by Chris James
The odd couple sat around the paraffin heater drying out and sharing their life experiences. When the cider ran out, the man dug deep in his overcoat and brought out a bottle of cheap, gut-rotting rum. Pilot reciprocated by bringing out the key to his net shed and holding it up to the man. “You’ll like it here, Llewellyn,” he said. “You can move in on Saturday. I’ll leave the key behind the drainpipe.”
The next day, Friday, Pilot was fighting a hangover. Despite the feeling of being three hundred feet underwater, he decided to cook his aunts a special farewell dinner of fresh squid from Trelawney’s, spinach, sautéed potatoes and apple crumble.
Later that evening the aunts announced that they’d never had such an enjoyable meal, which Pilot thought a dishonest statement considering they hadn’t touched the squid. They had resigned themselves to their great-nephew’s leaving, but were still no wiser as to where he was going. “Do you at least have a forwarding address?” Hilda had asked.
“Not yet.”
“If I were you, I’d let out the net shed for some extra income,” Sally had suggested.
“Can’t. It’s not mine any more. The new owner’s moving in tomorrow.”
In the morning, the two women were travelling to yet another out of town fête and this was ‘goodbye’ forever. He would miss Sally and Hilda. They’d been good to him and, now that he was leaving, he wished he’d been a better ward. If I could reverse time, I would be, he thought.
On entering his new home the next afternoon, Llewellyn Martin found a seven word note from his young benefactor on the table.
THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD IS NIGH.
VII
Pilot’s train journey to Falmouth, which had started on a note of high excitement, soon became infected by an equivalent measure of loneliness, brought on by the knowledge that from now on everyone, bar the five crew he’d already met, would be a stranger. Every emotion took it in turn to share the carriage with him: exhilaration; regret; fear; excitement; wonder; and disbelief. Materially, he had managed to fit everything he needed into a single medium sized rolling suitcase, and this he propped up on the seat next to him – two travelling companions heading for a destination no man or suitcase had ever set foot or wheel on before. He had gone round to Jenny’s studio to apologise for not being able to attend the opening of her exhibition the following week and to say goodbye. They had hugged wordlessly for five minutes. “Enjoy Australia,” she had said at the door. “And write to me.”
In his hotel that night, Pilot’s final reverie before falling asleep was an image of Llewellyn Martin darning his socks by candlelight in his new home.
Pilot had asked to be woken at six, but this wasn’t necessary. At five-thirty he was already dressed and pacing his room waiting for a reasonable hour to check out. He likened himself to a sixties astronaut, carrying one of those small silver suitcases to the lauchpad for his flight into the unknown.
Pilot reached the marina at quarter to eight. It felt as if his heart were trying to fight its way out of his ribcage and he thought neither the heart nor the cage would last another hour. There were over a hundred boats moored up and it took him ten minutes to locate the Polcrebo, resting at the furthest quay. She must have been sixty years old if she were a day and looked only just seaworthy.
A few minutes later two figures appeared from the wheelhouse and called over to Pilot. From his files, he recognized them as Jack Highbell and Jason Budd. Both had studied social psychology at the London School of Economics, but had dropped out after two years. They had also been recent cell mates in Dartmoor Prison, having served an eighteen month sentence for arson. The owner of the boat they’d set fire to in Brixham harbor was a cocaine dealer who Highbell maintained was responsible for the ruin of his sister. Through lack of solid evidence, English law had been unable to touch him, so ‘Devonian law’ had been invoked.
The two men were typical of the majority of Pilot’s crew− apostates and militants, not by inclination, but through necessity. It was wise heads, not chips, they had on their shoulders. The mysterious but inspiring Forrest Vaalon had had little trouble signing up Highbell and Budd for the voyage. They, and 78 of their crewmates, had no idea of their true destination, only that they were answerable to Lonnie Pilot, who was to be in charge of the experiment. They helped him onto the confined deck, where nine other crew stood compressed, shoulder to shoulder. Macushla Mara, Jane Lavery and Josiah Billy squeezed forward and greeted Pilot with hugs and hand shakes.
It was crowded on the old boat, but at least there was no baggage to accommodate. Everything but hand luggage had already been sent to Hull and stowed away on Ptolemy before her run down to Falmouth. Three miles offshore, the ocean-going barge carrying 24 further crew awaited Polcrebo’s arrival. The others would be joining them at the Bay of Biscay rendezvous.
Pilot made his way to the launch’s stern and watched the white, foamy ribbon between the marina and Polcrebo’s churning propellors lengthen. The weather was warm and there was a heat haze, so it wasn’t long before Pendennis Point and Cornwall and Britain and Pilot’s whole life up to this hour had dissolved from view.
He looked around to see what the others were doing. Highbell was glued to the compass in the wheelhouse. Budd stood on top of the cabin roof combing the horizon with a pair of binoculars, while another man kept his ear to an engine which wasn’t sounding at all healthy. Josiah Billy caught Pilot’s eye and made a grimace.
“I hope you brought your tools, Josiah,” Pilot said.
“A bottle opener’s all I need, mate. I don’t do engines.”
“There she is,” Budd shouted some time later. It took a while for ‘her’ to come within the scope of the naked eye and the first thing Pilot saw was a white dot on the horizon reflecting sunlight through the haze. As they got nearer, a dark smudge appeared underneath the white one. Then the entire image resolved itself into the identifiable shapes of ocean-going barge below jumbo jet.
“What the fuck?” someone said.
Although most of the passengers remained slack-jawed at the sight before them, when they reached Ptolemy, they knew exactly what to do. Ropes were being passed between Polcrebo and the barge by busy hands and soon the two vessels – one small, wooden and rotten, the other huge, steel and refurbished – were being pulled together. Aaron Serman, who had been aboard Ptolemy for two weeks, threw down a rope ladder.
As Pilot crested the rail, he got a clearer picture of the barge’s strange appendage. It wasn’t a whole jumbo jet, merely the front quarter of the fuselage, attached to the deck of the barge by eight hydraulic suspension columns. He walked around the plugged rear of the plane to a fixed ladder leading up to a small platform at the plane’s forward door. “Come on up,” Serman said. Pilot followed him up the ladder into the interior of the jumbo where a dozen rows of seats spanned two aisles. “There’s secure seating for 56 here and 30 upstairs.”
They climbed a narrow spiral staircase to the plane’s second deck where the bulkheads had been removed all the way to the cockpit. “The generator is in the cargo hold and feeds the aircon, lighting etcetera,” Serman continued. “There are four digicams – one in the nose, two either side and one mounted at the back.” They stepped into what used to be the jumbo’s lounge. A single chair was positioned in front of a bank of monitors and other instruments. “The cameras are controlled from here.”
“Toilets?”
“At the back. Both decks.”
They finished their tour of the fuselage and entered the body of the barge, where Pilot was shown storerooms, cabins, toilets, shower rooms and a state-of-the-art galley adjoining a spacious mess room. Everywhere, the smell of fresh paint and yacht varnish hung thick in the air.
The sea was as flat as a snooker table and the transfer of personnel to the barge proceeded without incident. Just before leaving the launch, Budd walked over to Pilot. “Do you think she’ll fly, Lonnie?” he joked.
Pilot gazed up at the massive white fuselage of the jumbo – ma
jestic, yet ludicrous – and at the contrastingly un-aerodynamic barge below it. “Looks sound enough to me.”
Only Highbell remained on the launch. Pilot watched him go below, return a moment later and climb the rope ladder to join him. “How long will it take?” Pilot asked.
“Less than ten minutes,” Highbell said.
The entire complement watched in silence as the scuttled Polcrebo was slowly pulled into the sea to finally disappear, leaving only oily rainbows and floating debris in the space she’d once occupied.
“This feels the same as when I left Sydney,” Josiah Billy said to Mara.
“Not Dublin?”
“No. Australia is my real home. Never felt that until now. There’s no going back, I guess. You going to miss Ireland, Macushla?”
Mara thought for minute. “Like you said, there’s no going back.”
Pilot sized up the chaotic scene around him and noted that order was being restored by some of the crew who seemed to know what they were doing. Leaving them to it, and taking one last glance at the nebulous coast in the distance, he followed Serman down the companionway into Ptolemy’s belly to his cabin. It was spartan, but five star compared to his net shed.
An hour later, Serman took Pilot to the bridge to meet the barge master. “Captain Turner, we’re ready for takeoff,” Pilot said.
Turner laughed. “Let’s see if we can get this plane of yours to fly.” By this time, everyone knew that the jumbo jokes were running a bit thin, and Turner’s was the last of them. Soon, there was a noticeable feeling of forward movement as Ptolemy began to plod through the water.
The lookout came running in with news of a visitor just before they heard it for themselves. A helicopter was flying about fifty feet above the water on a line directly towards them, and as it passed overhead Pilot could make out the Coastguard insignia on its fuselage. He could also see a pair of sunglasses peering down from the cockpit as the twenty tons of metal hurdled them.
The helicopter began a steep turn ahead prior to making another pass. This time it carried on past Ptolemy towards a small boat following them at a distance before disappearing from view. “That’s the visitor I meant, not the Sikorsky,” the lookout said to Pilot. “It’s an RHIB. Rigid-hulled inflatable boat – the Coastguard uses them.”
A frightening thought occurred to Pilot− that they would be shadowed all the way to their landing site by the French and British navies, which would then get beached alongside the flotilla and thereby have every right to plant the Tricolor and Union Jack on Eydos alongside their own. It was a scenario that had never entered his head.
He was relieved when, an hour later, the lookout reported that the RHIB had u-turned and was heading home. Pilot was only half pleased with this news. The Coastguard might lose interest once they had left UK territorial waters, but Ptolemy was now heading straight for France, a nation Pilot viewed as the bigger threat of the two.
“There should be nothing to draw undue attention to ourselves when we enter French waters,” Turner said, “apart from the jumbo on our deck. As far as they’re concerned, our destination is Lisbon.”
Pilot scanned the horizon. Behind and to either side of them the sea was empty, but ahead it was a different story. It was as if they were driving down a small country lane approaching a motorway at right angles, because as far as the eye could see, vessel upon vessel plied one of the busiest sea lanes in the world. It took them just under an hour to cross the road. Later, at a point level with Ushant, Turner picked up an urgent shipping warning being broadcast on at least five different frequencies. Pilot settled down to listen.
‘...make for the nearest haven immediately. Severe wave activity can be expected if the tremors continue. The epicenter of this latest disturbance is the Bay of Biscay at latitude Ferrol, longitude Nantes. All shipping in sea areas FitzRoy, Biscay, Sole, Plymouth, Shannon, Fastnet and Lundy are advised to make for the nearest safe haven. Ports on the French west coast, Spanish north coast, and the south coasts of England and Ireland are considered to be at risk. Shipping now on course for the danger zone should remain outside the sea areas mentioned until further notice. We repeat this urgent warning to all shipping. Severe seismic activity in the Bay of Biscay is pushing up seas potentially hazardous to shipping in sea areas FitzRoy, Biscay ... ‘
The first plane, an old turbo prop, appeared at dawn and circled overhead for around twenty minutes before disappearing northwards. The shipping warning was still being broadcast. The tremors had increased in severity and the first mini tsunamis were washing up against the coasts of France and Spain. They had caused no damage, but the experts were alarmed by their increasing frequency and magnitude. Pilot could feel his body bristle with excitement at this further emphatic evidence of the waking of their island.
A hundred miles west of Brest, cracks began appearing in the ice floe sky. Shafts of light rained down on the sea to form an S-shaped curtain of sunbeams which Ptolemy now parted.
Pilot pulled up his collar and left the bridge. There was nothing in the instructions that forbade use of the jumbo before the landing window opened, so he invited the entire complement to climb aboard the jet and enjoy the view and the improving weather from higher up.
From their seats it looked as if they were flying very low over the sea, but unlike a transatlantic flight where half the passengers are asleep and the other half are watching the film, every eye was pressed to a window.
Up in the cockpit, the two camera operators were familiarizing themselves with the video equipment while Pilot stared ahead at the horizon. It wasn’t visible from his viewpoint in the pilot’s seat, nor could he feel it, but from a thousand feet, the pattern was obvious. When Ptolemyhad cleared Ushant and changed course southwest towards the epicenter of the current disturbances, she had sailed straight onto a washboard− thousands of wave lines, escalating across the surface of the sea from horizon to horizon. At first they’d been small and far between, but had increased in height and frequency to five feet from trough to peak and twenty metres apart.
When the call came for dinner there was little enthusiasm for going below for first servings. Half the passengers had already begun to feel seasick.
Shortly after dinner, Turner altered course due south to take him to the designated coordinates. This had the effect of changing their angle into the waves from a straight ninety degrees, to forty-five degrees, with the result that, not only were they rocking front to back, but side to side as well. Only half the crew returned to the jumbo, the others deciding instead to take to their bunks within easy proximity of a toilet.
“JESUS. LOOK AT THOSE,” someone shouted. Everyone felt the new, higher band of waves at the same time as their arrival was announced. Row upon row, they passed under the barge. Just before she threw up in her sick bag, Jane Lavery likened it to traveling over a liquid cattle grid.
Fifteen other people lost their dinner. Pilot hoped they wouldn’t lose their nerve.
At three-twenty in the morning, sensing in his sleep that Ptolemy’s engines had stopped, Pilot got out of bed, hurried topside and found Serman, Mara and Bradingbrooke already in the wheelhouse.
Turner was trying to keep Ptolemy’s nose into the waves, which Pilot couldn’t see in the darkness, but which felt enormous. They were striking every seven seconds now.
“Don’t want to get ourselves broadside to those,” Turner said. “Not enough ballast under the water line. I saw a light to the northeast earlier. Could be one of the other barges.”
“We’re to signal every fifteen minutes,” Serman said, leading the others out of the wheelhouse and placing a flare in its firing tube. With a thump and a whoosh it cut through the night, its magenta light hanging in the sky for nearly a minute before dropping. Pilot followed it down to extinction and for half a second, before the light died, he could see a barge three or four miles away. Almost immediately, the blackness was split by the rising trail of an answering flare.
“We have company,” Mara said.
>
By dawn, three barges were standing just off Ptolemy, with a further seven in sight. What Pilot also noticed when he came on deck after breakfast was the placidity of the sea. He wondered how the waves could have died so fast.
Not more than fifty yards away, the barge Julius was resting on the upturned image of herself. Pilot could feel his body tingle with the input of extra adrenalin the scene triggered. Not far behind Julius were Fort Lowell and Douro, the latter painted green from stem to stern.
The entire scene was softly lit by a low, orange sun on the horizon and covered by a fine muslin mist. The sun hadn’t been up for long and Pilot guessed it would burn through the mist as the morning went on. A few degrees off the line of the sun, seven dark specks marked what was otherwise a clean horizon.
An inflatable dinghy, with Highbell and Budd aboard, had been put in the water earlier and they were now directing the positioning of the barges in preparation for the trussing up operation scheduled for later.
Pilot went below, gathered his instruction sheets, inserted them into his plastic pocket necklace, and returned topside. He’d been wrong to think that the sun would burn away the mist. Instead of dissolving, it was thickening and rising, and by 0730 the sun was obscured. Already, the day was taking on that same oppressive yellow-grey emptiness that had beset England for most of July. In light of the close maneuvering they would soon be undertaking, Pilot was glad of the flat seas, but not so the stale, bell jar atmosphere, which he found sinister and portentous.
Josiah Billy, taking his turn as lookout, shouted down that he could make out three more barges on the horizon. That made fourteen in all, including themselves. One short.
There was plenty of preparation work to get on with and Pilot went through each procedure with as much calm as he could muster to mask his growing nervousness. It was Serman’s job to attend to the details and Pilot’s to direct the overall operation.
