by Nevil Shute
Norman’s part of the business put the wind up me properly — I wouldn’t have taken on a job like that for quids. He was to be the observer at Marazan. He had had a telephone line run unostentatiously from St Mary’s to White Island, the rocky and uninhabited island to the north of Marazan Sound. He proposed to take up his position there under cover of darkness on the previous night, and to lie out there for the whole of Saturday to avoid the possibility of being seen on the way to his observation post.
Under the cover of darkness a destroyer and a sloop were to close the islands from the direction of the southeast. During the early part of the night these were to work round and lie off to the north of the islands, showing no lights. Norman, in telephonic communication with Hugh Town and so with the mainland, would watch events in the Sound. Immediately after the departure of the amphibian he was to send up a rocket. On that the sloop and the destroyer were to open up their searchlights and arrest every vessel in the vicinity.
It seemed to me a pretty little plan, and quite likely to go through all right. I must say I didn’t care much for Norman’s job. It struck me that he’d stand precious little chance if the Dagoes happened to find out that he was there.
My part of the business was not so difficult; for one thing, I had plenty of help. My job was to stand by with the machine at a point not very far from Taunton. I had chosen a large pasture there that the machine could operate from, and in one corner of it the Sappers had set up a field wireless station. This was in telephonic communication with half a dozen observation stations up the north and south coasts of Devon and Cornwall. I should wait on the ground till we had some news of the amphibian travelling up the coast; then I should get into the air and trust to luck to be able to pick her up in the dim light of the dawn, keeping in touch with the Sappers by wireless telephony.
At Fowey and at Padstow the Anti-Aircraft lads were setting up sound-ranging stations.
I had only one modification to suggest to these arrangements, but that was one that saved our bacon later. I suggested that a line of posts should be strung out along the Exeter-Barnstaple road that runs straight across Devon from north to south. The Sappers laid a field cable along the whole length of this road on the Saturday morning, and dropped a man every three miles with a telephone that he could tap into the wire. All through they did their part of the business extraordinarily well.
I flew down to Taunton on the Saturday afternoon, taking my mechanic with me. The field that we had picked to fly from was a couple of miles to the west of the town, not very far from the village of Grant Haddon. It was a fine, sunny afternoon. We got down there at about six o’clock after an uneventful flight. I found the field without difficulty, circled round once for a look-see, and put her down gently on the grass.
There was a bell tent in one corner of the field with one or two soldiers beside it, watching the machine. I taxied over to the tent, swung the machine round into the wind, and stopped the engine. As I was slowly unfastening my helmet one of the men came up to the machine.
“Captain Stenning?” he said.
I heaved myself up out of the cockpit and dropped down on to the grass beside him. “Right you are,” I said. “That’s me.”
I followed him into the tent. He had a vast amount of electrical gear there that he said was a wireless station; I took his word for it. He showed me the land telephone line that connected him up with all the other stations, and then he showed me the petrol that had been provided for filling up my machine. I left the mechanic to deal with this, and went with an orderly to meet the officer in charge.
I dined alone that night, in a little hotel that I found in the village. It was half full of summer residents, a couple of elderly maiden ladies, an old man who looked as if he’d been missing his Kruschens, and a honeymoon couple. I had nothing to do that evening till ten o’clock or so, and was too restless to spend it in the tent gossiping with the subaltern in charge. I wandered off to the village and found this little place, and ordered a dinner that brought the proprietor hurrying to me in respect.
It was a warm summer evening. I lingered for a long time over my dinner, grateful for the quiet of the moment. I knew that I had a pretty tough night before me; I think that even then I had a dim idea that when the cold dawn came up over the fields I should be fighting for my life. Certainly I made the most of that dinner. They served me well. They had put me at a small table by an open window that looked over a croquet lawn to a little wood; I sat there musing between the courses, my chin upon my hands, staring out of the window, thinking about my engagement, thinking about my golf handicap, thinking what a perfectly corking country England was.
I shall always remember that evening that I spent alone in that little pub, the night before I met Mattani. I had a straightforward job ahead of me, a job that I knew I could do well. I had no worries. I remember that I was most frightfully happy, in a quiet sort of way.
It came to an end, of course. I had my coffee out on the mossy lawn, and then it was time for me to go. I paid my shot in the dusk of the little hall, and strode out of the hotel. I passed the window of the drawing-room as I went by outside; the lights were on and the window open; I paused for a minute in the darkness and looked in. There they all were. The two maiden ladies were sitting together in a corner, one of them knitting, the other writing a letter on her knee. The old gentleman was reading an old book, his spectacles insecurely mounted on the extreme end of his nose. The honeymoon couple were sitting very close together on a settee, reading the same book. It was like a bit of Jane Austen.
I laughed, and swung away to my own life, the life that I knew, and as I went I thought of that same old line of Kipling:
It is their care that the gear engages, it is
their care that the switches lock.
I laughed again, and swung down the drive towards my work. I was still smiling over this when I arrived at the field and saw the machine looming darkly behind the bell tent.
I had a curious experience then. I found the officer in charge talking into the telephone; he was a subaltern, and rather a good sort. He turned as I entered the tent and nodded to me.
“Half a minute,” he said into the telephone. “Here is Captain Stenning.”
He was talking to Norman in his look-out station on White Island. I took the instrument and spoke to Norman, and told him the detail of the arrangements I had made. There was very little to discuss. I remember it made a deep impression on me to be talking to Norman as he lay stretched in a crevice of the rocks overlooking Marazan Sound. It made me feel that things were beginning to happen. Norman had little to say. It appeared that he had been very bored all day, and had attempted to pass the time by a telephonic game of draughts with the coastguard at St. Mary’s, sketching the position of the pieces on the back of an envelope. He remarked that he had suffered much from gulls and guano.
After that I went and sat with the subaltern at the mouth of the tent, gossiping in a desultory manner. The night seemed interminable. Every half-hour or so we rang up Norman, always with the same result; there was nothing yet in sight. Always after that we rang up the round of the patrols to make sure that everyone was awake. There were over twenty of those calls; we left them to the corporal, so that by the time he had finished with them it was time for us to speak to Norman again.
At about two in the morning one of the patrols a mile or so south of Barnstaple rang up and said he heard an aeroplane.
When the subaltern heard this he gave a terse, monosyllabic comment that expressed my opinion of the observer very well. He took the telephone from the corporal and was about to speak to the man to tell him not to imagine things, but I caught him by the arm.
“Steady a moment,” I said. “That’ll be the seaplane going down.”
It hadn’t struck me before — so far as I know, it hadn’t occurred to anyone — that we should hear the machine on its way to the Scillies. It’s the sort of detail that one is apt to forget. But there it was; the man was q
uite sure it was an aeroplane. He thought from the sound that it was a mile or two to the north of him, and travelling westwards. We rang up Norman to let him know about this, and then we rang up the rest of the patrols to tell them to keep an eye open.
It was really quite interesting. The man at Hartland seems to have missed it, and the next we heard was from the sound-ranging station on the headland above Padstow. They put the machine about a mile out to sea; they waited for five minutes and gave us a second observation, showing by the comparison of the bearings that the machine was travelling down the coast. They gave it as their opinion that the engine was a Rolls Eagle or Falcon, probably an Eagle.
That was the last we heard of her. We never got a report from Land’s End; we rang up half an hour later, but nothing had been heard there. We came to the conclusion that the machine had left the coast for the Scillies somewhere between Land’s End and Padstow.
Then we sat and waited to hear from Norman. I went to the door of the tent and had a look at the night. It was pretty clear by that time that I should have a job of work to do before many hours were out. It was a fine night with a bright moon, a little obscured by cloud. I remember thinking how quiet it was. I strolled over to the machine and mooned about it for a little, drumming with my fingers on the taut fabric of the lower plane. The lamplight in the tent streamed from the open flap and threw a broad belt of colour on the grass; over the tent the aerial loomed mysteriously against a deep blue sky.
I ran over in my mind the various civilian aircraft that I knew were fitted with a single Rolls engine. The information about the engine narrowed the field considerably, but I was still quite unable to identify the machine. I knew of seven machines fitted with one or other of those engines that might conceivably be used for the job, but none of them was a seaplane or amphibian.
Then Norman rang through. They called me from the tent; I went back and spoke to him on the telephone in his lonely crevice on White Island. He spoke as quietly as if he were in the room with me. I remember wondering at his nerve.
“Is that you, Stenning?” he said. “All right — this is Norman speaking. I can hear the machine quite close now. Yes, it’s bright moonlight here; I’ve got quite a good view of the Sound. There’s a launch in the Sound with her bows run up upon the beach. She came in about a quarter of an hour ago. Yes, on the Pendruan beach about halfway down Marazan. Wait a minute — the aeroplane’s shut off her engine.”
“Where’s she putting down?” I asked. “In the sea or in the Sound?”
There was a silence. Away in the darkness I could hear a mouse or something chittering in the field. At last Norman spoke again. “They’ve lit a lantern in the stern of the launch,” he said, “and two more that they’ve placed upon the shore down by the water, near the entrance to the Sound. Do you think those are the landing-lights?”
“That’s it,” I said. “She’ll probably put down beside the one in the launch, heading towards the two fixed ones. They point into the wind, I suppose?”
He didn’t answer, but a little later he said: “I can hear the machine again now. Not the engine — I can hear the squealing of the wires in the wind.”
“She must be very close to you,” I said.
Then he saw her. “Right. She’s coming in to land now, gliding down on to the water. Stenning! She’s a float seaplane with two floats on the undercarriage — but I don’t see anything under the tail. She’s a single-bay machine — one lot of struts in the wings. She’s quite a normal design, but I don’t know what type she is. She’s painted some dark colour on the wings and white or silver on the fuselage. I can’t see any registration letters. Are you there? Can you hear what I’m saying? All right — you’ve got that. She’s just landed on the water of the Sound — she’s lost way, and they’re turning her in to the beach with the engine throttled right down. You’ve got all that? Right you are. Now get off the line while I speak to the Yard. I’ll ring you again in a minute or two.”
I laid down the receiver and turned to the subaltern. “My God, they’ve got a nerve!” I muttered absently. “Fancy trying it again in the same place after last time.”
He looked at me curiously. “What happened then?” he asked.
I hadn’t realized that he had been told so little. “The odd spot of murder,” I said shortly. “They’ve got the nerve of the devil.” I said no more, because I didn’t quite know how much he knew. I had been pretty taciturn all the evening, so that I think he may have been a little in awe of me. He didn’t ask any more questions.
In a minute or two Norman was on the line again. “They’ve got the machine up against the beach,” he said, “but the engine is still running. I can’t see what they’re doing down there.”
“She won’t stay long,” I said. “If the engine’s still running it means that she’ll be off again quite soon.” I looked at my watch; it was about half past three. “If she starts now,” I said, “it’ll be touch and go whether I shall be able to pick her up, you know. It’ll be damn dark still by the time she passes here.”
“I don’t think she’ll be long,” he said. “I don’t think she’s aground on the beach — she seemed to move a little then. I think there are people standing in the water, holding her. They’ve still got the engine running.”
“No reason why they should stop it if they aren’t going to refuel,” I said. “It won’t take them long to load up the cargo. It’s only about a hundred pounds’ weight, you know.” I could see the subaltern out of the corner of my eye, half crazy with curiosity at the one-sided conversation.
“I hope to God the destroyer’s in her station,” muttered Norman. “Hullo. They’re turning the seaplane round. I can see the men wading in the water now.”
“She’ll be off in a minute,” I said.
There was a pause. “She’s going off,” he said. “They’re taxi-ing towards this shore, towards the Crab Pot, astern of the launch.”
“Damn it,” I said. “She’ll be here too soon.”
Over the wire there came the same level, quiet voice. “She’s starting on her run now, making straight for the two lights down on the shore. She’s about halfway across the Sound. Now she’s lifting — she’s in the air now, up over the lights.” There was silence for a moment. “Stenning! Can you hear what I’m saying? The machine is in the air on the return journey now. You’ve got that? Good. She went straight up over the lights and then swung round to the right, out to sea. When I saw her last she was heading about due north, and still turning. I can still hear the engine, but it’s getting fainter. It’s up to you to have a go at her now.”
“Right you are,” I said. “I’ll do my best. But it’ll be damn dark when she gets here.”
He spoke again. “They’ve still got the landing lights showing.”
“They’ll probably leave those out for a bit,” I said. “A dud engine might bring her back.”
“So much the better, if the launch isn’t in a hurry to leave,” he said. “We don’t want the aeroplane to see my rocket or the searchlights if we can help it. I’d like to give her at least ten minutes to get clear.”
“Wait till you see them take in the landing-lights,” I suggested. “They can’t leave those on the beach.”
I held the line and waited. There was absolute silence in the tent; I could feel them looking at me expectantly. Presently I nodded to my mechanic, and looked again at my watch.
“In about twenty minutes’ time,” I said quietly. “Get her going at about four, or a little after.”
He grinned at me and nodded. “All ready to start up any time,” he said. “Not half a moon out here. You won’t want no lights for taking off.” He expectorated cheerfully. I saw the corporal look at him askance, and resented it. I liked my mechanic. He had been with me on several long trips abroad. He was a man of my own type. We laughed at the same things, and at the same people.
Then Norman spoke again. “I’m going to let her go now,” he announced. “I can’t hear the seaplane
any longer, and the launch seems to be moving about a bit. I think she must be well clear now. Yes, I’ve got a rocket here all ready. I’m going to poop it off. Hold the line, and I’ll tell you what happens.”
I have always wondered at his nerve. The men in the launch were only three hundred yards away; he knew that they must be armed. He knew that as soon as his rocket went up they would know what had happened, would know that he was there, would know that they were caught. He banked everything on their first impulse being to escape to sea. He bet his life on that. As it turned out, he was right; they only fired one or two shots at the place where the rocket had gone up from, and he had arranged that ten or fifteen yards away to his flank.
I heard the rush of the rocket clearly through the telephone. Then Norman was back again, speaking in his quiet, level tones.
“Stenning there? It’s going all right, I think. Did you hear them shooting? Only one or two, and nothing close. The launch is off — left the lights on the shore and making for the open sea all out. Oh, good, sir! Damn good! What? The sloop and the destroyer are out there — I can’t see which is which, but they’ve got their searchlights on a vessel. Yes, she’s well inside the three-mile limit. A small tramp, with one funnel in the middle. They’re closing on her now. I think they’ve got her all right.”
“Oh, damn good,” I cried. “Damn good work!”
He spoke again. “I think they’ve got the steamer now,” he said. “Look here. Do what you can with the aeroplane. The odds are about five to one against you, but do what you can. Don’t worry if you lose her — there’ll probably be evidence on the steamer that will help us with the English organization. The Navy are coming to fetch me off from here as soon as they’ve made sure of the steamer. Are you all right? Have you got everything fixed up as you like it?”
