Island of Death

by Barry Letts

  ‘Sah!’ said the sergeant. With a parade-ground salute, he turned smartly about and marched outside.

  The Brigadier sighed with frustration. It was clear that he would get no information from Whitbread for some considerable time. ‘So. We fly to Sri Lanka and wait for them.

  And what then? Are we going to arrest the entire ship?’

  As he finished speaking, he realised that the noise from the chaise longue had changed. Alex was struggling to sit up, and taking deep shuddering breaths, trying to speak.

  ‘What is it, man?’

  ‘Sri Lanka...? You think they’re... they’re going to Sri Lanka? No, no, no!’

  The words were scarcely audible. His face was like a drawing of a ghost in a children’s horror story. He swayed, and his mouth opened and closed silently, as he tried to go on speaking.

  The Doctor strode across to him, and seized him by the shoulders, fixing him with his eyes. ‘You know where they’re going?’

  Alex’s voice came from far away. ‘Of course I do. They’re going to...’ A cunning expression came over the skeletal face.

  ‘Are you... Are you going after them?’

  ‘We are, if it’s the last thing we do.’

  A ghost of a sardonic smile. ‘You’ll never find them.

  Unless...’ The feeble voice faded away completely.

  ‘Unless? Unless what?’

  The urgency in the Doctor’s voice got through to him.

  ‘Unless... unless you take me with you...’ The effort was too much. His head dropped; and, as his body gave way, the Doctor gently let him fall back onto the braided cushions behind him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘Sammy!’

  The young Naval officer with red-gold hair and two rings on the epaulettes of his white shirt swung round to face her.

  ‘Oh... sorry,’ said Sarah, disappointed. ‘I thought you were somebody I used to know.’

  He grinned. ‘Afraid not. More’s the pity! You must be Sarah Jane Smith. Welcome aboard. Is that all your luggage? It’s okay, Matthews, I’ll take it.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir.’

  The sailor who’d greeted her with a salute at the top of the gangway handed over the backpack and returned to his post.

  ‘Come on, I’ll show you where your cabin is. And the wardroom and all that jazz.’

  And away he went down the deck.

  With a skip and a little run, Sarah caught up with him, and found herself almost scuttling along to keep up with his long legs. Of course it wasn’t Sammy! Even if Sammy had grown a beard. Same colour hair, that was all. This chap was much taller, more solid and more... sort of grown up. But then, of course, Sammy would be by now.

  It would be too much of a coincidence. Just as well. She’d had her fill of coincidences in the last year or so!

  ‘I’m Peter Andrews. The Number One. That’s -’

  ‘The First Lieutenant. Yes, I know. Sammy told me.’

  He came to a doorway and paused. ‘That wouldn’t be Sammy Brooks, by any chance?’

  ‘Oh no! ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Left him behind in Hong Kong. Lucky blighter. When the flotilla was rejigged, he was given command of the Cuffley. We got flogged to the Irish Navy. Much to the disgust of the Old Man.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Skipper. Lieutenant-Commander Gene Hogben. Let’s hope this little jaunt of yours will cheer him up.’

  He disappeared inside, followed by Sarah, who was trying to work out why she had an odd feeling of coming home.

  ‘What are you?’ she said as she followed him up a steep flight of stairs. ‘A frigate? Or what?’

  His laughter echoed down the corridor at the top of the ladder.

  HMS Hallaton, Village Class Offshore Patrol Vessel, en route from the China Seas to Chatham Dockyard for her pre-sale refit, with a skeleton crew, was hardly the best craft to go chasing the sleek, streamlined Skang across the Indian Ocean Built in Aberdeen, and based on the commercial design of a deep-sea trawler, she was about half the length of a frigate, but very nearly as broad in the beam.

  Her armament was sparse. Her 40mm Bofors could certainly do some damage, and her assorted machine guns had often proved their worth. But the four surface-to-surface missiles mounted on the foredeck, though fully operational, were there simply as a deterrent to the curiosity of the Chinese navy. They certainly weren’t meant to be used.

  But since Alex had insisted that it was too far to fly, the

  Hallaton was the best the Brigadier could come up with.

  Moreover, as if to prove Major Chatterjee’s point that the British had invented bureaucracy, it had taken the Brigadier’s boss at UNIT HQ in Geneva - apparently fearing a diplomatic incident with India - nearly three days to persuade the Foreign Office to consider lending her to them, and the Ministry of Defence another two days to say yes.

  ‘I am dumbfounded at the swiftness of New Delhi’s agreement,’ the Major had said. ‘ Skang sailing under the Indian flag, I would be making the assumption that you would have to wait for weeks. Even so, you have a long haul to pull. I am calculating that errant vessel will already have travelled at least twelve hundred miles, and more likely a couple of thousand or more, you know. I would be hazarding a large bet that they have already arrived there. Wherever they are going.’

  And that was the trouble. There was no way they could make Brother Alex reveal their destination.

  ‘South. Sail to the south. And when you have been at sea for two full days, with me on board, I shall tell you.’

  And nothing they could do would persuade him otherwise.

  With Major Chatterjee having been left behind to hold the fort, the UNIT team was reduced to its original size: the Brigadier, in a state of sustained frustration eased only slightly by their setting off at last; the Doctor, in one of his infuriating moods of equanimity (There’s nothing we can do, Lethbridge-Stewart, but wait...!’); and Sarah Jane Smith, determined to make the best of their enforced cruise.

  She intended to use it as the basis of one of the articles that she would eventually be writing about the whole adventure, comprehensively illustrated by shots of the ship and its crew. ‘If the Brigadier doesn’t stop me again,’ she thought ruefully, as she snapped him on the port wing of the bridge, staring glumly at the empty horizon.

  ‘Ah. There you are,’ he said, turning at the sound of the shutter of her little Olympus. ‘We need to have a council of war, if that’s the right thing to call it, to decide how much we tell them about the Doctor’s suspicions.’

  So far, as Sarah knew, the true aim of the expedition (and what was it exactly? What were they going to do when they caught up with the Skang? ) had been concealed under a smoke screen of Intelligence. On a need-to-know basis as the Brig put it.

  ‘If we can drag him away from his wretched fish,’ the Brigadier continued, looking back towards the bow.

  The day after they had left Bombay, they had been joined by a school of jolly grinning dolphins, who took it in turns to play in the white bow wave as the Hallaton cut through the deep blue of the Indian Ocean. Since then, the Doctor had spent most of his time in the stem of the ship, leaning over to watch them, and singing a wordless song.

  ‘They’re not fish, they’re mammals,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Same meat, different gravy,’ replied the Brigadier.

  Was that a joke? He wasn’t given to joking. But no, his face was as serious as ever as he returned to his grim contemplation of the empty sea ahead.

  A plump face stuck itself out of the bridge door. ‘Excuse me, sir.’

  Chris Watts was a midshipman who seemed to be the general dogsbody of the officers, doing all the odd jobs not allocated to the others.

  ‘The Captain asked me to tell you that Mr Whitbread has woken up and would like to have a word.’

  The Brigadier’s face lit up. ‘Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere,’ he said.

  Although the cabins of the Village Class Patrol Vessels were far more luxuri
ous than those of the average Naval ship -

  there were even single cabins for the crew - they were hardly big enough to contain a smallish journalist and four large men. So Sarah had to hover hopefully in the open doorway, peeping through the gaps as the Doctor and the Brig, together with the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant-Commander Hogben (who seemed to be about thirty, in spite of his exalted position), and his navigating officer, the lanky Bob Simkins, crowded round the bunk where Alex Whitbread lay.

  Unfortunately, she found that the gap between the two officers varied considerably in size, as the Captain seemed to be swaying gently from side to side, in a way that owed nothing to the motion of the ship. Peering past the Doctor she got a much better view of Brother Alex.

  The sight of him when he’d been carried on board on a stretcher, unconscious, two days before, had taken her completely aback. The transformation of the matinee idol Alex Whitbread to such an insubstantial ghost of a man, in such a short time, seemed unbelievable - no, impossible. Yet it had plainly been the same person.

  But at least he looked a bit better now. He had more colour in his cheeks, and his eyes, though still sunken into his face, were alight with a savage intensity.

  It must be the thought that he was on his way back to his chums, thought Sarah.

  ‘Well?’ said the Doctor.

  Alex waited a moment before he replied, his eyes flicking suspiciously across the faces of the four men. ‘How far are we away from India?’ he said.

  They all looked at Simkins.

  ‘India? We’re about three hundred miles off the Keralan coast. If you mean Bombay, it’s getting on for six hundred miles away.’

  Alex grunted. ‘Have I your word that you won’t abandon me?’

  ‘I’ve already given it, man,’ said the Doctor. ‘Are you going to tell us where we’re heading, or aren’t you?’

  Alex sank back on his pillows, frowning. I suppose I’ve got to trust you...’ He sighed heavily. ‘We’re going to Stella Island,’ he said at last.

  They all looked at Bob Simkins.

  ‘Search me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the largest of the Fleming group.’

  Simkins shrugged and shook his head.

  Whitbread gave a little laugh. ‘Nobody has heard of it,’ he said. ‘That’s the point. Don’t worry. The latitude and longitude are written on my heart. Twenty-four degrees fifteen minutes south; seventy-six degrees thirty-four minutes east. And you won’t know whether I’m telling you the truth until you get there, will you?’

  ‘This is a bloody farce,’ said Lieutenant-Commander Hogben in a slightly blurred voice. ‘Pilot, let me know when you’ve sorted yourselves out.’

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ said Simkins.

  The Captain turned and almost pushed his way out. Sarah just managed to dodge him. And when she turned back, she found herself looking straight into the eyes of Alex Whitbread. His mouth fell open, and he clutched at his throat as if he was choking. He fell back on the pillows, his eyes turned up.

  ‘Good God!’ said the Brigadier. ‘What the devil’s the matter with the man? I say, he’s not dead, is he?’

  ‘No, not dead,’ said the Doctor, who had a finger on the artery in Alex’s throat. ‘He’s just fainted, that’s all. Maybe betraying the secret was simply too much for him.’

  But Sarah knew better. For she had seen the recognition in those burning eyes.

  Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, from his earliest experiences in the Army, had always found himself profoundly irritated by the casual assumption of the Royal Navy that, apart from being the senior service, they were also the most efficient. So he found a certain satisfaction, to offset his impatience, in watching Bob Simkins trying to find the islands on his chart.

  ‘Well, that’s the position,’ he said, pointing to the lightly pencilled cross. ‘But they must be so tiny that they just don’t show up on such a small scale.’

  The chart he had produced from the big shallow drawer under the chart table very nearly covered the entire Indian Ocean between Africa and Australia, with the tip of Sri Lanka peeping in at the top.

  In the middle of nowhere, thought the Brigadier. For once it was just about accurate.

  Now that they were back on the bridge, their number had been augmented by the First Lieutenant, who was Officer of the Watch, and Chris, the midshipman, who was hovering around the edges of the group trying to see through the gaps, just as Sarah had been - and was doing again.

  ‘Bang in the middle of nowhere,’ she said, echoing the Brigadier’s thoughts.

  ‘More to the point,’ said the Doctor, ‘it’s bang in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I shouldn’t think it gets many visitors.’

  ‘Right away from the shipping lanes,’ agreed Bob Simkins, who was busy with his dividers checking distances. ‘About...

  eighteen hundred miles - nautical miles, that is - from Madagascar to the west, and... yes, near as dammit the same to Australia in the east.’

  ‘I say! Why don’t we... Sorry, sir,’ said the midshipman, realising that the Brigadier was trying to say something.

  ‘What about those islands up there?’ said the Brigadier, pointing at some little circles up towards Sumatra in the north-east.

  ‘Excuse me, sir...’ It was the midshipman again, wanting to get past him. What was the matter with the wretched boy?

  Wanting to go to the loo, probably. ‘The Cocos Islands, does it say?’ he went on, moving aside.

  ‘Getting on for a thousand miles,’ said Bob, after a moment. ‘I’d reckon the nearest outpost of proper civilisation would be Mauritius, and that would be a journey of something like thirteen hundred miles.’

  The Doctor had been peering at the chart. ‘How long will it take us to get there?’

  ‘Mauritius?’ said the Brigadier. ‘Why should we want...’

  ‘No, no. This Stella Island. How long before we catch up with the Skang?’

  The Navigating Officer applied himself to the chart again, first drawing a line from their current position to the cross in the middle of the empty sea. Then, taking the scale from the side of the chart, he walked the dividers along the route.

  ‘Bingo!’

  The cry of delight made every head turn.

  ‘What is it, Chris?’ asked Pete Andrews.

  ‘It’s the Indian Ocean Pilot book,’ he said, holding up a book a bit bigger than a paperback, identical to a shelf of others on the bulkhead behind him. ‘No, I mean, listen to this,’ he continued, scrabbling through the pages to find his place again. ‘“Stella Island. Volcanic rock, with coral-reef lagoon. Three miles long by half a mile wide - approx.

  Discovered in 1773 by Captain Harcourt Fleming, who named it after his wife. Still a British Territory. Uninhabited.”

  And they’ve got a drawing of it - what it looks like as you approach it from the east...’

  Bob Simkins looked up at the First Lieutenant with a rueful grin. ‘Out of the mouths of babes...’ he said.

  ‘Well done, Chris,’ said Pete.

  There! Not so bloody efficient, thought Lethbridge-Stewart.

  The Doctor had taken the book from Chris, and was scanning the text. ‘Mm. Maybe our friend Whitbread has sent us chasing your wild goose after all, Lethbridge-Stewart.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The Doctor looked back at the book. ‘“Last visited January 1923 by a Norwegian whaler on passage to the Southern Ocean...” There’s a translation of their report. “Good spring water... access via beach through eastern lagoon at high spring tide... Alternative landing place on northern shore...”‘

  He looked up. ‘So far, so good. But listen to this... “There is little sign of life. Apart from a few palm-trees, and some bamboo, the sparse vegetation consists of lowlying spikey shrubs resembling gorse. In spite of there being relatively few seabirds, very nearly the entire island is thick with ancient guano...”‘

  Chris looked enquiringly at Sarah.

  ‘Fishy bird-crap,’ she whispere
d.

  ‘“...the stench of which catches the throat. It is quite clear why Stella Island is uninhabited...”‘

  There was quite a long silence after the Doctor stopped reading.

  ‘I wonder what sort of marriage Captain Fleming had,’ he said. ‘Poor Stella.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Whyever should Mother Hilda take her flock to such an unwelcoming spot? Alex Whitbread must have given them the wrong information, either unknowingly, or deliberately to lead them astray.

  The Brigadier, with grim face, led the way to Alex’s cabin, determined to find the truth. But they couldn’t tackle him.

  He’d been so frantic that Bob Simkins, in his capacity as surrogate medical officer, had raided the medicine chest to find one of the little ampoules of morphine, supplied with its own needle, which were available in case a member of the crew was severely wounded.

  The young Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, only thirteen years old, had crept into his grandmother’s bedroom just after she died, despite having been forbidden to go anywhere near her.

  She’d been lying on her back, her face collapsed and sallow, her toothless mouth gaping wide. No way was she the dearly loved Granny McDougal who’d kissed him goodnight only the day before.

  If it wasn’t for his stertorous breathing, like the snoring of some sort of animal, the Brigadier would have said Brother Alex was as clearly dead as she had been. Nothing was going to stir him for some time, if ever.

  The Skipper’s reaction to his midshipman’s discovery of the description of their destination was categorical.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ he’d said when Pete Andrews had taken the bad news to his cabin. ‘I’ve no intention of sailing nearly two and a half thousand miles in the wrong direction, just to turn round and sail back again, on the say-so of some sort of phoney sw... swami in a white nightie. The sooner we’re back in Blighty and rid of this old tub the better, as far as I’m concerned. ‘S time we all rejoined the real Navy. Back to Bombay!’