Scend of the Sea Read online

  It must have sounded ponderous, stuffy, for he glanced at me narrowly and then exclaimed boisterously:

  'What about a little pubcrawl tonight, boy? Beat up the town, you and I. It's a good spot, Durban. We could …'

  I liked Alistair, but there were too many undercurrents since Cape Town to surrender to his light-hearted mood.

  'I sail tomorrow,' I cried off. 'No dice, I'm afraid.'

  He looked at me searchingly. 'I guess, if you hadn't been sailing, there'd have been some other equally good reason. You're growing old, boy, and the grass is growing under your feet. Sorry, I forgot, there's no grass where you graze in the South Atlantic. You've changed since I last saw you, Ian, and that's only a few months back.' He kicked at a length of rope on the floor. 'Even to a dumb flyer like me, you can't pass this off as met. gear.'

  I picked up the offending nylon rope. It had a wire core anchored round a thimble. I played with a loose plug-and-socket connection.

  'It is and it isn't,' I replied. 'Once we get well south of the Cape, Walvis Bay will be in an area where there are all sorts of exciting and little-understood interchanges of warm tropical water with cold Antarctic streams. For a long time there has been need for an intensive study and we're going to try out a new technique for measuring sea surface temperatures. It's called a trailing thermistor, if you want to know.'

  Alistair eyed me quizzically. I wondered if Bruce Fairlie had been like that when he flew his crazy bombers, or was it Douglas Fairlie who had bequeathed Alistair the air of confident nonchalance which once might have graced the high controversial promenade deck of the Waratah, Those were the Edwardian days when captains still wore top hats, and officers fraternizing with attractive lady passengers was permitted only in so far as it promoted the interests of the Blue Anchor Line. Would Alistair mature from the unshakeable confidence of the jet fighter-bomber pilot to … I remembered then that she had spoken of Collingwood. The average age of Nelson's men at Trafalgar was twenty-two; and the Battle of Britain had been won by boys. Alistair was twenty-one.

  'When the Buccaneers were ordered to come down to Durban for manoeuvres, I expected to find my distinguished;lder and scientific brother quietly fiddling over barometers and suchlike,' went on Alistair. 'After all, you said you were making this special cruise to gather met. information which apparently no one else can get, it's so bloody remote. Fair enough, but you've been here ten days now, and I'll bet you haven't even been ashore for a run. You should look on me as a heaven-sent piece of luck.'

  'Not your sort of run, Alistair,' I grinned back. 'Backwards arid forwards to the Institute..

  'Sounds slightly sinister to me,’ he rejoined. 4I always felt you needed your head read.'

  'Institute for Marine Research. Down by the beachfront.'

  'You mean the aquarium?'

  The aquarium is only the shop window for the public,' I replied. The science lies behind. When the Institute heard I was in port, they asked me to carry out some deep-sea scientific studies for them-in addition to the investigations I've already been scheduled to do for my own people. After all, it isn't every day that a scientist gets the opportunity of taking observations in an area where no observations have been taken before. .'

  'Here we go,' sighed Alistair. 'Give me another beer, Ian, while you go off on your hobbyhorse. No wonder they all love you and clutter up your ship, even your own cabin. You're the country's No. 1 scientific sucker. Just say the words, where no research and observations have been carried out before, and you're sold on it. Ask you to examine the sex life of plankton in the Roaring Forties and you'd do it too.'

  Alistair was as uncomplicated as a summer high pressure system. And as warming too. Like astronauts, Buccaneer pilots must not be bedevilled by imagination.

  I caught his bantering mood. There's a sea worm called a Bonollia. She fixes what sex her young are going to be.'

  Alistair held up a hand in feigned protest. 'No more without more alcohol.'

  'I'll get another from the ward-room.'

  'That's the place which is one spit long each way?’

  'It is.'

  He took imaginary aim across my cabin. 'This place is only half a spit. Easy to see why you don't keep your liquor here.- If I were cooped up for weeks on end like you in this scientific bed-sitter, I'd reach for the nearest bottle. Wise man, to put temptation far away in the ward-room.'

  Before I could go, Feldman, the ship's first officer, knocked and said, 'Can you come on deck, sir? We're having a bit of trouble with that crane-like thing."

  'Coming, Alistair?'

  He nodded. 'Might as well see the worst.'

  Two dockyard men were trying to weld and bolt to the maindeck port rail the ungainly collection of pipes and pulleys called a Van Veen grab. It looked like a strange triangle forming an outboard derrick from the ship's side. At its extremity was a small bucket-like grab, worked by pulleys and chains from the deck.

  'Looks like a steam shovel born prematurely,' commented Ali stair.

  The two workmen relaxed. Alistair had that effect. I had pushed them pretty hard for the past few days.

  ‘It keeps snapping shut,' explained one of the workmen. 'As soon as we start getting the rest properly into position, the bucket gets itself in the way. Can't you fix it somehow?'

  I clambered out on the rail and adjusted the trip chain mechanism of the steel jaws (designed to bring mud samples from the ocean floor), so that it could not run free as it had been doing. This was to be one of my prime instruments for tests along the line of the Agulhas Bank, the oil-bearing continental shelf which envelops the tip of southern Africa. Since the Americans had found that it was uneconomic to exploit offshore oil when the depths exceed 300 feet, Walvis Bay's mission was to proceed along the line of this depth and make preliminary samplings. Before striking south to Bouvet and beyond, I had been commissioned to deliver these samples to one of the big rigs already operating farther round the coast, from where they would be flown by helicopter to land research stations to establish whether more detailed seismic refraction and gravimetric investigation were justified. My route at first down the coast would seldom be more than twelve miles offshore, along the 300-foot line.

  Alistair said, 'You've already got one of these grabs on the other side of the ship — what do you want two for?'

  A slightly less complicated array of pipes, pulleys and wires hung from the starboard rail.

  The other's a gravity corer,' I explained. 'That thing like a mortar bomb hanging on the end is for penetrating the sea-bottom itself. .'

  Feldman interrupted. 'It's all right off the coast, sir, but won't all this top-hamper make her a little unstable when we hit the Westerlies?'

  I kept my reservations to myself. 'Together they're lighter than the harpoon gun in the bows which we scrapped,' I replied. 'That kept her head down too much. I got rid of it to reduce her overall weight above the waterline and give ler more buoyancy for'ard. In any event, the Van Veen jrab will come into its own again once we start investigating the two seamounts beyond Bouvet.'

  'You can always cut all this adrift if you get into trouble,' remarked Alistair.

  The two workmen laughed. Feldman looked mildly shocked.

  ‘At a guess I'd say the scientific equipment Walvis Bay is carrying is worth more than the ship itself,' I said. The type of apparatus we've aboard for observing the new weather satellite has never been taken to sea before, and we'll have to treat it like Dresden china. We spent our days in the Southern Ocean having litters of kittens over the radar scanner, which also wasn't designed to take the sort of beating the Southern Ocean hands out. These grabs and corers in themselves are worth thousands. You'd better come below and have your beer before you put more ideas into the crew.'

  Alistair sprawled himself again in my chair. ‘I reckon I'm in the wrong game. Fancy just cruising around taking a few barometer readings or plucking bits of mud from the sea-bottom I A few weather buoys would put you chaps out of business.'

>   Alistair's jibes were sour. I remembered her admiration for my way-out job. It came home to me then that I would be away from her for two months at least. How trite then would sound my account of my sterile reconnaissance of the Bashee and the Waratah's graveyard!

  'My mission isn't the kind of scientific ivory tower you seem to think,' I retorted. ‘What I find could determine the whole course of the offshore oil-drilling programme. I've got to drive a cross-section investigation through three of the mightiest current systems in the world — the Agulhas, the West Wind Drift and the Benguela — and each one is going to throw its particular brand of toughness at my ship..

  'Boy, there's no doubt you're sold!'

  "Listen,' I said. 'I see the storms born in the Southern Ocean. You couldn't fly your Buccaneer without the information I send back.’

  'You're so involved, you don't see the sea for the plankton,' Alistair mocked. 'Come and do a pubcrawl with me. Get it out of your system.'

  He didn't wait for my 'no' but stood up and went to the two photographs on the bulkhead. She had also stood there and looked.

  'You want to get rid of these!' he said. 'Why don't you hang up a picture of Touleier coming in to win? Haven' you got a girl to remember down there in your God-forsaken Antarctic? Why fiddle around with these old dead 'uns?'

  I have a picture of a girl standing there, I thought to myself, I shall always remember her.

  'They're a reminder,' I replied. 'They're history; reality. I haven't your Air Force attitude. If I saw my best pal crash in flames, I wouldn't go and buy a beer in the mess for him as you do. You don't admit the brutal facts. I do.'

  'Some buy it, some don't,' he said. 'It's your skill, and what's not written — your luck. You can't escape it.' 'Is that why the Viscount went into the drink?' 'Listen, Ian, you belong to the sea. As your brother, I can tell you to stick there. You don't know flying men. Dad was a flyer. He knew the risks-he'd been through them all. War. Peace. One night three years ago, flying a straightforward run with nothing but a bit of wind, he bought it. That's the way it happens in the air. I don't believe he had a heart attack at the controls. Don't try and work it all into a neat pattern, or whatever you're trying to tell me. We don't, and we are the blokes who fly. Dad was old for a pilot, but he was still good. But the air doesn't want old men. You've heard of the Old Man of the Sea, but wouldn't it be bloody silly to say, the Old Man of the Air? Why, then, hang up this picture of the Old Ship of the Sea? No one will ever know what happened to the Waratah. They've all tried for sixty years; you'll beat your brains out against the wall if you go on. Leave it the way it is. Same with the Viscount. Take down these damn things and let's have something else in their place.'

  Alistair's appraisal was like a bucket of cold water. It could not, however, have been hers, I told myself quickly, for there had been that immediate rapport between us over the very object Alistair derided so.

  I grinned. 'That's quite a speech for-you. Have another beer.'

  'Sorry I blew my top,' he apologized. 'Yes, I will. But you-somehow you seem to have got yourself in a corner and all this chatter about weather and oceans seems to be only a way of keeping you there.'

  Alistair's outburst showed me how deeply the Waratah had eaten into me. The red light was showing, clear. If I did not beat the Waratah, the Waratah would beat me.

  I went for more beer. Alistair was facing the Waratah photograph when I returned.

  'I feel like shaking this can and squirting it all over it,' he said angrily.

  I didn't — want to sharpen the mental image Alistair seemed to have of me over the ship, so I said with studied casualness, ‘I came past the place where she sank on my way here.'

  I misjudged how deeply he felt about my involvement in the mystery.

  'Why?' he demanded. 'Why? Why? Why? You can't.. he fumbled for words '. . make the sea give up its dead. Why try and make it? Take a look at it clinically, brutally. What would you actually find if by some chance you happened on the remains of the Waratah or the Gemsbok. A lot of stripped skeletons — what the sharks left, and it wouldn't be a pretty sight. Think of it like that. Leave it alone. Don't go messing around!'

  Something, somewhere, was beginning to take shape in my mind. Seen as Alistair saw it, my preoccupation with the Waratah was sheer morbidity; with her …

  'There was less than nothing all the way up the Pondoland coast. Just a calm sea, a couple of tankers. Nothing more,' I replied.

  Alistair clasped the beer mug in his strong, square hands. His words came tumbling out. 'It took about a million Rand to train me as a Buccaneer pilot. That's what they say in the Air Force, anyway. A whole round million. What is this ship of yours worth-fifty, maybe a hundred thousand? I'm worth ten times as much at least, without my plane, which is worth another million. The money's there, that's what I'm saying. If they'd really wanted to, they could have spent ten times the value of your ship looking for the Gemsbok or Waratah. But they didn't want to, once the immediate search was over. Why should you? What do you think you can achieve in a shoe-string little outfit where all the latest electronic devices failed? They had the Navy and everything from Search and Rescue out looking after Dad's plane went in. They found nothing. Sweet nothing.'

  I think it was Alistair's bandying of those enormous figures which triggered to a conscious purpose the idea which was starting to form in my mind. I had heard the oilmen toss such figures around in describing their floating platforms in the same way a Hollywood producer boasts about his multi-million-dollar supercolossal film. I had used the argument myself in persuading obtuse officials about the need for the weather ship … oil. My function at sea was to protect the floating oil rigs in advance by acute observation of sea and weather in the Southern Ocean, and soon those rigs would be moving round the coast to drill off Pondoland. The mere fact that part of my mission after leaving Durban was to sample the ocean bottom all the way down the Agulhas Bank off Pondoland showed how little was known about it. What better key to their safety than a series of sterile tabulations, day after day, week after week, would be-specific knowledge of what had sunk the Waratah! If I could find out what extraordinary conjunction of sea, gale and ocean-bottom contour had sent a brand-new 10,000-ton liner to the bottom without trace, it could provide a triumphant short-cut to knowledge for the oil rigs' safety and at the same time lay the mystery which had tantalized three continents for over half a century! I knew that a front was approaching the Cape, but its severity was completely unknown, since my own weather ship was not on station to forecast. Within forty-eight hours I would be at sea in the area where the Waratah had vanished, and what looked to be a promising similarity of weather — although it was impossible to judge at this stage more than vaguely-would hit the Pondoland coast, the Bashee Mouth at the same time …

  Alistair was eyeing me curiously. 'Look,' he said impatiently, 'if you were in my squadron I'd ground you for a psycho check. Every time the Waratah is mentioned …'

  I decided to drop it. But I could not forget her, standing by those self-same photographs.

  'Forget it,' I grinned. 'You send me your pin-ups and whatever else you think fit for my mental health, and I'll promise you I'll hang 'em up. But you still haven't told me what really brings you to Durban beyond that wonderful cover-up phrase-manoeuvres.'

  Alistair seemed relieved. 'Very hush-hush.' He grinned a little. 'Bet you have only the fishes to confide in, anyway. My squadron is to make a surprise test of the air defences of every big port along the coast to see how alert they are to an attack from the sea. Russian penetration into the Indian Ocean and all that, you know. The Buccaneer is primarily a carrier aircraft, and it's built to fly under the conventional radar screens. So we're going to operate out to sea, as if the attack was carrier-based, and then come in low. See if Durban, Port Elizabeth and East London are awake to a surprise attack.'

  'East London?'

  Alistair eyed me sharply. 'What about East London?’

  'Is that your particula
r target?'

  'Oddly enough, it is. How did you guess?'

  I could have said, Bruce Fairlie and his airliner. Douglas Fairlie and his Waratah — the Red Rose of the Sea, he had called her affectionately, since she was named after the national emblem of New South Wales, the waratah flower — that is why I knew. I deliberately shook the shadows out of my mind. I had made my decision. The Waratah and her fate would serve me, serve the oil rigs. I would break her hold on me by wringing from the sea the secret of her fate …

  I laughed. 'Good. Because that's just where I shall be, round about the same time.'

  'What do you mean?'

  ‘I sail tomorrow; you're due at East London the night after. I'll loaf a bit down the coast doing a little sea-bottom sampling so that I can be off East London when you come in for the attack. You can wave me goodbye for my voyage.'

  Alistair got up and slapped me affectionately. 'Dammit, that's just what I will do. Beat up this bloody little tin can before it gets beaten up by the sea! You've got some odd ideas at times, Ian, but I like the idea of this one! Let's make this a nice friendly, brotherly meeting.'

  'It'll be dark.. ’ I began.

  Alistair laughed. 'I'll give you my ETA for the attack, and you can be in position between the Bashee Mouth and East London. You can put on the ship's lights, and I'll risk the plane's when I spot Walvis Bay. Then we'll know it's each other, huh?'

  'I'll tell you what,' I added, ‘I’ll have all the lights on and in addition the floodlight aft near the radiosonde hut. Then you won't mistake Walvis Bay for any other shipping-and there's plenty up and down the coast.'

  ‘I’ll come in for the attack at zero feet over the sea,' Alistair went on excitedly, like a schoolboy out on a lark. 'That's what my height has to be so that the radar won't pick me up. I'll come in from the north-east, and we'll be far enough out to sea so that the defences won't see 'em. You can also serve a useful function by providing me with a datum point for the attack-I'll know exactly where I am when I pass over you. My instruments are set on the sea, you understand, so as to keep as low as possible.'