The Lonely Sea: Collected Short Stories

by Alistair MacLean

  What ensued would have thrown any aspiring etymologist into transports of rapture. With every second word unprintable, McCrimmon anathematized the world in general and Alexandria in particular for five full minutes without repeating himself once. He held his audience spellbound. Finally, he calmed down, soothed by Mohammed Ali's consoling words and several glasses of native-brewed arrack.

  After much further argument and bandying of words, it was agreed that they should meet again on the following night, at a cafe at the hither end of the Sherif Pasha — a rendezvous insisted on by McCrimmon. The advantages were two-fold — it was in the white quarter, and McCrimmon was not unknown there; had they been there that evening, wallet or no wallet, the necessity for a further assignation would not have arisen…

  McCrimmon sat on for some time, drinking moodily and deciding to leave only when Mohammed Ali showed no signs of supplying any further arrack. Clutching at the wavering bar in an effort to steady it, he rose to go; he wore the weary air of a man whom fate could harm no more. It was, after all, a pardonable assumption.

  Launching forth in the general direction of the door, he found it blocked by a quartette who showed no signs of complying with his imperative calls for gangway. Focusing his eyes with considerable difficulty, McCrimmon peered at the nearest of the four; his mind, harking back several leagues, ultimately identified him as the Cypriot to whom he had been demonstrating the finer points of poker earlier on in the evening. Intuition told him who the remaining three gentlemen were.

  Shocked into comparative sobriety and hoarsely uttering the war cry of his clan, McCrimmon leapt back. A high-speed camera would have recorded but a blur as his hand streaked for his Stilson wrench. Wild Bill Hickok, at his best, would have stood in silent wonder. Alas for McCrimmon, the miraculous speed of his draw was grievously hampered by the plethora of assorted cutlery in his pocket. True, it caused but a second's delay: but it is a scientifically established fact that a heavy stool, impelled by the arms of an enraged Armenian, can cover a distance of four feet in less than half that time.

  A naval patrol happened to be passing by as McCrimmon emerged, in slightly unorthodox fashion, through the closed lattice window of the cafe. It was an unusual method of exit, but not sufficiently so to warrant investigation by any average hardened naval patrol. Pausing only to separate him from the splintered woodwork festooned around his neck, the patrol picked him up and escorted his tottering form to the sanctuary of the docks.

  Dragging himself away from the mirror wherein he had been gazing with rapturous admiration for the past ten minutes, McCrimmon adjusted his hat to the correct angle befitting an Active Service A/B, donned his raincoat, checked up on his armoury and prepared to leave the mess-deck.

  It was nightfall on the following day, Sunday. During the morning McCrimmon had held a council of war with his cousin, who was that day accumulating an impressive amount of overtime in 'A' Turret. Annoyed as he initially was by McCrimmon's intrusion — for even the most phlegmatic amongst us resents any interruption of a deep and healthful slumber — his cousin was soon cursing luridly and gnashing his teeth in perfect sympathetic unison with McCrimmon as the latter unfolded his sorry tale. But there were no hard feelings — amongst the McCrimmons, recriminations are quite unknown. Another wallet of notes would be forthcoming by evening. The loss, McCrimmon assured his grateful cousin, could be made good by another two or three overtime weekends, even though he was not the man he was, as he had latterly begun to be troubled by insomnia. Many a lesser man, in his circumstances and in the light of recent events, would have categorically refused to venture ashore; but there are no lesser men among the McCrimmons.

  He was watch aboard that night, but had easily circumvented that slight technicality by mortgaging his rum for the next three days to a messmate — a practice strictly at variance with Service regulations, and, therefore, all the more dear to the heart of McCrimmon.

  Satisfied that all was well, and that his wallet, only to be used as a last resort, was securely stowed in an inner pocket, he climbed briskly up the rope ladder to the upper deck passageway. It is here worth recording that the steel ladder, normally in position, had been removed that morning for the purpose of welding new foot-grips on the worn, shiny steps.

  He arrived ashore in the liberty-boat some thirty minutes later, passed out of the dock, strode up through the native quarter, rolled his way along the vast cobbles of the rue Soeurs, turned into Mohammed Ali square, crossed it diagonally and disappeared down the Sherif Pasha.

  On arrival at the rendezvous, he exchanged a few genial words with the proprietor — an old acquaintance of his — pressed some genuine Egyptian currency into the hands of the two large Yugoslav waiters and seated himself in the private recess curtained off from the restaurant. Here he patiently awaited the arrival of Mohammed Ali, from time to time smiling with smug self-satisfaction and automatically easing the heavy wrench in his pocket.

  Ten minutes passed, and Mohammed Ah arrived. He was not alone. The man who followed him in stood about six foot one in his bare feet and was so broad that he found it necessary to turn sideways in order to pass through the doorway. A large man by any standards, he was puny and stunted when compared to the other two dark-skinned individuals who pressed in behind him. Mohammed Ali's companions appeared to have been chosen with a complete lack of the aesthetic viewpoint.

  McCrimmon ground his teeth in black fury and bitterly marvelling at the depravity and depths of distrust of human nature, he smiled broadly and greeted Mohammed Ali with a cordiality that would have embarrassed any but the blackest-hearted. Mohammed Ali remained unmoved.

  The wrench was hastily pushed well out of sight and the wallet dragged forth from the more remote fastnesses of McCrimmon's clothing. Mohammed Ali, permitting himself the merest smirk, took out the washleather bag, unloosened the neck and spilled the contents on the table. There were eighteen stones in all, blue moonstones, small but perfectly matched.

  McCrimmon, who probably knew less about precious stones than any other man living, produced a magnifying glass which the Navigator had carelessly left lying around his chart table and proceeded to examine the stones with the hawk-like eye of the Hatton Garden expert.

  For a long time he examined them, one by one. He picked each new one up hopefully, scrutinized it and cast it away in a disparaging fashion, carefully allowing his expression of disappointment to deepen after each unspoken condemnation. Mohammed Ali fidgeted and fumed. McCrimmon ignored him completely.

  Mohammed Ali's patience wore very thin. Clearing his throat after his unpleasant fashion, he stated his price as 800 piastres. McCrimmon, rapidly calculating that, on figures supplied by his cousin, this would give him only 500 per cent profit, cast away another moonstone with an even more marked degree of disgust, and laughed hollowly. He had spent much time in practising and bringing to its present state of perfection that hollow laugh of his and it had served him well more than once in the past.

  It effected Mohammed Ali not at all. McCrimmon once more gnashed his teeth and offered 500 — a ridiculously high price, but he, McCrimmon, was not the man to haggle over an odd piastre. Neither, apparently, was Mohammed; he restated his original figure and then the haggling began in earnest. Both called for alcoholic sustenance; not, as the innocent might expect, from a spirit of amity but in the fervid, if unChristian, hope that it might cloud the other's intellect. When McCrimmon left the cafe a brief two hours later, the blue moonstones were his; his wallet, true, had been lightened to the extent of 500 piastres, but he was more than satisfied with the night's work. Granted, there had been a slightly unpleasant scene when McCrimmon, producing a 1938 Currency Quotation book, had endeavoured to pay in Greek money (rate of exchange, in the year '44, due to inflation, being approximately five million drachmas to the penny); but further reflection, coupled with the sight of one of Mohammed Ali's bodyguards absentmindedly tying knots in a small crowbar, had convinced him of the unwisdom of this. Still, as aforesaid, he w
as satisfied. McCrimmon decided to celebrate.

  Some time after midnight, it was borne in upon McCrimmon that, for every twenty paces he took, he was making no more than one yard's direct progress. Rightly calculating that it would thus take him several hours to cover the mile that separated him from the docks, he hailed a gharry. Mounting, he enthroned himself on the collapsible hood and shouted ironic encouragement to the decrepit Jehu, who uselessly belaboured the ancient collection of skin and bones barely supported by the gharry's shafts.

  They arrived at № 14 gate in ten minutes. McCrimmon vaulted gracefully over the side of the gharry and collapsed in an inert heap in the gutter. Picked up and revivified by the army guard, he staggered down to the quay and found that the last liberty-boat had departed three hours previously. He hired a felucca, and his powerful, off-key baritone, rendering the 'Skye Boat Song', reverberated among the silent ships as the two natives laboriously rowed out of the windless inner harbour. In the outer harbour, with sail raised, he switched to 'Shenandoah', and so went through his painfully extensive repertoire, craftily changing to 'Rule Britannia' as the felucca came within earshot of the Officer of the Watch of the ILARA.

  Making good his escape up the chainladder while the natives searched the bottom of the boat for the handful of carelessly thrown Glasgow Corporation tramway tokens, McCrimmon made his way for'ard. He disappeared into a convenient patch of blackness which enveloped the port side amidships of the ILARA, and tarried there a space while he opened the heavy steel doors of a small compartment and tucked the bag of blue moonstones safely inside. They were completely hidden. He closed the door, tightened the clamps with a tommy bar and departed on his way, smirking widely and fulsomely congratulating himself on his own genius. At no time was McCrimmon's faith in his fellow-man very marked.

  He passed within the for'ard screen door and navigated his unsteady way to the hatchway leading down to his mess-deck. Above this hatchway brightly burned a warning red lamp; this he incorrectly judged to be merely yet another of the brightly coloured spots which had been interfering with his vision for some little time. Swinging his leg over the coaming, McCrimmon started to descend the ladder with the careless aplomb of the born sailor; it was not until he recovered consciousness several hours later in the Sick Bay that he recollected that the ladder had been removed the previous day.

  On the following day the ILARA left for operational duties. Three days later McCrimmon was well on the highroad to recovery and on the fourth he suffered a serious relapse.

  About 7.00 am on the fourth morning, the ILARA intercepted and sunk a small German transport evacuating troops from Crete. McCrimmon had heard the news and had been not unaware of desultory gunfire. About 10.00 am he summoned the Sick Berth Attendant and lackadaisically asked for details. He was told that the trooper had been disabled by gunfire and, when emptied of troops, sunk by torpedo.

  Insofar as it was possible for a complexion the colour of saddle-leather to match a snow-white pillow, McCrimmon's now did just this. Finding some difficulty with his breathing, he asked the SBA whether he knew which tubes had been used. The SBA did and informed him that the port ones were the ones in question. The SBA was now thoroughly alarmed, as he had it on the best authority that only dying men plucked the coverlet after the fashion his patient was now using.

  Moaning slightly, McCrimmon mustered the last tattered shreds of the legendary McCrimmon courage and feebly enquired whether the torpedo which had done the deadly deed had issued from X, Y or Z. 'Ah! no, no, not X.' 'Yes — X.'

  As the first wave of kindly oblivion swept over his shattered frame, McCrimmon momentarily and agonizingly relived those few moments of inspired cunning — now clearly seen for the maniacal folly that it was — when he had stowed the moonstones inside X torpedo tube. With the fleeting realization that 'jewel-studded Aegean' was no longer the empty phrase that it had been in Byron's time, McCrimmon lapsed into a stunned unconsciousness which caused the SBA to have no hesitation whatsoever in calling both medical officers at once.

  Physically speaking, McCrimmon eventually made a complete recovery: mentally, he is scarred for life. More terrible still, internecine warfare has at last destroyed the historic solidarity of the Clan McCrimmon. I met McCrimmon the other day, striding briskly along Glasgow's Argyll Street, with an empty haversack over his shoulder — he had just been on a visit to his plumber uncle in the Broomielaw — and he told me sadly that, even after the lapse of years, his cousin was still looking for him.

  They Sweep the Seas

  It was still night when we cast off and nosed our way through the outer harbour, crammed with vessels of all sizes and nationalities, riding peacefully at anchor. Cold, grey rain was sluicing down mercilessly, spattering off our deck and churning the murky water to a light foam, and from the bridge, visibility scarcely extended beyond the trawler's bows. We felt, rather than saw, our way out to the open sea, barely making headway. We brushed along the side of a sister trawler, and farther on felt our hull scraping over an anchor cable, the black hulk of the ship's bows looming perilously near. Approaching the entrance, and feeling reasonably safe, we increased speed, and all but collided with a big Finnish freighter, which had worked with the tide across the harbour mouth; it was the word 'SUOMI', painted in six-foot high letters, gleaming whitely through the darkness, that gave us warning. Our skipper cursed fluently, spun the wheel to starboard, and we passed on. But we reached the sea without mishap.

  In the harbour, it had been comparatively warm and sheltered, but a very different state of affairs existed beyond the headland. The trawler pitched wickedly in the long, heavy rollers coming in from the Atlantic, drenching itself in spray. Sometimes an exceptionally heavy sea foamed along fo'c'sle high, poured into the well, slid over the deck, and went gurgling through the scuppers; but this did not happen often. The wind was not strong, but possessed that biting quality which makes one raise one's coat collar and withdraw, hurriedly to the lee-side of the upper deck. There are few bleaker and more cheerless places than the west coast of Scotland in the early morning of a January day.

  As the trawler went butting through the seas, in the chill grey of the breaking dawn, to its appointed station, the two officers on the bridge discussed the prospects of the coming sweep. Both agreed that it would be a trying day, that it would be as boring as ever, and that they would, as usual, encounter no mines. They disagreed, however, concerning the weather: the Lieutenant thought there was little chance of the wind dying down or the weather moderating; but the skipper was of the opinion that both would come to pass, although, probably, later in the day.

  Neither the Lieutenant nor the skipper was a young man. The Lieutenant (RNR) wore three rows of ribbon, had been in the Dardanelles in the last war, and walked with a pronounced limp — a memento of Zeebrugge. He had retired ten years ago, but at the outbreak of war had left his comfortable, even luxurious, existence for the unknown perils and hardships of a minesweeper's existence. He did not do this as a favour to his country: he did it as his duty.

  The Lieutenant, as has been said, was not a young man, but the skipper was at least ten years older. Half a century had passed since he first went down to the sea. He had swept mines in the war of 1914-18, but had considered himself, not unnaturally, too old for such an arduous task in this. Then one day, while trawling in the North Sea, he had been bombed and machine-gunned by a Heinkel. The bombs had missed, but the bullets had literally riddled one of his crew. That man was his son. And so he had changed his mind about being too old.

  An hour after clearing the harbour mouth, we reached the beginning of our beat and cut the engines until the trawler had barely enough way to keep head on to the seas. We were awaiting the arrival of our companion sweeper, who made her appearance some ten minutes later, pitching heavily up on our starboard quarter, a vague shape in the dim half-light.

  We drifted a light line astern and she altered her course to port, to pick it up. A wire was attached to this; we hauled it aboard
our own trawler, attached the sweep wire to it, and paid it out astern again. At regular intervals, peculiarly shaped objects, professionally known as 'kites', were shackled to the hawser by two seamen, whose stoic features betrayed no signs of the extreme discomfort they must have been experiencing from their raw hands and stiff, cold-benumbed fingers. These 'kites' acted as weights upon the sweep wire, keeping it at the requisite distance beneath the surface of the water.

  No landlubber or 'freshwater' man could have performed this task of paying out the sweep wire; it was an operation that demanded the very highest standards of seamanship. The co-ordination and sense of timing of the man at the wheel, the two 'shacklers', and, above all, the winch-driver, were marvellous to a degree. They worked as smoothly and as swiftly as the well-oiled, correlated cogs of an intricate machine.

  Everything adjusted to his satisfaction, our Lieutenant signalled, by siren, to the other trawler that he was ready to commence his sweep. She acknowledged his signal, swept round to our starboard beam, and off we went, beating southwards. It was becoming rougher, and the Lieutenant, studiously avoiding the skipper's eye, was smiting with ill-concealed satisfaction. It was not often that the skipper's weather forecasts proved false, but this time, for once, he seemed to have slipped up.

  We were broadside on to the seas now, one moment lifting over a sullen, spume-capped crest, the next sliding along a shallow trough, clouds of icy spray cascading inboard. The pitching had given place to a rather unpleasant rolling motion, the latter being a decided change for the worse. It was now that the genius — and genius it was — of the winch-driver asserted itself. His job it was to see that the sweep wire did not become too slack, which would have been bad enough, or become too taut, which might have resulted in tragedy. Sailors have, with good reason, a holy dread of overstrained hawsers. A snapped wire is a lethal weapon, and its power of destruction is rather terrifying; such a wire can slice off a man's head far more efficiently than the sharpest axe. But, judging from our winch-driver's nonchalance and the deceptively careless ease with which he manipulated the levers, one would have thought that no such unpleasant possibility had ever occurred to him.