, willing hands helped the refugees aboard, especially the now-senseless woman whose legs had been roughly bound and upon which crude tourniquets had been improvised. Then they descended again on the second of what would prove to be seven trips, taking over four hours to complete.
As the boat headed back to the junk for the last time, the wallowing craft was visibly lower in the water. Stevenson was seriously concerned about the wind. Captain Mackinnon had patiently worked the unwieldy bulk of the Matthew Flinders upwind of the junk, cutting down the transit time, but the disparate sizes and windage of the two vessels caused the ship to drive to leeward faster than the waterlogged junk. To avoid overwhelming it he had been compelled to move away as the penultimate load of refugees was disembarked.
Having made several of his trips almost entirely in the shelter of the ship, Stevenson now found himself exposed. There was a savage note to the wind and the sea was building rapidly. The wave crests broke about them with a malevolent roar, striking the sides of the boat with a jar.
Mackinnon had passed a message down to the Second Mate that he was to personally check the junk before finally leaving it. As the last of the wretched boat people scrambled or were pulled aboard the motor lifeboat, Stevenson jumped nimbly across on to the bare timbers of the pathetic craft.
The girl interpreter had remained until last. Although Stevenson had asked her to, he had not expected to be obeyed so punctiliously. For a moment he caught his balance, swaying with the motion of the junk. She was dead in the water, lolling dangerously at the end of each roll and only her internal subdivision, a feature introduced to boat-building by the Chinese in the middle ages of European history, prevented the free-surface effect capsizing her.
He caught the painter Braddock threw him and took a turn round the junk’s mast.
The girl observed him. Her small moon-face was framed by her tangled, shoulder-length hair. She had more prominent cheekbones than he had first observed, and her tiredness shadowed her beauty.
He tried to smile reassuringly. ‘You go now,’ he said, waving at the boat bumping alongside and noticing, for the first time, how they had sprung the gunwale capping in two places.
‘What you do?’
‘I search,’ he said vaguely, not certain what was expected of him.
‘All go,’ the girl said. ‘I wait, like you say.’
‘Okay,’ Stevenson said, a hint of impatience in his voice as his men grew restive.
‘Dat fucking t’ing’ll sink in a minute if youse don’t get a shift on, Sec,’ said Pritchard, voicing the opinion of all the boat’s crew.
‘We’re making water ourselves, Alex,’ added the Fourth Engineer.
‘You go,’ Stevenson almost shouted at the girl. There were tears in her eyes and she swayed with exhaustion. Instinctively he put out a hand and grabbed her arm. Steadying her he was aware of the thinness of her, of her dry, exposed skin, her lacklustre hair.
‘She’s at the end of her tether,’ he said, passing her over to the boat’s crew who lifted her aboard with a rough tenderness and set her gently on a thwart.
Stevenson slipped below. The junk’s hull consisted of three compartments. Forward, a small space had once provided accommodation for the junk’s crew, abaft which was a cargo hold containing pieces of wood with which, Stevenson supposed, the boat people had built makeshift sleeping quarters. Both of these were half-full of dangerously slopping water on which assorted filth slowly revolved, evidence of the ingress of water. The air was thick with the sickly sweet smell of urine.
He made his way aft, and dodged through the hut-like wheelhouse which also contained an old propane stove. Muck and debris were littered everywhere. He ducked inside, past a leaking bilge pump which showed signs of recent use, and lowered himself into the space below, a dark and foul engine compartment awash with oil bilge water. The junk was filling fast, though void of humanity. Stevenson turned to leave when something bright caught his eye. It was partly concealed under a wooden box. He bent and picked it up. Without knowing precisely how it worked, he guessed its function.
It was an empty ammunition clip for an automatic weapon. The neatly dovetailed box it had been shoved under was an ammunition box. Someone he had just put aboard the Matthew Flinders was armed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Stuff of Heroes
Captain Mackinnon waited, anxious and impatient, a churning sensation of extreme discomfort in the pit of his stomach. He felt a repugnance for the responsibility he had assumed. As Stevenson leaped into the motor lifeboat and it cast off from the junk, he knew his problems were only just beginning.
‘Sorry to bother you just now, sir . . .’
‘What is it?’
Almost apologetically Sparks handed him a message neatly written on Eastern Steam’s own signal paper.
‘Another typhoon warning, sir.’
Mackinnon grunted irritably, going into the chart-room and reaching for the general chart of the North West Pacific. He remembered the purpose for which he had come on the bridge six hours earlier. It was too late to reprimand Taylor; the man was showing signs of stress and it would do no good now, when more pressing matters demanded his own attention. Besides, the Third Mate had done pretty well in trying to assist the boat people aboard, even though their first attempt, for which he held himself responsible, had ended in failure. Mackinnon sighed and bent over the chart, reaching for his reading glasses.
Christ, he felt tired.
Plotting the reported position of the storm’s centre, Captain Mackinnon did not see Stevenson bring that last boat load of castaways back to the ship.
With her engines stopped, the Matthew Flinders lay beam on to the wind and sea, rolling so heavily that it proved beyond the capabilities of the boat’s tired crew to grab the wildly swinging falls with their heavy blocks and catch them under the steel hooks in the bow and stern.
Braddock succeeded in hooking on the bow, but the boat fell into the trough of a sea and the boat’s bow was jerked high in the air, jolting the occupants violently. The next moment th
e ship rolled over on top of them, the falls hung slack and the un-moused block dropped from the hook and swung dangerously past the already injured Braddock’s skull.
Alongside them the Matthew Flinders’s shell plating went up and down with the relative motion and rapidity of a lift shaft viewed from an erratic and runaway lift. It was clear to Stevenson that they had pushed their luck beyond the point of safe return.
‘Chuck the boarding ladder over!’ he roared at Rawlings, whose slackly handsome face wore an unfamiliar expression of real concern as he leaned over the boat-deck fishplates high above him.
The Mate acquiesced immediately. The coiled rope ladder, intended for evacuation, was flung out from the boat-deck looking like a weapon of repulse, but it uncoiled harmlessly as it descended and, with a snaking rattle against the ship’s topsides, hung invitingly besides them.
‘Astern a touch, Tony,’ Stevenson ordered, trying to keep the boat somewhere laterally close to the bottom of the rope ladder, the lower rungs of which alternately dipped into the water then shot several yards above their heads, catching with a momentary explosion of splinters between the shell plating and the boat’s damaged gunwale.
‘Jesus Christ . . .’ someone muttered, wondering who was to be the first.
‘I think one of us had better lead,’ Stevenson began when the girl, waiting for the boat to rise and the ship to lean over them, made a sudden grab for the ladder.
Stevenson watched with anxiety as she scrambled upwards, out of reach of the rearing boat. Already figures appeared at the main-deck rail to help her inboard and, as soon as she was clear, others quickly followed her example. Somehow the information that this was their final chance transmitted itself to the last of the refugees. It seemed, too, this final boatload consisted of the fittest and most able. Stevenson wondered if any of them had concealed arms about their persons. It was a stupid, suspicious thought, for they wore only the thin, sun-bleached cotton rags they stood up in. He hoped the weapons had been dropped overboard from the junk.
The Fourth Engineer deftly threw the boat’s engine in and out of gear, ahead and astern, to keep the bottom of the rope ladder as near steady as he could. One by one the refugees clawed their way up the ship’s side, until only the boat’s crew remained.
‘Up you go, Brad.’
Stevenson saw the Able Seaman’s bloody finger for the first time, saw him wince as he clung to the ladder and began his hurried ascent. Pritchard followed.
‘You too, Tony.’
Stevenson waited for the Fourth’s feet to clear, then he too left the boat. Its engine chugged in neutral as it bumped against the ship’s side. Almost at the rail, Stevenson looked down. From this height it seemed a relatively simple matter to hook on those blocks and save it. He hesitated, half-minded to go back and do the job by himself.
‘Get inboard, Alex!’ he heard Rawlings bellow from the deck above. ‘Leave the bloody boat!’
He clambered over the rail, accepting a helping hand from the Bosun.
‘The wind’s piping,’ the Bosun said by way of a compliment. ‘She’ll not be needing a motorboat in the scrapyard.’
Taylor, who had been watching, reported the boat’s loss to Mackinnon and the Captain returned to the starboard bridge-wing in time to see the motor lifeboat drop slowly down the ship’s side and disappear under the curve of the quarter.
The loss of the boat increased his isolation and anxiety. In all his years as Mate and Master he had husbanded the owner’s property as though it had been his own, a prudent, careful and responsible man in a position of trust. Considerations of scrapyard redundancy never entered his head. As the boat drifted out of his sight he felt carried back to an earlier time, a time when the loss of a boat was inconsequential, when the ocean was dotted with abandoned boats and the wreckage of broken hulls. The sensation of déjà vu was almost overwhelming and with it came the inevitability of cyclical crisis, of a second testing being upon him when he was bereft of the resilience and assumed immortality of youth . . .
‘They couldn’t hook on, sir,’ Taylor was saying.
Mackinnon raised his eyes to the horizon. The weather continued to deteriorate and the ship could no longer be left to roll at the mercy of the increasingly heavy sea. As if synchronising with his thoughts a wave broke against the weather side of the Matthew Flinders. The whole ship shook from the gigantic blow. Mackinnon and Taylor spun round as a huge column of white water, the dissipated mass of the thwarted wave, rose high above them. It was instantly demolished, torn downwind to scour their faces like shot-blasting. Both men lowered their heads, then Mackinnon, spluttering with the cold shock of the spray, revived.
‘Ring on half-speed, mister!’ he ordered and Taylor responded, glad to be active again. ‘Hard a-port!’ Mackinnon made for the wheelhouse door to stand behind Macgregor as the Able Seaman brought the ship head to wind. ‘Midships and steady,’ he ordered, adding to Taylor with an uncharacteristic clue as to his mental state, ‘Keep her so, mister, while we sort ourselves out.’
Mackinnon desperately needed time to give his full consideration to the problem of the typhoon, a problem that the sighting of the boat people had compelled him to shelve for a fateful five hours. Yet even now he could not entirely dispel the image of the boat drifting astern under the quarter. He recalled the junk they had nearly run down on the James Cook, and how he had craned to see it clear of the stern’s overhang.
Satisfied he had settled the Matthew Flinders on a comfortable course that effectively hove the ship to, he strode out on to the port bridge-wing and raised his glasses to stare astern. The boat bobbed white in their wake. To starboard the junk had vanished.
‘She’s gone, sir,’ a voice said and he lowered his glasses to find Stevenson beside him, wet and shivering, his teeth chattering. ‘We were just in time. She was filling fast. They must have been pumping all the time.’
‘You did very well, Mr Stevenson.’
‘I’m afraid there’s something else, sir.’
Afterwards, several of the Matthew Flinders’s crew remarked that Rawlings had surprised them. The Mate’s talent for organisation had possibly been spurred by Mackinnon’s recent admonition, or perhaps, like many a man promoted slowly and gradually losing drive and ambition in an uninspiring world, he simply rose to the occasion, revealing talents they had never known he possessed.
Between them Rawlings and Freddie Thorpe, the Chief Steward, had marshalled the women and children into the officers’ smoke-room, the men into the saloon. The injured woman, her legs still bound in the rag tourniquets applied in the junk, had been given a shot of morphine sulphate from the drugs chest.
Rawlings, who periodically eased the restriction of the cinctures to allow blood flow to inhibit mortification of her ragged flesh, considered some form of operation would have to be performed if she was to live. Armed with a rough list of the rescued, he climbed to the bridge to make his report.
Captain Mackinnon was not there. Having hauled the ship head to sea and hove-to, he had left the bridge to Taylor and Macgregor and gone down to his cabin with Stevenson. Rawlings retraced his steps to the boat-deck and knocked on the open cabin door.
‘Come in, mister,’ Mackinnon said and Rawlings stepped inside. ‘The Second Mate has something to tell us. We’re going to have to search every one of them.’
‘Why, for Chrissake?’ asked Rawlings. The Second Mate told of the ammunition clip he had discovered.
‘That’s wonderful,’ Rawlings muttered with dismal emphasis.
‘I’m putting the pistol back in the safe,’ said Mackinnon. ‘It’s all we’ve got if things get rough, but I don’t want it flashed around and rousing anyone’s suspicions. Everything will probably pass off all right. They’re exhausted and should be relieved we’ve rescued them, but’ – he paused to let his words sink in – ‘in case there are problems about landing them and so on, this is the combination number.’ He bent to his desk and scribbled a few digits down on two scraps of pape
r handing one to each of the officers. ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen, so you two learn it and if you think circumstances demand a shooter and I’m not available . . . well, you know how to get hold of it. Okay?’
The two officers nodded solemnly.
‘This seems a bit serious,’ Rawlings said as Mackinnon put the Smith and Wesson back into the safe.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Mackinnon, shutting the heavy door with a clunk. Straightening up he turned and faced them. ‘I’ve got her hove-to at the moment. I’m going down to see the Chief. I want you to secure the deck; we’re in for a bit of a blow.’
‘What about the woman, sir?’ asked Rawlings. ‘We’re going to have to do something about her and I’m no quack.’
The weight of all that was happening bore down on Mackinnon again and the problem of the typhoon waited like a guilty secret, demanding attention that he could not give.
‘The ship’s pretty comfortable at the moment,’ Rawlings prompted.
‘I’ll see the Chief,’ Mackinnon repeated, an edge on his voice, ‘and then we’ll have a look at her.’
‘The officers’ duty mess?’
‘Yes. Go and tell Freddie Thorpe to get things ready, then take a turn round the deck. When you’re happy with the deck,’ he said to the Mate, ‘you take the bridge. Send Taylor down to help.’ He turned to Stevenson; the Second Mate had already done his whack in the boat and in any case, with the middle watch to keep, the man never had more than a few hours’ sleep. It was already long past his relief time and Rawlings should be on watch. Mackinnon wanted a stellar fix before it got dark if cloud cover permitted. ‘See if you can get some stars.’
Rawlings agreed.
‘I’ll see to the deck, sir,’ volunteered Stevenson helpfully.
‘Very well,’ Mackinnon said. ‘Then you get your head down. Freddie and the Third Mate are enough to help with the woman.’
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