Scend of the Sea

CHAPTER NINE

'Then give me the position, bearing, and depth of the wreck of the Waratah, and the nature of the phenomenon which sank her.'

The C-in-C leaned sideways, flipped a switch on his intercom, and said crisply, 'Watch that recorder, Perry. This is important.'

The sulky hum of the tape-recording machine limped slightly on a warped cassette. There was no other sound in the big room. The officer was monitoring our conversation-from the next room; the two of us were alone. For hours we had sat like that in his office at Simonstown, once the headquarters of the British South Atlantic Command. For over a century Simonstown was an enclave of the Royal Navy at the tip of the African continent, and the room was impregnated with that long occupancy. Under a huge painting of the sinking of the famous Birkenhead troopship off the Cape was a signed letter from the first German Kaiser eulogizing the men in her who had gone steadfastly and unflinchingly to their deaths. A faded print showed a steam-cum-sail warship attacking a land stockade. The title hit me — HMS Hermes!

Only yesterday, on the deck of my ship, everything had changed. One chapter had closed, another had opened. We should have been free to have taken the Mini and lost ourselves inland — away from the sea — somewhere among the ine-rich earth and purple mountains of the Cape; or gone laughing and skiing in the snow; to have drunk wine; simply to have been with one another. Mr Hoskins had readily agreed to her leave and we found ourselves together, a little uncertain and greatly excited about our weeks ahead together. In that spirit I had brushed aside the significance of my appointment with the C-in-C; I'll be back in an hour, I told her, arranging to meet her nearby at an eccentric aunt's who kept a thirty-acre wild garden under the batteries of the naval base.

Now almost the whole day had passed. When I had first been shown in, the C-in-C had been curt.

The Weather Bureau has requested me to conduct a one-man investigation on its behalf into the damage suffered by the Walvis Bay and the causes of it,' he told me. The Bureau itself has no experience of maritime matters.' He stared at me penetratingly. 'As well you know.' He gave a throaty, mirthless chuckle. They nearly lost the one ship they had. Both the Bureau and I felt it was logical for me to act, since the Navy has already been so closely implicated in this. . uh. . incident concerning your ship and the storm order. Kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.'

I had decided the previous day, after Tafline had left me, that my best defence of my actions would be to make a clean breast of the whole Waratah saga and weather enigmas. I could justify my actions to a sailor, I reasoned, and the C-in-C was a sailor. He had boasted publicly of his descent from the Sea Beggars of William the Silent. The emotionless moon face and rather flabby eye-sockets gave no hint of the iron personality in whose hands lay the destiny of Britain's great trade and oil routes round the Cape. In line with my decision, I had brought with me for the interview a mass of Waratah documents, as well as a scale model of the liner I had originally begged from Lloyd's of London.

It was not, however, an interview but a trial.

For hours I had expounded, argued, reasoned, explained, sought to justify. I had shown him on the model a hundred technicalities which might have caused the liner's end. I had gone into every facet of the contradictory storm weather which the Waratah and the Walvis Bay had shared.

The C-in-C had been a good listener. He ordered mid-morning coffee; his only relaxation was to get up and speak to a budgie in a cage which repeated after him, 'Don't talk about ships and shipping.'

Ten generations in his ancestry since the war,’ he had remarked with a ghost of a smile. 'Still says the same damn thing.'

It was the only warmth I saw.

The C-in-C had sent the officer who was in charge of the big tape-recorder into an ante-room, while he himself kept an eye on the revolving cassettes. I appreciated his gesture of privacy between us. Nonetheless, every word, every hesitation of mine, was remorselessly logged. Now my throat constricted. Should I answer, south of the Bashee? I remembered Lee-Aston's reaction.

I wanted to get up and tear that grinding cassette from its socket. Its rhythm willed me to say, a ship without a soul!

I looked away, fiddling with my documents.

The C-in-C said in his deep bass. ‘I have three warships in the area. Lee-Aston's a good man. Has a great interest in these sort of things — weather, currents, seabeds. I sent him to the French inquiry when one of our subs on delivery nearly sank a Frenchman in a collision off Southern Spain. There are all sorts of tricky currents and sets where the Med meets the Atlantic'

Lee-Aston! I wish I had known. It would have made all the difference to my approach.

The C-in-C bridled in his chair. 'Well, man?’

‘I am uncertain what my position was at the time,' I mumbled.

'Captain Fairlie, you have based your entire justification for your extraordinary actions on your need to find out where the Waratah sank, and what sank her. I ask you, where did she sink, and you say, I am uncertain of the position.'

'That is correct.'

'How far are you uncertain?’

'I was south of the Bashee. My dead reckoning became suspect once I became aware that although I was actually supposed to be doing thirteen knots, I felt I was in fact losing way over the ground.'

'Captain Fairlie!' snapped the C-in-C. 'No destroyer ever laid a smokescreen like you are trying to do. You have talked ceaselessly, articulately, for two hours. At one straight question you dodge behind a screen of words and uncertainties.'

'If I had found the Waratah I would have solved one of the greatest mysteries of the sea …' I stumbled on.

The C-in-C threw his big bulk back in the chair with a snort.

'But you chose to try, nevertheless, using a valuable ship and highly expensive scientific equipment. You defied orders to get out of the storm area. Why?'

The oil rigs,' I said helplessly. 'I tried to tell you…'

'Again, nothing but a smokescreen of words!'

'My actions were inseparably connected with the safety of the oil rigs.'

'You have spoken about what you call a Waratah storm which you say has special features which no other storm has. What are they?'

'The counter-current seems to take over.. ’

'Seems! Are you incapable of giving me a straight, factual reply, Captain Fairlie?'

I said, 'It's the effect of all this-the build-up. I've never known a wave like that. She didn't rise. Walvis Bay put her head down, not up, as she would do normally …'

'Bah!' roared the big man. 'There's not a man of us who has been to sea who hasn't seen a hell of a wave sometime. Now you want me to believe. . what the devil do you want me to believe?'

I had come prepared to tell him everything. Now I could not. If what I had explained was so patently unacceptable, how much more would that other be?

The C-in-C snapped the intercom switch impatiently.

'Perry! Come and shut this blasted thing off, will you?'

We waited until he had gone again. We sat and faced one another.

Then the C-in-C said, 'What I report to the Bureau may well rob you of your command-you know that, don't you?' 'Yes.'

They tell me you're a damn fine sailor. They've got nothing against you as a captain or a first-class weather-man except…'

'Waratah,' I said.

'You've allowed something which hasn't any substance to eat into you, cloud your judgment — even risk your life and your ship.' He stopped and added brutally, 'Kill your own brother.'

I was alone on that shattered bridge with the water pouring through, trying to swing her head clear of that dark sinister shape among the white waves.

I said, without heart, There'll be a proper official inquiry into my brother's death.'

Then I feel sorry for you if you can't do better in public than you have with me in private,' he replied tartly.

There was a pause. My mind shut fast on the Waratah. I had made up my mind. I wondered what Tafline had been doing during the hours I had been with the C-in-C.

'You're holding back on something, Fairlie,' snapped the C-in-C. 'I've a damn good mind to send a frigate or two to have a close look at the area.'

'South of the Bashee!' I interjected ironically.

'Listen!' he replied brusquely. 'You can make up your mind which way it's to go. You can tell me confidentially, and then we'll set the recorder going and I'll ask you the right questions and you can give the replies, as if we had never discussed it meanwhile with the machine off. That'll let you out. Otherwise..' He shrugged.

I stood up. 'Thanks for the chance. You're wasting your time if you think your ships will find anything where I failed. I've been there in daylight, too.'

The C-in-C's rough surgery was gentle compared to the brutal cautery of the Buccaneer inquiry.

When the massive air-sea search failed to find Alistair or any trace of his plane, the inquiry was announced for ten days later. It seemed to me to be rushing things, but public interest remained at a high pitch and I suspected that the Air Force wanted to put itself in the clear as soon as possible. The hearing was scheduled to be in public, as is customary with all military and civilian crash investigations.

Smarting from the interview with the C-in-C, I wanted to get away inland with her, find solace, forget about the Waratah. But I had brought my cabinet from the ship and stored the documents in her flat. The model of the Waratah had intrigued her first. She had made me lift off the removable top to explain the interior. She expressed delight at the scale reproduction of the first-class music lounge with its tiny 'minstrels' gallery' of carved wooden pillars in the centre and heavy curtains gathered at each wooden corner supporting post; plush, comfortable settees with backs tuckered like a Tibetan anorak; concealed lighting (the Waratah was the first ship ever to try it); and, inevitably, some potted palms. Starting with the model, she had lost herself in the mass of documents, microfilms, newspapers, weather reports, and the full evidence of the Board of Trade inquiry in London, until the days slipped by and we still had not moved from Cape Town.

Both of us had been tense at the beginning of the Buccaneer inquiry. She had sat by me on a hard chair in the big Ministry of Transport conference room. It had low concrete beams and a rather battered dais at one end for the chairman and two assessors. The place smelt of stale smoke. The battery of pressmen used old tin lids on the battered tables to crush out their cigarettes. The presence of so many reporters reflected the intense public interest. The public galleries, too, were crowded. Witnesses, set apart to one side of the room, had to run the gauntlet of the public eye as they walked from their seats to a stand by the chairman's table. The down-at-heel air of the place seemed an unworthy funeral parlour for a creature as swift and noble as the Buccaneer.

I was called on the second day. She pressed my hand quickly as I rose and walked up to the stand. A ripple ran through the news section. They, like myself, had been lulled into a comfortable drowsiness by the previous day's flat monotone of technicalities, flying and meteorological. The hearing was taking shape as an open-and-shut case of an aircraft being lost in bad weather through nobody's fault.

That is the way I wanted it, too, for Alistair's sake.

Musgrave, a Supreme Court counsel who had made his name by specializing in aircraft matters and was often called in to serve on boards of inquiry, led me through my sighting of Alistair's Buccaneer coming towards Walvis Bay, his passing over the ship, his disappearance. I breathed a sigh of relief. No suggestion of low-flying! Only a casual, passing reference to our rendezvous. I glossed over the datum point story; no one probed it.

I waited to be told to stand down.

Musgrave said, 'Thank you, Captain Fairlie.'

I turned to go, but he said almost casually.

'Did you and your brother find the Waratah's treasure, Captain Fairlie?'

A galvanic Shockwave passed through the newsmen. Pencils were grabbed, unsmoked cigarettes forgotten. Men and women whispered to each other in the public galleries.

Bewildered, I looked across at Tafline. She was sitting very still and upright on her hard chair; I could see how white her knuckles had gone from clenching her gloves. Already some people were starting to crane forward to look at her — they had seen me come from her side.

'There was no treasure in the Waratah,' I stated flatly.

'Which means, of course, that you found the ship which for sixty years has defied every effort to locate her?'

'I didn't say I found her,' I was confused, rattled, off balance. There was nothing in her manifests to show she carried bullion. .'

'Bullion, Captain Fairlie? Who said anything about bullion?'

Already a newsman or two had broken from the table and were racing for the nearest telephone.

'Listen,' I said desperately. The Waratah was carrying a cargo of frozen meat from Australia, some ore, a couple of thousand tons of bunker coal, 279 tons of fresh water. .'

Musgrave nodded, pleased. 'Exactly. We take your word for it, Captain Fairlie.' He slipped a pile of papers in front of him. 'In fact, in going through every single detail in connection with the Waratah — even to such a minute fact as the amount of fresh water in her tanks -1 think it is fair to say that there is no living person who knows as much about the Waratah as you do.'

I cringed for the next blow.

'In fact, Captain Fairlie, if it wasn't treasure you were after, I cannot see any reasonable. .' he emphasized the word ' — person going to a hundredth of the trouble you have done: weather, metacentric heights, minute analysis of evidence. .'

Feldman! The C-in-C, too, had sold me down the river! They had turned over everything I had said and collected to this sharp-tongued barrister who was in the process of making a Roman holiday out of me!

'I wasn't after treasure, nor was my brother,' I flared. 'I wanted to find out what sank the Waratah so that I could make sure it didn't happen again.'

'A very commendable sentiment,' murmured Musgrave. 'Yet, despite the fact that this was the very purpose for which the authorities sent your ship to sea, you saw fit not merely not to consult them about your. . ah. . proposed enterprise, but you acted in flat defiance of their order.'

I could not reply.

Musgrave went on. 'It seems, on looking at the case as an outsider, that there must have been some compelling reason why at least three members of the Fairlie family have chosen to risk death-endure death, even-for the sake of the Waratah' The bland tone vanished. Tell the court, Captain Fairlie,' he ordered.

‘I've already told you — the safety of the oil rigs.'

'Then,' said Musgrave, 'you can undoubtedly describe, on the basis of your near-miss with death, and your brother's death, what those conditions are?'

1 said unhappily, 'There are still certain imponderables which require elucidation.'

Musgrave let the lightning rest on every syllable as he repeated my words. There-are-still-certain-imponderables-which-require-elucidation.'

The newsmen were grinning and scribbling. This was what they wanted.

Musgrave went on. ‘I put it to you, Captain Fairlie, that you used your brother and an aircraft, irreplaceable because of the arms embargo against this country, as a spotter for some nefarious enterprise which you will not disclose to the court, and in doing so caused his death. You also used a ship belonging to the state for the same purpose and caused tens of thousands of rands' worth of damage both to the vessel and her equipment. You have also destroyed the value of the weather watch in the Southern Ocean by breaking its continuity, so that the observations carried out during the past year will have to be scrapped, and the whole project begun again.'

I looked desperately across at Tafline. Her eyes did not meet mine. She was taut, white-faced. Had the Waratah cost me her, too?

I did not know the answer to that when, raw and damaged, I returned to her flat after the inquiry. There was no doubt that in the court's eyes the whole broadside of blame would be mine. She opened the door and went straight across to the window, not speaking. The dusk had come and the beam of light from the lighthouse flicked across her face and gave it a brightness which is with me still.

She still did not face me when she asked.

That night when the big wave hit Walvis Bay-what did you see, Ian?'

'Dead ahead I saw a ship, an old-fashioned ship. She was heading into the wind.'

She did not turn, and the light beam cut across her face. It came and went as she stood looking out.

I do not think either of us heard the telephone ring the first two or three times. Then she went slowly across to the instrument and spoke quietly. She said 'thank you' mechanically and went back to the window.

She waited, then said, 'That was Mr Hoskins. The late papers are full of it. The Navy has found part of your father's airliner. It has got a message on it — for you.

'It is addressed from the Waratah.'