The Lost Flying Boat

1

Rose, having pre-computed the initial course to steer, acted as second pilot during the fraught minutes of take-off. A slight blue-black waterchop grated along the hull as he and Bennett checked the controls. Customs clearance had been given, and the harbour authorities were glad to see us go, because a flying boat was liable to drag its moorings and, being in a place where facilities for such craft hardly existed, could only be a danger to shipping – and itself.

Wilcox primed the engines, and when port and starboard outers were going, Nash and his bowmen-gunners slipped our moorings. Once clear, the inners were started, and hatches closed. I had already taken sycop gen of four-tenths cirro-stratus, visibility ten miles, pressure 29.8, temperature 71, and wind 280 degrees at 25 knots. A depression centred 300 miles southeast presaged a deterioration in the weather as the warm sector was crossed and the front approached.

The noise of four engines scoured our minds to emptiness on that nondescript dawn. We were on the move. No more doubts, and not much thought except for the job in hand. Harbour buildings, shabby like everything else from the glass windscreen of a flying boat, were a row of bad teeth lit by a spark of sun. There was a smell of fresh air and dust from the shore, and a saltier whiff from the sea. An amarillic band across the horizon was broken by a twig of steamer smoke.

We turned to starboard, well clear of shipping, taxied downwind and positioned ourselves between two buoys. The outers were run up, then the inners. Wings and fuselage vibrated, and I gripped the seat to stop my legs shaking like a pair of knick-knacks. All our problems were solved in that there was no turning back. Difficulties would arise, a disaster might occur, but the primary question was no longer valid.

A green flash from the roof of the harbour master’s office was a dragon wink to warn us away. Engines roared a harmonious answer, and we moved forward. Bennett worked the control column: floats clear of water, stick back, a shade wing-down into wind to stay straight. A rock-bump denied we were up, and I wondered how long the run would be, as we dashed towards the town and high ground.

Ease stick back. The elements were taking over. Another feeling as if airborne. The skipper would worry, not us. But bump again as, in my own darkness, I held my breath, and at the roar of labouring motors prayed we’d get unstuck from the water and heave our tonnage into the air. Wilcox said that no flying boat had ever been so laden. Each power unit had to lift three tons of its own fuel, and race us to flying speed along the empty boulevard of water, a runway as hard as concrete should we come back down with too much of a bang. Seconds of time stretched as if made of all the rubber in Malaya.

I didn’t know whether I heard or felt. The sensation, as of peril at the beginning of any enterprise, was indeterminate. I knew enough about flight to make me uneasy, but only the skipper had sufficient to engage the worry clutch, and the flight engineer to experience proper anxiety, and the navigator – later – the mathematical expertise to feel embarrassment. Perhaps only Nash accepted completely the fiduciary characteristics of the flying boat.

There was a gravelly scraping under the hull, as if a studiously fashioned fully fingered hand was feeling for the weak spot before punching a hole into which more water would flow than air. If I had kept a diary, the entry of January 1st 1950 would have told how a large war-surplus flying boat (the cheapest that ever was bought, said Rose) took off with eight crew and set course for Kerguelen, 2415 nautical miles to the southeast.

Instead of sea, the sky flooded in. A glimpse of brown and green land, then a few buildings. We banked before getting closer, and while I hoped God would keep that four-stroke cycle igniting, I tapped a message of departure to the coast station.

On an even keel the climb began, saying so-long to land and good day to the birds. Rose confirmed our course to steer of 145 degrees, which made us henceforth playthings of drift and track, vectors that boxed us in and styled us airborne. Morse warbled among the atmospherics. One operator pounded his key as if using a transmitter from the stone age. Another sounded like Donald Duck trying to tell us the long and the short of it.

Bennett’s reactions were needle-quick: sight keen, hearing sharp and muscles in trim. Such flying called for the same skill and co-ordination as steering a large sailing boat single handed. Any deterioration of well-being, even with the best pilot in the game, was dangerous. One false move and the trip would be over.

Set against the immensity of the sea, the flying boat was frail indeed, but we had settled into our large and wieldy home by the time it gained that peerless sky waiting for us two miles up, the endlessly wrinkled sea scored at one corner by a coal-burning ship. I knew where we were heading, but what about that old steamer? He saw us, and we him but, caught in our own sounds, neither could hear the noise of different engines. Such detachment drove me to the rear turret where I took a back bearing for Rose with the hand compass which confirmed our track.

Land melted into the haze and, fly as long as we could on the fuel we had, I wondered if after twenty hours we’d find a place by which to put down. Perhaps soil or trees were gone for ever. On my first troopship-crossing of the Arabian Sea I had feared that land would not be found even with the most refined navigation. The world would end as at the beginning, leaving us no choice but to alight on water.

I glanced at Rose as he laid his ruler straight, turned the Douglas protractor, twiddled the knob of his computer, and worked a pencil deftly over the chart. He sat as cut off at his table as if a door were closed on him. He reckoned his tracks and course in deadly earnest, assembling the many factors by which to decide our most probable position, and the prudent limit of the flying boat’s endurance.

2

The plane entered cloud but hardly ever stayed there. Yet it always seemed so. Beads of moisture hung on the perspex. The engines took on a harsher and more vulnerable tone than in clear sky, though this, like a tinnier vibration detected in the airframe, was an illusion. Bennett nursed the kite on its gradual ascent, and my unexplained fear was emphasized by the effect of being in cloud and climbing at the same time.

Ripples of indistinguishable morse came from God knew where, as if even at this late stage someone was making, though without much hope, an attempt to call us back. The plane shuddered, but ploughed beyond the speed of stalling or hesitation, and we sat at our duties as if we had never left the earth.

The more we stayed in cloud the more null my senses became, till I seemed to be alive after death, not able to see or be seen. The cloud cotton-woolled us out of existence. Solitude and lack of visibility caused the engines to go silent as I turned the frequency needle of the Marconi more for something to do than in the hope of receiving any vital data, which made it seem as if the world had abandoned us rather than that we had waywardly departed from it.

After six miles without visibility my bones ached for the emptiness of blue. Nash called from the mid-upper that we would go blind unless somebody turned the sky back on. In such latitudes there was no chance of a collision at least.

Daylight dazzled the fuselage. Bennett whistled to himself, glad to have made a start. Cloud tops were the surface of another earth whose white soil we had sprung from fully formed, a landscape of spun glass, knobbly obelisks, mushroom columns, wispy stalagmites and, further away, caves suggesting mysterious hide-outs on some polar shore. We gained height till the milky landscape below was like a world in the process of being formed, lit by the sun’s flood but now tinged with grey. There was nothing between us and the universe as, after a hundred miles of gradual climbing to go easy on the fuel, Bennett levelled off and kept us on course for Kerguelen.

Anyone able to stand on an anvil of cloud would see our flying boat going gracefully through the blue at two miles a minute, with its turrets and aerials, tailplane and vast four-engined wingspan. I would have wanted to wave, much as I had lifted my arms as a boy to trains that went by, craving to be one of its passengers.

Cloud tops we flew between were like plumes of the Prince of Wales’ feathers. Earphone wire trailing, I tried to rid myself of a feeling of isolation, almost afraid to look out at the wings in case I witnessed them being rent from the fuselage. I wanted to live for ever, whereas on the ground I had not much cared whether I lived at all. Every moment that I was not at my wireless filled me with anxiety, unless I consciously marvelled at how four great engines propelled us along as easily as a bus on a country road. I was only alive when listening to morse while being carried through the sky, ten thousand feet above the sea.

Bennett stood behind me. The bounce of wireless signals was our lifeline. Whoever heard could write the call sign in their log, and if we vanished into the water of the South Indian Ocean, at least there would be the record of a last message, even if only a call tapped out to reassure the crew that we still had some connection with the earth.

Sweat fell from my cheeks. We were an hour on our way, with nineteen to go. A coast station tried to get me with a QRZ, so I asked Rose for our position and established contact by the return compliments of a QTH. Bennett smiled at seeing me busy. He had amended the position report, and what I sent, while the correct distance, put us on course for Madagascar.

He descended to the galley, satisfied at our attempt to obfuscate. The legal situation intrigued me. We were crossgraining all the laws. The sending of false signals was strictly forbidden, and I had committed the first criminal act of my life.

In the kernel of such detachment, highlighting my lack of connection to whatever in the world had any meaning, I felt allied to something that was not good, almost to a sense of evil. I put my fingers on the morse key and thudded out the call sign of the flying boat so as to imprint our identifying letters on an unlistening void.

3

Bennett called for less chat on the intercom. As he got older he wanted more perfection from himself, and consequently only spoke to others when he could be sure of being obeyed. He wished for perfection from them too, so that what he demanded contributed to the standards he had set himself, and thus enhanced his perfection. But if he wanted obedience he had to be reasonable. He had to be right, and because it was getting harder to match the two demands, he gave the impression of being taciturn.

The price of such individualism was often at the expense of others’ conformity. No one knew it more. But he expected it nonetheless, not only because there was so little about but also because it was part of his nature to strive after perfection. He wanted it from others as well as from himself, as a defensive bastion against all comers. The cost to himself was nil because his value increased the more he acquired it. And as for the cost to others – it was no concern of his.

He faced the clear blue, getting bumped by upcurrents from cloud tops a few feet below. The boat trundled at 110, plus the push of an almost following wind. The more such windy knots the merrier, caught in the Roaring great-circle Forties, but any speed would have been too slow.

The furrows in his brow seemed to go into his soul, and cut it into fragments, which was better than merely cleaving it in two, because while many parts were manageable, two would be stalemate. Diplomacy could be brought to bear on many parts, while with two it was a fight to stop them destroying one another. All the same, he did not know which system he was most in the grip of, or in need of, nor even in the end which he preferred. He had long been a battle-ground, but the fight for stability always resulted in a strong and perfect balance in himself which he presented to the world.

The inner fight to stay firm did not allow for speculation. He was happy with the bargain. He had to be. Pragmatism was the way to survival. There was no point in allowing self-knowledge to destroy you. To keep a balance between knowing yourself and survival might be feasible during a holiday in the English countryside, but on this trip the difficulties could break you if steps weren’t taken to defeat them.

Sitting for hours at the controls, mulling on chances and pitfalls, it wasn’t easy to stop chaos coming with malicious intent from beyond the horizon. The furrows on his forehead had similarly sharpened as a schoolboy when he crept upstairs to his mother’s bedroom. She had gone, so he opened her Bible as if committing a sin. Thin paper flipped like a cloud of butterflies crossing a turbulent river. He had forgotten the name of that great river. The butterflies had a name from cigarette cards. He read some verses about Isaac and Abraham. They smelled of face powder from the dressing table. The book made him want to die. When he grew tired of opening and closing, he tore out the page and swallowed the pieces as he stood at the window.

No one walked on the garden path. Beyond rows of lettuces were redcurrant bushes. He could taste their fruit by looking at them. Dahlias and chrysanthemums coloured the fence. Instead of going to school he wanted to spread his arms and fly from the window, reach the bushes before it got dark, when they would leap even redder with their flame.

The clear and aching light of long summer evenings needed all day before stars came out. His father was up there, his mother told him, but he was under redcurrant bushes where she had buried him. If he flew, he would fall. You couldn’t fly without falling. Not even time to scream, your eyes would drop out before you could see the earth that hit you. You would be too dead to feel it, just as his father was too dead to know anything, whether he was in the sky or under the bushes, because how could he be in two places at once? Maybe he would die from the bits of paper. Either that, or they would make him better.

Captain Bennett smiled at the enormous hemisphere of the heavens.

4

Rose came on the intercom with a course correction for the thirty degree latitude south and forty degree longitude east position. He had released a smoke float to get drift. I swept the ether with a fine tooth comb, going up to eighteen megacycles, then dropping back to search on medium wave. I was tempted to click my callsign to the few audible ships, but radio silence was the order of the day. Everything went in the logbook nevertheless, in case it was useful later. Liking to keep busy during bumps through cloud, I took a gonio reading on a coast station for Rose.

‘It’s not much good,’ he said, ‘but they might help one of these days, though I hope I won’t be reduced to such ham-handed navigation. Be the end of us all, if so.’

‘Levity is coming back,’ said Nash. ‘He’s a young soldier, Nav, so don’t discourage him.’

‘Bound to, once we’re airborne,’ said Wilcox. ‘We get light-headed, don’t we, chaps?’

Two hours out, and I could relax my tight-fisted contact with the ether. ‘Permission granted,’ Bennett called.

‘Got dots and dashes before the eyes?’ said Appleyard as I walked over a heap of parachutes to get to the Elsan. The plane grumbled. ‘What do we need those for?’ I asked Armatage, as I buttoned my flies. It was like being in the cellar of a laundry, except for the smell of last night’s cooking instead of today’s washing.

‘You’ll see that hanging up soon enough,’ he said.

‘Do sailors like us need parachutes?’

Armatage hung them in some sort of order. ‘You never know. But I expect the only time we’ll bale out is when the dinghy starts to split after we’re in the drink – if we’re lucky enough to get that far on our way to salvation. Or bailed out of some foreign copshop. But while we’re in this flying bailiwick we’re more than safe, Tosh.’ He tapped one of several packing cases with his boot: ‘It’ll be the others we meet who’ll need bailing out, or to bale out, believe you me.’

The wood smelt fresh. ‘What’s in them?’

‘You’ll see when we open up.’

‘And when will that great day be?’

‘When, mate? When? When Bennett gives the verbal nod over the speak-tube, just beyond the third-way mark. That’s when we’ll do it. I’m a dab hand with a jemmy.’ Fingers at his left cheek rubbed the smile away. ‘This toothache’s giving me a bit of stick.’

I was ready to laugh at such a common malady, but it was clearly no joke. ‘You could have had it pulled before we left.’

‘I didn’t know, did I? Anyway, it comes and goes.’

‘On Antarctic expeditions some blokes have all their teeth taken out, good or not, and steel ones put in. Saves ’em suffering if they’re two years in the wild.’

His grey eyes turned watery. ‘If I’d told the skipper, he’d have left me behind rather than put the trip off for a day. That’s the skipper all over. One of the best – but no sentiment. Iron Jack, some of us used to call him. I heard that swine Shottermill talking about having too many in the crew and wondering whether they shouldn’t ditch a couple of bods. I can’t think he was genuine, because if the Antarctic ice sticks hard on this white elephant we’ll all be out on the wings melting it off with blow-lamps.’ He smiled when the pain went. ‘And if there’s a bit of a scrap over who gets the damaged goods, there won’t be too many of us on board to handle it.’

‘Are we expecting opposition?’

He sat down and nursed his face at another wicked twinge. ‘Who can tell?’

I felt sorry for him. ‘It can’t last forever.’

‘Maybe. But we’ve got to be prepared.’ We were part of a machine, each at his job to keep the props moving. I sat in my wireless section and spun the needle over coloured markings. In an emergency, one man with ordinary toothache would put us off schedule. He would be as bad as a stretcher case. But I felt as if I’d had a few whiskies, and couldn’t care less.

An Italian opera from Cape Town or Johannesburg had a hard ride with such bounce and crackle waiting in ambush along the route. I adjusted the wavelength, and poured music for enjoyment through the intercom, vibrating what phones were plugged in.

‘We’ll make you the ENSA wallah,’ Bennett said, ‘if you aren’t careful.’

Nash wanted the Warsaw Concerto. ‘It always gives me a lump in my throat. One of my best oppoes was a Polish gunner, alas no longer with us.’

I put up the volume.

‘A piece of Beethoven,’ Rose said. ‘Much better than your bent bearings. What about Fidelio?’

‘Fidelio’s a dog,’ said Appleyard. ‘In quarantine.’

‘You mean Fido,’ Bull barked convincingly. ‘That’s a fucking dog, not Fidelio. Get back into your kennel.’

Wilcox asked for Mantovani.

‘You can’t have him,’ Appleyard called.

‘It might stop him coughing,’ said Nash.

‘Or play Victor Sylvester,’ said Armatage.

‘No dancing,’ said Nash, ‘or you’ll be on a fizzer.’

‘You’ll bugger up Mr Rose’s sunsights,’ said Bull.

‘Cut the language,’ said Appleyard, ‘or you’ll get no tea.’

One of the gunners booed, Armatage I think. There was rediffusion of flying boat favourites till the music crumpled against a mountain range of static and disappeared.

‘Back to business, Mr Adcock.’

I switched to ships and coast stations. My fingers itched to tap a greeting, but I roamed up and down the wavelength, never long enough on any to get a whole message. What did I expect? No weather report could come from where we were going. If a rolling stone gathered no moss, whose loss is that? It was the pattern of my life, and after so long I thought that nothing could break it.

We were the filling in a cloud sandwich, two thousand feet of sky through which we droned, a movable feast activated by so many currents of air that the plane had to be ridden rather than driven. A topography of ridges and cauliflower hillocks passed us by. Rose jerked his elbows back and forth. ‘A cold front’s coming from the southeast.’

‘How do you know?’

‘If I knew, I wouldn’t know. Take it from me. There’ll be a bit of turbulence before we hit the drink.’

He paced irascibly against the bumps and lurches. ‘Calm down.’ I made myself heard as he came close. A hand covered the scar-side of his face, while the exposed half was pale and leaden. He shivered with cold. I wondered how we would manage if our navigator passed out.

‘Maybe something I ate,’ he said. ‘It’s not unusual for me to feel air sick. Every other trip, and I spend half my time staring the bog out.’

I found a canister of water and filled a mug, spilling some before getting it back to him. Bennett was dodging the black three-dimensional coastline of cumulus, trying to rise to where the kite might be steady enough for Rose to obtain his sunsight. We went onto oxygen at twelve thousand feet, though I delayed as long as I could, hating that rubbery medicated tang that crept into the throat. ‘It’s like the whiff that comes out of a Selection Box of french letters,’ said Bull. A disembodied croak over the intercom agreed, adding that his popsy had given him such a gift at Christmas.

‘Shut up,’ Bennett said.

I hung on, oxygen tacking and veering through my veins. My ears were buzzing, and a bodily nervousness – while at my wireless table – presaged a heavenward lift where all might be well. The impression lasted a few minutes, time for the system to get used to alien air taking hold. For whoever had work, reality reasserted its grip. A ship sent a routine message, faint but readable, which I logged, returning to the illusion that my work and I were inseparable. On this trip we had to be.

Another ship’s operator, having difficulty reaching a coast station, was sending so slowly that I’d have had time to part my hair between each letter.

5

Height was the best aerial, but there was a limit to how far it could be extended. Infinity was not enough, though the higher we climbed the more I could hear. To bring in Madagascar and Mozambique gave a sense of power. I heard Tasmania and Nairobi with pleasure. Rhodesia and the Seychelles were registered with childish pride – yet the world was no bigger than the space between my enphoned ears since, in spite of what I wanted to believe, each place came in of its own accord.

I heard them all, dots-and-dashes denoting each locality, showing picture-book scenes where I would rather be than in the bucking slum-galleon of a flying boat going to a place that lacked the morse symbols which my imagination could embellish with reality. Without those electrical impulses (affected, as the handbook might say, by keying across a resistance in the high-tension negative supply), a place had no identity. Robbed of a name, it was erased from latitude and longitude, and so was denied existence.

And yet where we were going was on all maps and charts, and perhaps even shown on those small globes used as pencil sharpeners. Its natural harbours had been known for two hundred years by whalers and seal hunters. Explorers had laid up in them to fair-copy their surveys, piratical merchants had hidden to count the score of their plunder, and the Germans had used the area as a base from which to prey on shipping. But without a wireless station the region lacked a soul. No sound meant no life. No aerial system on high ground conveyed intelligence to other places. We were heading for white space because my earphones could not bring in the necessary signals to convince me it was solid property.

Rose’s table took most of the sun as we ascended from the gloom, but a narrow shaft illuminated my log book. Cloud below was flat like the sea, fixed ribs crossing our track. The plane was steady, and Rose got into the ’dome with an Astro-Compass to check the course, while I stood below with his watch and wondered whether, should it become necessary, I could navigate our boat on its trans-ocean flight. Apart from radio bearings, it was not beyond my competence to lay out a course if provided with the wind vector. There was no mystery in sextant and timepiece as long as sun or stars were visible, and a book of Sight Reduction Tables available to work out a position line. You always learned something of the next man’s job, occasionally without him knowing, and hardly aware of it yourself.

But the proper exercise of navigation demands arcane knowledge during a long flight over water, as well as subtle judgement when putting together the factors of dead-reckoning, astro navigation and wireless bearings. Therefore I couldn’t do it, no more than anyone on board could do my work, though they tended to regard the wireless operator as having the easiest task on the flight deck. His technical knowledge was thought to go little beyond rectifying a few obvious faults, and using Morse Code could not be compared to the arduous work of flying or navigation – both of which are as much an art as a craft.

With senses of a more primitive order, the wireless operator needs experience and patience when pulling in any data for the well-being of the aircraft. He interprets symbols coming into the earphones, and uses the international ‘Q’ code as an operator’s Esperanto. To take morse at speed calls for the sense of rhythm possessed by a poet – or an African in the bush manipulating his tom-toms, as Rose scathingly said. The wireless operator’s brain receives a series of beats which galvanize him into writing words originating from someone else. Others will in turn take down words or initials tapped out by him, both senders and receivers being mediums to transcribe electrical patterns from the sky.

At either end of the contact there is a human touch. If you miss a letter, you either let it go, thereby losing all trace, or you make the correction and then try to catch up with the speeding text, with the risk of missing some which is still to come. If the message isn’t intended for you, yet is essential for your wellbeing, and you can’t get in touch with the other operator to ask for a repeat, you are in trouble.

Each operator is distinguishable by idiosyncratic sending. Those whose rhythm is of a pleasing regularity are artists at the job, possessing stamina and an infallible sense of style, their evenly spaced strings of dots and dashes being a delight to transcribe. But most operators have mannerisms which make their sound patterns as unique as fingerprints. One can detect a change in operator, can tell when an inexperienced sender is tired, or lazy, or permanently irascible, or inwardly disturbed.

If half a dozen stations are hammering for attention you note their call signs and then, in an orderly manner, bring them in one by one to transact business. When a dead-keen coast station thumps out automatic five-kilowatt morse on eight megacycles, symbols come into each ear like needles intent on pricking your brain in the middle. Your vital interest may be to listen instead to the mewings of an underpowered pip-squeak tramp steamer. His feeble transmitter, so far away, may not realize the strength of the opposition that besets you while trying to read him, for the interference is in your area, and not his. What is preventing you from listening may sound no louder to him than the strength at which you hear him. In any case, the ship’s transmitter, being right next to him, drowns all but his own morse.

The onus is on you to assist the weak. Moral considerations overcome any difficulty in the execution of your task. Human feeling encourages you to hear that small voice behind the great bellow, and struggle to bring forth meaning in case the lives of the sender’s crew depend on it. The most important article of faith, hidden yet not hidden, without which you would only do your job and not your duty, is that which elevates your purpose and takes your craft close to art.

Your integrity can survive only by the proper rendering of the message onto paper, so you nurture those disjointed sounds, sweat at the finger ends, and tremble, and squint in order to cool yourself – and you may still, for all your effort, lose the thread. You hope for contact to be properly established, and do not give in to the evil of despair, which is too easy to accept and always to be turned from. A lost soul is revived with the belief that it is not finally lost and, rekindling your attempt to hear it again, you force your ears to conquer the bleak static of the ether and double the sharpness of your senses in order to encourage those in peril.

I listened for any such ship within the radius of my receiving aerials. A wireless operator in an aircraft is the lookout man in the crow’s nest, the first to hear any manned object in the circumference of sounds. There was self-interest in my endeavours, for whatever I heard proved that we ourselves were not lost, whether the signals were to be of assistance to us, or a threat. Unable to accept that we were totally alone was an imperfection of spirit which should have made me ashamed – but did not. The individual cannot be supreme in an empty world.

Two hours out, I heard a ship send a weather report to a South African coast station. His QTH was a couple of hundred miles north of our onward route, so I noted it as being of some use. The force five wind was westerly, weather mainly fair, visibility moderate or good. I got a bearing on ship and coast station and, allowing for half-convergency, handed the slip of paper to Rose.

When I showed the report to Bennett he jumped as if bitten by a tiger-ant and called Wilcox to sit at the controls. Was there anything about where the ship was coming from or going to? He was disappointed at my answers. ‘Glue yourself to those valves,’ he said, ‘and keep listening to that ship. But don’t for God’s sake send a single squeak on your key. Understand?’

I did. He went down to talk to Nash and his gunners. But if, on this enormous ocean where ships were scarce, aircraft rare, and a flying boat perhaps unique, I heard a vessel in distress, would I keep radio silence as commanded, even though such a policy was vital for our safety? Or would I inform them with alacrity that they were not alone, and relay a message to other ships which might be able to help them?

Bennett’s pressure to push on, come what may, in silence and as if invisible, need not clash with the distress of a cottonboat or sugar-carrier. I lived in hope of lesser moral choices, but knew which one I would make if the moment came.

6

Armatage flicked his moustache, and looked as if he had woken up into the Stone Age. He wanted only to get back to sleep, but said: ‘I heard scratching underfoot. From when I closed my eyes to opening them again.’

‘Scratching?’

‘Have you ever heard of rats in a flying boat?’

‘You must be dreaming.’

He got out of the bunk and stretched. ‘Claws were going, ten to the dozen.’

‘Can’t hear ’em now.’

‘You wouldn’t, would you?’

I laughed at his irony. ‘I would if they made a noise. I can usually hear things like that.’

He rubbed his face. ‘I suppose it was a dream, though I never dream, so it’s hard to believe. Why should I, on a flying boat? Makes no sense. Scratching, as plain as anything. I thought claws were going to come through that door.’

I jumped away.

‘See? Gets you, don’t it?’

‘When they stop scratching,’ I teased, ‘let me know. It’ll mean they’ve left. We’ll be in trouble.’

His face was covered in sweat, as if he had been under a shower – and we were freezing at ten thousand feet. ‘Do you want a drink, Sparks?’

I thought he was joking. ‘I’m not thirsty.’

‘I never said you was. I mean a tot of old grouser to steam its way up and down the tripes.’

He winked.

‘There’s not supposed to be any on board,’ I said.

‘That’s all right for such as the skipper. For us it’s King’s Regulations and Station Routine Orders. He’ll have us on bloody square-bashing next. But he’s got something else to warm him up, though I’m not sure what it is. But it warms him, all right. You can see the hot spot burning his brain. If I had a tenth of it I wouldn’t need a secret bin of firewater to wash my throat in. And besides, he ain’t got toothache.’

‘You’ll get thrown overboard if he finds out.’ His sweat stank of alcohol, but I didn’t care how much booze he put into himself as long as it was after we had reached land and the job was finished.

‘I’ve got my flask,’ he said, ‘and I can refill it any time. You’ve never known a gunner to be without his flask, have you? Even on ops I took one, though I’d have been on the carpet if I’d been caught. Being half-cut on the way back from Nuremberg sharpened my sight. Saved my life a few times, such as it was. This is the last op I’m doing, though, and it feels the longest already.’

‘We’ve only been out three hours. Still, if you kip down for another half hour maybe you’ll” wake up feeling better.’

‘I can’t sleep,’ he grumbled. ‘There’s rats in the hull, scores of the bleeders squeaking and scratching.’

I lost patience. ‘You’re round the bend, if you ask me, and halfway up the zig-zags.’

‘I wish I was.’ He pulled at my lapel, but I shoved him off. ‘And not only rats. I heard voices.’

‘Voices? You’re getting my bloody goat.’

He came close again. ‘In Bennett’s wardroom somebody laughed and it wasn’t Bennett. They were talking, all gruff and matey. Wilcox was at the controls, you was at your gear listening to Geraldo, Rose was at his table doing noughts and crosses, Appleyard was in the mid-upper, Nash was in the tail, and Bull was sleeping on the parachutes. That left me on my tod – hearing voices.’

It was the wind, the shaking, the drone of engines as we changed height. The effect was to make you hear things.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it was that, was it? Do you think I don’t know? I’ve logged more flying time than you’ve spent listening for the first cuckoo in spring.’

He took another swig from the flask and, wanting a drink as much as anyone, I thought him more funny than dangerous. But I was angry at knowing there was liquor on board, and wondered who else was getting at it. ‘Does Bennett know the mess is no longer dry?’

He ignored my question. ‘I’m bloody freezing.’

I envied him having no work, unlucky as he was in being crippled with either drink or toothache. His expression of malice diverted me from worrying overmuch at his boozing. The only fit response was to do the impossible, and laugh. I pulled a blanket from the rack and let it fall.

He belched his thanks. ‘You’re a babe unborn, Sparks.’

The floor of the plane dropped under our feet and, while I held on, Armatage crumpled into the bunk and was straightaway unconscious. I had no further weather reports to listen for, so had time to watch the others opening a packing case with crowbars. Bull fixed the claw under a batten, strained like a sailor at the capstan, shirt off, arms chevroned by elaborate tattoos, lips clamped as if knowing that the noise of the engines would drown any shanty. Nash and Appleyard held the crate from sliding.

‘Do you need help?’

‘We’ll manage.’

I stood by, but kept clear. The cases were labelled ‘Engine Spares’. An outboard motor for the dinghies? Tents and equipment? Shining nails gave without trouble. A smell of oil and paraffin floated up as side planks splintered away, leaving plywood and thick card to pull free. ‘We should get Armatage on this stunt,’ Bull said. ‘A bit of hard labour would do him good.’

Appleyard took the crowbar. ‘He’s as pissed as a falling flare.’

‘He’s down with the toothache.’ Nash steadied the crate. ‘Leave him for a while.’ They rested when the work was all but done. ‘We’ll give him an hour to spruce up.’ He turned to Appleyard, who was rolling down his sleeves. ‘Why don’t you boil some water for coffee? Make a start on cobbling a meal together. You’ll find tins of M and V, a bag of spuds, a wheel of rat-trap, and some fresh bread.’

Bull agreed. ‘Flying makes me ravenous. I once ate a whole packet of cream crackers over Berlin.’

‘Me,’ Nash said, ‘I smoked fifty Players.’

‘I said my prayers,’ Appleyard called before he went, ‘and bit my nails. Bull got drunk. He ought to pull his finger out and sweat like the rest of us.’

Beneath the cardboard, sacking was darkened by grease stains. Nash braced himself to pull one container free. ‘They’re our stingers. Or will be when they’re assembled. We’ll sweat like pigs to get ’em up in time.’ He cut into the coils of string with a black clasp knife. ‘Treat ’em nicely,’ he said to Bull. ‘When the job’s over we’ll pack ’em up and sell ’em back. They cost a few hundred each. We can unload them on China for a lot more if we fly our kite up the Yangtse. Might as well make all we can out of the trip.’

‘I wouldn’t care if we chucked ’em in the drink.’ Bull cut the string into small lengths, then peeled away the sacking till bits and pieces of a Browning .303 machine gun gleamed on the floor.

Nash stroked the barrel. ‘We’ve a few hours to work like grease-monkeys and put four of these beauties in the tail.’ After a rapid check on the various parts he laughed at my surprise. ‘You didn’t have a clue, eh? If anyone comes up the fjord and tries to stop us, we’ll rake ’em.’

In the guise of a mechanical skeleton, the gun looked ominous. ‘Maybe they’ll have a similar shock for us.’

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But listen, Adcock, the world’s full of bloody maybes. You can’t live on ’em, I’ll tell you that. And in my experience one maybe is as good as another. All you’ve got to do is get yourself ready to meet one maybe. And if any turn up that you don’t expect, you’ll just bloody well defeat it, if you’ve prepared properly for the first maybe. That’s the only system I know, and it hasn’t failed me yet. Now we’re out of territorial waters we’ll gun the old flying boat up like it was always meant to be, and once they’re mounted there’ll be no trouble we can’t get out of.’

The more the flying boat went on, the more I was disturbed, a condition strange and painful because I had been trained to create order from a multiplicity of signals. Confusion in myself was unfamiliar and therefore insoluble. The only way of staying calm was to close down the wireless, hold back from the one thing that might help me to bear it – which would be as impossible as pulling open a door and letting myself fall into the icy air. I envied Armatage his drunken sleep.

The headset back on, I immersed myself in an endless waterfall of static. Vital gen known to everyone in the plane would not be imparted to me. Latched to the outer atmosphere, I was certain to stay innocent. It was not a matter of knowing nothing, but of believing that what I did know was not worth knowing, and of assuming that what I didn’t know was the only thing worth knowing. The balance was crucial, yet as gentle as the motions of the flying boat following that invisible line of the Antarctic Convergence, where warm and cold water mixed to give high winds and thick cloud above the troubled surface.

7

A landslide of static was swept aside by a continuous signal. As my tuning needle went over it became an attenuating whistle, like a bomb falling into infinity and unable to explode. By the time I thought to take a bearing it had disappeared. It should not have been there. Someone had inadvertently leaned on his key, or was tuning his transmitter. If the latter, who did he expect to contact? To judge by the intensity of that accidental signal, if that’s what it was, and allowing for skip distance and freak reception, he could be up to a thousand miles away, in which case he was likely to be on or over the sea in the direction of Kerguelen. Perhaps he was interested in our whereabouts.

Such deductions might sound like so much magic. Intuition was not evidence. Assumptions were not facts. Feelings could not rate as intelligence by which to assess danger. In the imagined conversation, Bennett told me to pull my finger out and find clues he could work on. My job was to inform him, not worry him.

The green eye glowed. Atmospherics dominated. The universe of noise was like a house of many mansions latched on each ear, doors and windows firmly bolted against lunatics scratching inside. Maybe, like Armatage, I was hearing things. A long bomb-like whistle had no symbol for the logbook.

The knowledge of the Browning machine guns made every sound seem like a threat, and kept me extraordinarily alert. I had to do my job well, though sworn loyalty to Bennett hardly meant helping to find bullion which did not belong to him. Yet if I didn’t chip in to the best of my ability the sudden onset of peril from any direction would be as much a threat to myself as it was to the others. Having signed my way into the trap, I must learn to live in it.

The flying boat moved on. Rose passed a new course of 138 degrees when we reached, by astronomical computation, 45 north and 40 south. The local time was 11.52, three hours and forty-seven minutes after setting out. A rippling stream of high speed telegraphy tinkled between Singapore and Home Base. My crow’s nest could monitor half the world, but I only needed to beware of ships steaming in the area we were heading for. The first headland was over 1700 nautical miles away, though it wasn’t too far if I kept my fingers at the corrugated tuning wheel as pertinaciously as a safe-thief trying to unravel the combination of a lock.

The second leg of the trip meant we were making progress, said Nash. ‘The Alpha Rats are on their way.’

‘Skimming along at 120 knots,’ said Rose.

‘How much is that in Dolly Mixtures?’ asked Appleyard.

‘Damn near a hundred-and-roaring-forty, if you’re talking about statute miles,’ said Bennett. ‘The speedier this old bird shivers along, the better for my blood pressure.’

‘Do you measure that in millibars?’ Wilcox wanted to know.

‘Mars Bars,’ said Appleyard.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Armatage.

‘If you aren’t careful,’ said Rose, ‘I’ll sing “The Navigator’s Lament”.’

‘I put men on a charge for less,’ Bennett said, ‘when I was Orderly Officer.’

Rose took another look at the sun, and Nash hoped he wouldn’t drop his Mark IXA Celestial. My eavesdroppings were brief. I roamed to either side of three chosen frequencies, and static sounded as if the world was wrapped in a scarf of water, heightened crackles like rocks or fallen trees in the way of the liquid’s headlong route. I caught news-agency morse from Tass in Moscow, crackpot claims about life in Stalin’s paradise. Silence on my own frequency was more golden. ‘The less heard, the better, Sparks,’ Bennett said. ‘We want to be the only ones in a thousand-mile radius when we get there.’

‘As long as we have no trouble from the Gremlins, Skipper,’ said Wilcox.

I cursed the jungle of static. ‘Or the Marcolins. They eat the filaments out of the valves, and chew at the connections, and gnaw the impedences.’

‘I’ll sing “The Navigator’s Lament”,’ said Rose.

Bennett at the controls lit a cigar. ‘Let rip, if you like. We can be happy till it’s time to dig up the doings, pull out the plum, refuel our tanks, and fly away like good little blackbirds. God is with us, don’t forget. He’d better be.’ His laugh swamped all rejoinders.

Rose was so busy that his Dalton computer was in danger of seizing up – he said. But maybe he could spare a moment. Appleyard was duty cook: ‘Like me: both burners going, and a stack of plates to fill.’

‘Gangway!’ Nash called. ‘I hear a throat being cleared.’

Rose tapped his tuning fork against the Bygrave slide-rule.

‘Stap me if I too didn’t hear the dull click,’ said Wilcox. ‘He can use the tattooed gunners for a chorus.’

‘Shut your soupbox,’ Nash growled. ‘If you put him off you’ll be confined to the port float on bread and seaweed. Jankers has nothing on that.’

‘Navigators never lament. If they can’t get a fix they break down and cry.’

‘You remember “O My Darling Clementine”?’ said Rose. ‘Well, my song sings to that banshee wail. I didn’t write the music.’

Armatage came up from the depths of his boozy snooze. ‘You bloody wronged it, if I remember.’

‘It was the highlight of the old squadron concert party. The comb-and-paper melted in my mouth at the thought of how many of us would be gone by the morrow.’ When he could get space on the intercom he put out his melody, in which the others joined without waiting for the chorus:

Bennett broke in: ‘Cut it out. Nash, get those guns into position.’ A lace-curtain network of high frequency stations came to pieces before an onslaught of atmospherics. Blinded by so much din, I put down the volume, detached the headphones and stood by Wilcox to look into the dazzle of oncoming sky that was like drink to my spirit. Space we needed, space we got. Four engines propelling the weight of our flying boat, we rode the air smoothly, however the boiling sea behaved two miles below. I had known no other life. The rest was a dream. Nothing and no existence prospered beyond our fuselage.

Wilcox held the controls so that Bennett could go to a meal in his room. By rights on a long journey over the sea there should have been a double crew. A nineteen-hour stretch or more at the wheel, wireless rig, navigation table, or engineer’s panel was too long a time for comfort or safety. But a double crew, as well as entailing double cost, would also mean double weight, and almost equal that which we expected to load on board.

Below, on another floor level, Nash manoeuvred a Browning towards the front turret. We would defend ourselves from all directions. Elaborate rearmament was not carried out unless to stop others taking the gold. ‘We should run up the skull-and-crossbones.’

Wilcox coughed his cough to the end. ‘If we get into a jolly-roger scrap, we’ll blow ’em out of sea or sky. We haven’t come this far to take chances. Anybody tries to stop us, and they’ll walk the plank.’

I was a prisoner of their harebrained scheme, and had too much pride to express regret at the speed of my conversion to the general cause.

8

The skipper wanted to see me, Appleyard said, so I climbed the ladder and found him at a table laid not with odd knives and forks but a silver set resting across the remains of his meal on a large dinner plate – a pitcher of water and half filled glass by his elbow.

‘Hearing any funny noises on your box of tricks, Sparks?’

‘Not so far.’

Plywood walls made his compartment seem solid and soundproof. A plantpot adorned a metal shelf under the porthole, and a small plan chest against a partition had the bottom two drawers half open. He told me to sit down. ‘The time to glue yourself to the radio is when we’re five or six hundred miles away. In the meantime, take a rest if you feel like it. I want you as sharp as a needle for the few hours before landfall.’

The bunk opposite had its bedding neatly stacked, and above was a framed photograph of a Lancaster bomber, Bennett prominent among the crew lined up on the ground. ‘What exactly should I listen for?’

Appleyard put down a dish of pineapple and went out. ‘The faintest bleat or crackle.’

‘I hear all sorts of noises. None make sense.’

‘When they do, tell me.’

A chart on the plan chest was held down by a sliderule, which suggested he kept a constant check on Rose’s navigation. ‘If two ships are in contact they might use duplex, so I’d hear only one.’

He picked at the fruit. ‘The boats I’m thinking about have simple rigs.’

‘I’ll keep tabs on the calling frequency, log everything, and let you see it by the half hour.’

‘Be sure to miss nothing. And I want to say this, Sparks: piloting the plane is a normal job. I’ve got the controls in my hands, and can see the engines going full spin out of the windows. As for navigation, Rose is second to none. And Wilcox has the panel to tell how the engines are functioning, and what fuel’s still floating around. But you’ve not only to listen: you must also hear. Everything. I can’t tell you what to listen for. You have to decide that for yourself. You’ll know what to tell me when you hear it. The least thing will make the difference between us getting home dry, or ending up in the drink.’

Appleyard came in for his plate and dish. ‘Bring a cup of coffee for the radio officer.’ Bennett looked at me: ‘I suppose you’ve seen the measures we’re taking for self-defence?’

‘As if we’re going to war.’

‘The last of a tour of ops.’

‘I can’t get a straight answer from anybody.’

He rolled several white papers around a cigar. ‘Straight answers stop you thinking. Another thing to remember, Adcock, is that busy people don’t like to talk much. You’ve got eyes, and you’re supposed to use them. But look not too long in the face of fire. I’m in command of this ship, and I’ll bring her through. That’s what I’m here for.’

My guts went cold, no embers apparent. He was testing my fitness for some devastating encounter which he clearly expected. I wanted to be trusted. He could rely on me, in spite of my aversion, not from loyalty but because I felt a stronger urge than his to get into the unknown. I was afraid and exhilarated, and wouldn’t have traded such mixed feelings for anything. I was more willing than he was because, not sharing his obsession, I felt the kind of gung-ho keenness that he had probably forgotten about.

He was alone, and lonely, but instead of being sorry I knew I had to be on my guard. He lit his cigar. ‘This ship will be my last. No more flying. My life’s been a long chase after freedom. I don’t suppose that means much to you, Sparks. But I’ve noticed that the longer you go chasing freedom, the more it dodges you. You can’t find it. Can’t grip it. The pursuit of freedom has always led me into captivity. Funny, eh? Into a profession, into the Air Force, into a marriage that never happened. Yet I thought each one would give me the freedom to know myself. It never did. The end of freedom is always the beginning of it. I got out of those institutions, and even then didn’t find what I wanted. Do you know what freedom is, Adcock?’

His question surprised me. Though hardly listening, I took everything in while not caring to. I supposed freedom is not to worry about what the hell happens to you. I drank the coffee. He let his go cold, and smoked the cigar as if it were suckling him. ‘In this flying boat I’m as close to freedom as I’ll ever get. It’s my natural state. But when the gold’s been disposed of, I’ll be free for the rest of my life. I won’t live on Vortex Street anymore.’

He paused, his grey eyes staring at the photograph of the Lancaster. ‘There’s no more beautiful sight than that of an aircraft going across the sky. It’s got engines, and fuel, and a crew on board. It’s my reality.’

I wanted to sleep, or eat, or be at my wireless – anything but listen to a rambling I didn’t understand.

‘We are all inside that aircraft,’ he said.

He’s not well, I thought, determined to say nothing while he was talking to me. As long as he doesn’t get stricken, and forget the drill when at the controls.

‘I had an uncle who lived to be ninety. When I was on leave, the last time I saw him, he went for a walk. He seemed to have all his faculties, but he got lost, and the family had to search the streets for him.’

I knew younger people who would get lost if they went out alone. He only wanted me to listen, and I didn’t think much of my luck in having been chosen.

‘I’ll never want to be taken away from myself, either by not being my own master, or by a senile old age. You understand?’

I said I did. And I did, though I wondered why he felt the matter important when he was so far from such a state. Everything happened for a purpose. He was sounding me out, to set us apart from the rest.

He thought I understood: ‘I like my crew to function as one unit. Therein lies our survival. How do you get on with the others?’

‘I’ve known them a fortnight.’

‘You and I, Sparks, could get this aircraft from Point A to Point B on our own, if we had to.’

‘I suppose we could.’

‘I fly, and you navigate – by radio. Why do you think I picked an expert in direction-finding? Because you can get us home on wireless bearings, or at least make landfall, with me at the controls.’

He refilled his water glass. I was also thirsty. His words made me bone dry. Thoughts were rushing into my head that I didn’t want. ‘It wouldn’t be impossible.’

‘One has to anticipate all eventualities, that’s what I’m saying. I want someone who is loyal, simple and clever.’

‘Can anyone be simple and yet clever?’

He seemed out of touch. We were in the same aircraft, but of a different world.

‘They can be, if they’re loyal.’

‘Loyal to what?’ The question seemed important to my chances of getting out alive.

‘To me.’

Self-preservation was paramount. ‘You have all the loyalty I’ve got,’ I heard myself saying.

He imagined it to be more than he needed. ‘I expected no less. Getting to Kerguelen is easy enough, but knowing what we might find before we arrive – that’s where you come in. I know you’ll do it.’

The trunk of ash fell from his cigar.

‘I’ll try,’ I said, having no idea what he meant.

9

Bull sat at the galley table and ordered slum-gullion. ‘Every hour I’m in the air without eating seems as long as a day.’

I unwrapped my knife-fork-and-spoon. ‘That’s because you’re cut off from mother earth.’

‘I’d stay with her longer if she liked me.’

‘You offend her with those obscene tattoos,’ said Nash.

‘I thought she was my friend, all the same.’

Rose dipped a biscuit into his scalding tomato soup. ‘Friends are the easiest to offend. Enemies know where they stand.’

‘Heads down,’ said Appleyard cheerfully, ‘or your steak and spuds’ll get cold.’

‘If it is’ – Nash moved the peas and carrots around his plate – ‘you’ll go overboard, and no messing. You’ve got worse since the war. One thing I hate, and it’s cold grub, especially in a flying boat.’

‘Vegetables should be fresh, not out of a tin,’ said Rose.

‘Appleyard doesn’t care,’ Nash went on. ‘His guts are like concrete, and we know why. He’s never farted in his life. Oh yes, he did once, one frosty morning at Sullom Voe. He thought the bottom was dropping out of his world. The CO had him on the carpet because he sniffed lack of moral fibre. Took another ten trips to get him back on course – but it was a close-run thing.’

‘You think this is the YMCA?’ Appleyard felt genuinely insulted at complaints about his cooking. ‘I can’t imagine why I came on this bloody trip. After leaving the mob I was so fed up with the Brylcreem Boys, I worked two years down a coalmine to get it out of my system. The money was good, the blokes were marvellous, and I was glad to be doing some proper work for a change. Now I’m back on this stunt.’

‘Why are you, then?’

He looked contrite. ‘Well, you need a change, don’t you?’

Bull was unable to cut his steak. ‘It makes the grub at the Driftwood seem like Mrs Beeton’s best.’

‘The past always looks good,’ Rose drawled. ‘The old Driftwood reminded me of the Jetsome Inn, a hostelry near Guildford where they even ruin black market food.’

Bull’s eyes watered with nostalgia. ‘I wish I was there, all the same.’

‘I’m fed up with being duty cook,’ Appleyard said, though no one took any notice.

‘I think you-know-who’s been boozing,’ said Nash. ‘I can smell it.’

Armatage ate the steak with his side teeth. ‘When we get to Kerguelen, maybe a polar bear will make a meal out of you – though I expect the poor bugger’d sick its guts up if it did.’

‘Your eyes look like piss-holes in the snow already,’ said Nash. A scarf of cloud brushed by the porthole and turned the galley dim, with a grating sound under the hull, as if ropes that held us fast were being pulled loose. ‘Can you cook seal meat?’

Appleyard levered a tin of Players from his jacket. ‘We ate whale meat during the war.’

‘You wouldn’t cock a snook at anything,’ said Rose.

‘Or look a seahorse in the mouth.’ Wilcox fought off another bout of coughing. The joke that he should get an X-ray, or that the Kerguelen air would be as good a tonic as the best in Switzerland, had long been worn out, and we could only wonder how he managed to go on doing his job.

‘Better get a move on, or your dessert will get hot,’ said Appleyard as he dispensed bananas. Mine was too green, so I put it in my jacket pocket. He took each plate for washing up. ‘I’ll cook what you like, as long as I don’t have to kill it.’

Armatage joked that for half a bottle of grog he’d kill anything.

‘He’d cook his bloody firstborn for a swig of gut-rot,’ said Bull. A fist flashed, as if powered by the jet of an obscene word, in an arc towards Bull’s face, but collided with the palm of Nash’s open hand, which stopped it dead. ‘Wrap it up, the pair of you.’

A bump underfoot reminded us that we were moving on course to a place where none of us had been. Bull spat – nothing from a dry mouth, and reached for his mug of coffee. Wilcox coughed, his face pale and shining, a reddish spot in the middle of each cheek: ‘We’ll go hedge-hopping after seals, tally-bloody-hunting, like we did across Cambridgeshire when we chased a string of racehorses over the hill and down again. The skipper nearly lost his wings for that.’

Nash could hardly speak from laughter. ‘And then there was that time when the old Sparks let go his trailing aerial and cut a cow in half. They couldn’t decide which plane had done it, but the Air Ministry had to pay up – which was more than the cow could do!’

‘We were bloody hell-bent in those days,’ said Bull.

‘If we mow down a few seals from the rear turret we’ll live off the fat of the land, eh Nashie?’ Armatage chipped in.

‘There’s even coal to cook on,’ I said. ‘And you don’t have to get it from underground in a bucket. We’ll find a whaler’s hut for shelter. Stranded or not, we’ll be snug.’

‘I prefer civilization,’ said Rose, ‘on the whole.’

‘Why not speculate on all possibilities?’

‘Speculate, my arse,’ said Bull.

Rose rinsed his irons in the bowl, dried them on the teatowel hanging from its hook, and put them into the top pocket of his jacket. ‘I’ll say no to that one, if you don’t mind.’

I went back to the wireless with my mug of coffee, and wondered how we would survive if the flying boat couldn’t take off. I was not so appalled at the idea as I should have been.

10

The plane was a workshop. Shottermill had obviously left a few packs of gaudy banknotes in the right places, otherwise how could we have set off with such lethal goods? I turned to see people lifting and carrying, serpentine belts of ammo around their necks. Curses were frequently shaped on their lips because the interior frame of the flying boat was lined with sharp corners.

Nash levered an assembled gun towards the rear turret. The Aldebaran was being set for defence, and it did not matter against whom or what. ‘Something’ll turn up, you can be sure. And if it don’t, we ought to make it. Otherwise, what’s life for?’ But he was sweating and breathless, and put the gun down after a few feet. ‘We had armourers to do this in the war, and I’m not as young as I was.’

Bennett need not have left the flight deck to see that work was up to scratch, because Armatage was sufficiently competent as an armourer to forget toothache, overcome his disability from drink, and rig twin guns in the mid-upper. The crew had been chosen well, and in our pre-lunch talk the skipper had made sure of me. Bull went to assist Nash, and they managed the labour between them.

I could make no sense out of the distant twittering on eight megacycles but, thinking that contact might come from that quarter, scoured to either side of the band. There was nothing for us. The plane was losing height. Cloud melted away except for what seemed like a line of grey bushes to the south. Hard to think of the Pole as being a point from where any straight line away from it went north. The cobalt sea glowed in the sun. My ears popped, playing a tune. Taking off the headset, a deep breath brought engine noise roaring back.

I looked out in the hope of seeing a ship. So much water was a transparent envelope around the earth, waiting only to be pierced by a spike of land. Maybe ships had been visible while I listened at the radio, but the world had now gone back to water, and our contraption was a flimsy habitation that might crumble any moment into a tangle of wreckage from which none of us would swim.

I returned to the friendly embrace of atmospherics, from whose noise some message of support might come, an item of interest or mystery to rejuvenate the brain. After a while cataracts of static became a form of elemental life, like being in the stomach of an animal big enough to contain the universe. If I closed my eyes there were colours, cobalt and magenta stippled with pale orange, a complicated pattern battling against itself, unharmonious because no morse impinged. The noise of the atmosphere was channelled into my headset via the aerials and receiver. In order to miss no signal lurking among the noise, I kept the volume high, the din almost overpowering.

I began to hear signals that did not exist, perhaps the bleep of a transmitter tuning in, or a string of dots and dashes that made no sense, coming and going but only to tantalize. The next stream resembled bars of music, of no recognizable tune, and too fast to be intercepted. I was amused at how they could deceive an old hand like me. Rose glanced in my direction because he imagined I was listening to a broadcast of ITMA.

Figures and letters appeared on the notepad, my hand willing to write anything rather than be inactive; but all I produced was a dozen signs at most, and wondered what marcolin on the tailplane scratched signals into the atmospherics with webbed feet or clawed fingers. Perhaps a pair of stations on the Antarctic coast fifteen hundred miles south worked their two-way traffic, using callsigns in no handbook. Had they spotted us on a sophisticated form of long-distance radar? Only the continual brain-battering static could create such ludicrous ideas.

A garble of faint squawks resembled voices. I turned down the CW switch, but could not bring them clearer. My receiver, superheterodyned for wireless telegraphy, was not ideal for getting speech. Feedback and distortion made readability difficult. Given the static that deadened my eardrums and induced a kind of half sleep at my set, why did I think they were voices at all? And if I didn’t hear them, what put the idea into my head? Craving company, perhaps I had conjured them out of the ether, suggesting I was losing my attachment to reality after barely six hours out. Voices or not, they were too garbled to decipher. If they had been understandable, what effect would they have had on our flying boat? That was the crux of the matter, if there was a crux, and if any matter existed, which I was beginning to doubt. Perhaps they were too far off to read, and it was only a question of time before the words became plain.

When I heard them again, slightly off frequency, I listened as if a needle had pierced my eardrums. I turned up the volume in the hope of surprising a word before the static became equally loud. It couldn’t work, of course. But art is often artfulness. A distant voice sounded like a slobbering idiot in the corner of a bare room trying to sing something he had heard twenty years ago. No amount of fine-tuning could get him to remember it. You try everything, however.

I couldn’t delay informing Bennett of a mysterious harmonic or frequency echo from some far-off broadcasting station that had a twang of the radio-telephone in its tone. He left Wilcox at the controls, and stood near me. ‘How far away?’

‘Can’t tell, Skipper. A few hundred. Or a thousand.’

Electric waves travel at 186,000 miles a second, so what’s the odds? I thought.

‘More than a thousand?’

‘It could be.’

He gripped the receiver so tightly I thought he would yank it out of the fixture. ‘It must be near the islands.’

‘Might not be.’

‘Did you get a bearing?’

‘I tried. It’s all over the place. Could be behind us – along the reciprocal.’

Sweat ran down his face. ‘Why tell me, unless you’re sure?’

‘You asked me to notify you.’

He listened. The voices had gone. Pulling out a handkerchief to mop his forehead, a screw of paper drifted towards Rose’s table. ‘Keep at it. Next time, I want something definite.’ He went back to the controls.

Would I tell him as quickly? He wanted to know. So did I. Then he’d know. God knows why he wanted to. The air around the world was full of noises. Pitting himself against that kind of play would get him either into a dead-end or a million fragments. The same with me, but I had to try, detach myself from the flying boat, become disembodied, attain a state of equilibrium, power of manoeuvre, and discrimination so that I would appear as an enigma to any outsider who might be trying to fox me with his intermittent sending. The difficulty in achieving any kind of success enthused me. To attempt the near hopeless induced humour, which gave way to a spirit of beneficial calm.

I must not seem anxious to begin measures for our defence. Hurry would create suspicion. I had to separate the imagined from the real and, having decided what was real, assuming I was in a fit state to do so, try to make sense from what I heard. If I hurried to find out, by tapping my morse key and asking direct, I would have little chance of success, and play right into their hands. Success was a term by which nothing could be measured, at this stage.

After a sunshot, and working out his spherical triangle – Rose sometimes liked to do things the hard way – he stood up and stretched himself. By a quarter turn I noted his movements, for any twitch within eye-shot was a marked event in our progress. There was a naval tidiness about a flying boat and, seeing the paper that had fallen from Bennett’s pocket, Rose picked it up.

I measured time by my wrist watch set to Greenwich, other indications being the number of meridians crossed. Stations popped up from a quarter of the world but, being on radio silence, time ceased to exist as far as events were concerned. Locally, it was midday, but we were not due to sight Kerguelen till five in the morning. With a favourable wind we travelled south easterly at 120 knots air speed, the crackling ether so loud it sounded as if a giant saw was cutting the earth in two. No instructions tied me to my set, only a congenital burden of having to pass the time usefully, so when static threatened irreversible deafness (except when a message of ‘Z’ time landfall at Bombay was picked up from a Royal Mail ship) I went down to the galley for a stroll, where I expected to see Rose, because he was no longer at the chart table.

Armatage was putting the finishing touches to the mid-upper. Bull was completing installations in the front turret, and Nash was doing the same in the tail. Bennett and Wilcox were on the flight deck. Appleyard slept in his bunk, a copy of Lilliput fallen onto his chest. I flipped through to the nude, then put it back.

The galley was empty, and on touching the handle of the door to Bennett’s room I heard a noise. I acted like a somnambulist. My eyelids had two mattresses pressed on them, and sleep was my only wish, but as soon as the door began to open I awoke as if I had already dreamed of pushing it hard and had come out of the dream without knowing. Inside I saw Rose by the table holding a notebook and a sheet of paper. Both of us shivered as if stricken instantaneously with malaria. The good side of his face was as white as the paper, and I guessed he must have thought I was Bennett coming in.

He had only to say he had been sent to get something, and I would have retreated, for I was hardly inside. His shock was bigger, and a jolt underfoot made him lean on the table, and put the book back under the chart. But he kept the paper, and clutched my arm. His lips trembled, and he almost pushed me.

‘What are you up to?’

‘We’ve got to talk,’ he said.

I clambered over heaps of stores and followed him halfway to the rear turret. We crouched by a pile of sacks, boxes and mooring tackle. ‘What about?’

He waited, as if to get his breath after running half a mile, then he showed me the paper, on which the only thing written was a crew list. ‘You can hear, but you haven’t got eyes to see.’

I didn’t understand till he pointed to three names with crosses pencilled against them. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘This paper fell from Bennett’s pocket.’

‘I know. I saw it.’

He took the paper back, as if afraid I would eat it. ‘He’s put a cross against your name, mine and Wilcox’s.’

I lost patience. ‘The bloody flight crew. But so what?’

‘Not against his own.’

I still didn’t get it.

‘We’re the ones he’ll dispose of.’

Wireless operators face an occupational hazard of going off their heads for no known reason, but I had not so far seen anything similar happen to a navigator. ‘Too many sunsights have done for you. Kick somebody out of their bunk and take an hour’s snooze.’ I felt I was in a flying lunatic asylum. ‘He can’t do without us, and you know it.’

‘I thought so, too. But he’s also a navigator. In that notebook it says we fly north to Ceylon. He wants to get rid of us. Maybe the gunners as well – even Nash. With all of us out of the way, no one will be able to say where he got his gold. There won’t be any but him and Nash to share it with.’

I laughed. ‘He used that notebook to work out every hypothetical getaway route, and it doesn’t mean a thing. He’s not a Roman emperor. You forget those who financed this expedition. He can’t do them down – nor would he.’

He wondered, from his glare, what else you could expect from a Group Two Trade wireless operator. ‘He’ll give them the slip, as well.’

I was rocking. The scheme would make sense, if I could become sufficiently insane to believe in it. He said calmly: ‘It fits as neatly as a cocked hat – the whole scheme.’

‘Let’s get back on duty.’

I needed to think. A wireless operator listening to static can do so, but a navigator can’t, otherwise he makes mistakes, adding where he should subtract, or putting his pencil on the wrong column in the Book of Tables. He pushed me aside, and made his way through the plane.

In order to spare my brain the deadening drumfire of static I wondered if Bennett’s idea really was to get home with only one other member of the crew. If so, who was the lucky man? The slip of paper need not have given any indication. Perhaps the final duo would be Bennett and Rose, or Bennett and Wilcox, or even Bennett and me. Even the person he marked down to live would not finally survive. The golden hoard would be Bennett’s alone. If Bennett had chosen a gunner in taking over the flying boat, the obvious candidate was Nash, who could keep a secret better than any of the others.

The game might be carried a stage further. Should Bennett cease to exist, Wilcox could fly the plane. Rose also had the ability. Both could at least make some kind of pancake landing. But I doubted whether Rose or Wilcox had any notion of reducing the crew, sure that Bennett had wondered the same – if he had wondered anything at all. They were not that kind of people. Wilcox was ill, in spite of hectic optimism, and in no state to fly the plane for long. The others would not try to take the plane because they did not have the experience of command. They couldn’t care less. As a crew they kept their feelings close, and lacked the personality to forge such a plan. Neither would they be accomplices of Bennett’s.

Such a wonderful self-told tale kept me occupied while my ears flattened against the crackling emptiness of the ether. In no way was I distracted from listening. As a counterweight to deadness, the possibility sharpened the keenness of my ears. Once on civilized dry land, and the job finished, I would smile to recall such suspicions from inside and out, and laughingly remember it as if some tap-chatting card of the morse code fraternity had transmitted the latest joke about ice-cream vans at the South Pole.

My hand shook as it hovered over the key, knowing that an unnecessary contact might bring disaster. I was caught in the trap of being the only one able to open a window of our enclosed world and alter the turning wheel of fate. My suspicions were ludicrous, yet I couldn’t let go the idea that I must take note of my feelings. The warnings from both sides were as clear as if they had come in at strength five from some guardian wireless station deep in myself, whose existence I had not known till this moment. Whatever words I keyed out, no one else on board would know what they meant. They read morse, but not at the speed I could send. The language was mine alone, and the responsibility belonged only to me.

But the sending could not be done in secret. I was visible to Rose and Wilcox, and my relays might be heard clicking over the intercom. I had to keep silent, but what did that matter when such feverish and lunatic speculations meant that there was no reason to send anything at all?

11

We were in a sunspot: duration unknown, dimensions beyond the scope of mensuration, not even a far-off coast station on which to focus the old needle, a feeling of timeless loss which made it easy to wonder whether Rose was out of his mind, or Bennett quietly loco, or Wilcox dying of TB, or Armatage about to pop down the chute from too much booze – or whether I ought to have my brains tested for trying to decide how many of us were, in fact, beyond the blue horizon. The eternal sandpaper of static rubbed the eardrums with little variation. The doldrums were in the ether rather than half over the sea.

Wilcox’s cough was sawing through his windpipe. His eyes glittered, and a smile of confidence in God’s benignity when the hacking paused made him appear that he would be almost grateful to go when the time came. Armatage was often drunk and hearing voices. Bull tended to be surly and quarrelsome, while the normally stolid Nash had been reinforcing his spirit with benzedrine pills since installing the Brownings, so that at least he and Appleyard seemed sufficiently level-headed to be trustworthy in a crisis.

For myself, the messages I intercepted went in circles, a snake whose tail was in its mouth, saying that if what Rose surmised turned out to be true, our worries were as good as over. We would be dead when the circle broke. Yet there was many a step between imagination and reality, though how could you expect anyone with a persecution complex to know that? The question I put to myself lacked subtlety. Born of distrust rather than enquiry, answers were unrewarding. Would we be killed on shore at Kerguelen? Or would the flying boat take off and leave us to fend for ourselves? Again, who was Bennett’s accomplice besides Nash? More important, would I, Rose or Wilcox be the first to go?

Credence was not as firm as it ought to have been that Bennett would refrain from slaughtering his old crew on the last great flying boat journey for something so paltry as a bigger share in the profits. To ignore the evidence was stupidity or laziness, a way of hiding fear. Rose had passed his trepidations on to me, in whom continual static induced nightmares, and I wondered whether I should transfer them to Wilcox, and observe his reaction – supposing he wasn’t too ill to notice.

The flying boat slipped, lifted, fell into another of God’s pockets, then righted itself. I looked out of the port hole. Bennett descended through rain cloud to sea-level, overtaking the green and rolling combers to each crest and then down again. No wonder I couldn’t get much range on the wireless. My guts were turning, but after a few minutes of such flip about, he held us straight, while the altimeter was checked for zero, leaving nothing to chance for the landing. Then we gained height.

I could only smile at Rose’s fantasy that the best of flying boat skippers would put such a scheme in hand. But if Rose was mad, how far would we get with him in a straitjacket? All the way, if we worked hard. The paper had accidentally fallen from Bennett’s pocket. I thought he had done it deliberately. Rose disagreed, apt to regard his own mistakes, however trivial, as mental deterioration. Even if temporary, no one was exempt, but when you dropped a clanger there was always a subtle warning to tell you that you had, and with concentration you could find it out. He whispered as much to me when we were back at our stations. When the sunspot over Bennett’s consciousness cleared, and he discovered the loss of the paper, he would assume that one of us had picked it up.

We stood at the bottom of the ladder. ‘I couldn’t care less,’ I said.

‘That attitude will get you nowhere.’

‘It got me here.’

‘It’ll keep you here. Or under the bog with a penguin pecking at your liver. The French claim Kerguelen, and to go there and recover the treasure from under their noses is illegal, old boy.’

‘The mission’s difficult enough, without Bennett disposing of people he’ll need to get the plane to wherever he decides to head after his gold’s stowed aboard.’ I climbed up, and put on the earphones. I cared very much, not wanting to alarm Rose in case the others noticed his disturbance.

Static was less intense, and I swung the needle till a jazz band sounded like a juggernaut whose unoiled axles were squeaking and grinding over the stones. I got back onto my listening frequency, wondering if I should tell Bennett that we had his death list. He would think I was as much off my head as I considered Rose to be out of his. We would only know that the note had any significance if Bennett got up from his seat and carried out a square search for what he had lost.

We hadn’t long to wait. He came loud and clear over the intercom, speaking calmly, yet seeming a shade on the still side of breathlessness.

‘What I don’t want is for any of you to keep a diary, or make notes, or start letters which you won’t have the opportunity to finish – or post. Filling in diaries while on board will be frowned on, because all details of this trip must be kept secret. Your memories must black out whatever takes place. At the end of our journey, navigation and wireless logs will be handed in. Stray chits for calculation, or bits of paper containing call signs, or inside-out pieces of cigarette packets with engine performances or fuel consumptions scribbled on them will be handed in to me. In other words, whatever happens is not to be communicated to the press, nor any information given to people not permitted to receive it. Everything is restricted, and for official use only. That is to say: ours, and nobody else’s. But mostly I’m talking about diaries and journals, because none of us want to be incriminated for minor breaches of the international navigation laws which we might inadvertently make. It’s too easy for written evidence to be used against us in a court of law.’

He was talking to himself.

‘Roger,’ I said.

So did Rose.

Then Wilcox and the others gave their assent.

Nash added: ‘I never wrote anything in my life, Skipper. It’s not my style. If I don’t keep a log, I don’t have to cook it!’

Bennett laughed. ‘Hi-di-hi!’

‘Ho-di-ho!’ said Nash.

I tucked the notes I had made into my left flying boot. If he expected me to eat them, or turn the wad in, he couldn’t have been more wrong. He hoped one of us would produce that scrap of paper so mindlessly dropped. Rose winked, and I gave the thumbs-up.

I tapped out a few signals, hoping none of the crew would hear, but the contacts bled all over the intercom.

‘Splashing a bag of Dolly Mixtures across the sky, Sparks?’

‘Only testing, Skipper. I disconnected the aerial.’

‘Didn’t sound like it. If God gets a bearing on us, we’re doomed. He’s a sharp old bastard.’

‘He’d have to be, to get that.’

‘So pack it in. When I say we’re on radio silence, don’t play roulette with those nursery-coloured clickstops. Put the silencer on your heartbeats – like me. Everything provides a fix for some big-eared operator in the sky, or on the sea. Any more playing around and even the Radio Doctor won’t get you going again. Just grow up, and do as I say. There’s always someone in the world sharper than you.’

I saw his back, solid and unmoving, protecting his heart, keeping a straight course and constant speed, as if he didn’t even trust the automatic pilot.

‘Tore a strip off you, did he?’ said Wilcox.

I gave him the fuck-off sign, and fished into my bag for the Smith and Wesson. With enough rounds for all emergencies, it nestled solidly among my possessions, the cold-comforter from Malaya that I was glad I’d got. Fired at Bennett, the great plane would cone into the sea before Rose and I (and maybe Wilcox) could get him out of the seat and set the kite back on an even keel.

My brain was no good. I had betrayed myself. To pit my endurance against the circling rush of electrified air was all I could manage. Murderous action was only fit for a theatre, preferably while I watched and, when excitement became too intense, hoped the curtain would descend and leave me with my own inactive reality.

Bennett inhabited the whole stage because, at one with his imagination, he felt no division such as that between the two that lurked in me. He sat at the controls of a world that was bigger to him than any other, as if not even God could break the unity of his cast-iron obsession. I contemplated destroying him before he could lead us into danger. But that would mean entering the zone of his obsession, where all thought would be clouded, and success elude me. The only way to fight was to get back to work, and establish a life-line to the outside world.

The more I searched, and found nothing, the more vulnerable I felt the flying boat to be. Instead of holding the loaded gun at Bennett’s back I pinned myself to the tuning dials, knowing that nothing short of disaster could lift any of us from our private worlds. I heard Royal Navy ships sending to each other, and to Trincomalee in Ceylon. Their call signs seemed as far off as the Line of Capricorn, and pipingly distinct. They were the great morse-soloists of the age, brisk telegraphists whose machine-like rhythm was a pleasure to listen to. I noted their direction, and wanted to know whether they were frigates, destroyers or survey ships; whether they weren’t caught in the flurrying tail of a monsoon, or smudges of smoke on the placid sea. What was the purpose of their manoeuvres? I looked out, as if beyond the earth’s curvature, to force ship or plane into vision. But from the window of my flying radio shack, there was empty sea, and my effort at hallucination could not populate that vacant water.

I was glad to get back to my place, where the faintest squeak was backed by an intelligence that had initialled its duration and the leap of its distance – the Heaviside ricochet piercing the static racket. Whatever had diminished the power of its pure note, and furred the lines of clarity on its way from the transmitter, must be the same force that prevented me asking questions by which I might have bottled all problems up. Nothing could be done to cure my impotence, however, or resolve my ignorance. I had always been shifted by fate, something which I had known long ago.

Perhaps the Navy ships had nothing more to say. I missed their robust precision. From our freebooting flying boat the tenuous connection of their signals had comforted me, and now their absence exaggerated my isolation. Rose called out a course correction, and Bennett took us a few degrees to port. The local time was ten minutes to five in the afternoon. A ceiling of highball cumulus, speckled cloud ragged at the edges of its denser parts, formed at twenty thousand feet, sun filtering through bars which kept us prisoners from the universe beyond.

I was divided between regret at having signed on, and enjoying the adventure I had let myself in for. Harmony could only be maintained by doing my job. But the split, being necessary, would need a third of me to keep them under control, which led me to wonder what other part of me would keep them in order? Only all states fusing into one, and fuelled by the conveniently forgotten split, could ensure self-preservation.

In the meantime, as dusk came on, I had to accept that there was no safety for one unless there was safety for all. The next moment I told myself again that I couldn’t care less, but the part of me that knew better, earthed as much as it could be in such a place, continued to search the ether.

12

Dusk was gunmetal blue, and smelled of sulphur. There was an ominous wall of cloud to climb over, or fly under, or get around, and I could think of nothing except what we would find on the eastern side after travailing all night along the cone-like convergence. The new day would bring us to the island, and events beyond that were too much in the unknown to contemplate. But the darkness remained, and though my awareness of Bennett’s intentions and Rose’s fears had faded, and questions as to our future seemed irrelevant, I vacillated in mood between feeling entirely beleaguered and fitting in with the general pattern. I could not think why the night would demand all my attention, but decided that no matter what conflict erupted among the crew, I would remain as the radio operator whose duty it was to stay on watch for whatever information I could obtain to keep the plane secure. The flying boat was our world, and I did not want the world to end. Against the bumps of the elements it was flimsy, but the enclosed space was safe, and I was the ears of its inhabitants, doomed though they might be, able to hear from the outside, as well as having eyes with which to bear witness on the inside. Being the sort of person I knew myself to be was the extent of my power. I could fulfil my function, nothing more.

Bennett took off the automatic pilot and made a frontal attack on the looming battlements of cloud. Static became pandemonium at the airless pockets we fell into, and at the precipitous updraughts that sent us leaping. On the flight deck water beaded across the perspex. Through the turbulence I kept a grip so as not to be thrown off my feet.

At my set the static of the world converged for a conference at dusk, the worst time for reception. I searched for one clear voice of morse, however irrelevant, but every frequency was swamped. A rolling stone gathers no morse, I said to Rose, and settled on the 6500 HF DF frequency, sliding to one side or the other but getting little more than indecipherable squeaks.

The stars had gone, as if they had vanished with us into the spongy barrier of cloud. From the side hatch the propellers purred normally, seeming to make little noise. Grumbling underfoot felt like the earth giving way. I disregarded the yawing of our boat in the ocean-air, and my gyro-stomach took control. Swathes of rain and sleet slewed the canopy, and Bennett eased us through a series of alarming bounces, not yet over the top into clear air.

The lamp glowed, and I gladly returned to the semicircular window of my radio-face with its indicator lines of different colours. Someone stood nearby, and I pulled half a world of static from one ear to see Nash lighting a cigarette. ‘The storm’s very pretty. I watched it from the mid-upper, but every flash gave me a pain in the arse, so I came down.’

I tapped the set with my pencil. ‘A storm like this makes me want to talk – about this one-eyed expedition, maybe.’

‘If you’ll stop listening to Dick Barton or Mrs Dale’s Diary on that clapped out wireless, perhaps we will. Follow me to the rear turret. Tell Rose you’re going for a kip, or he’ll want to join in the pow-wow.’

Old fliers, with more than the five senses, can pick the air to pieces like a bird, and find a way through. Bennett pressed on regardless. The cloud ceiling rippled below, but in the distance was an archipelago of holes – dark pink and dirty grey, a purple band circling the sky, a well-advanced dusk I had never seen before and thought I wouldn’t see again.

Darkness faded the rosy view. More cloud ranges bordered the northern sky. Streaks of white fire snaked themselves into the sea, one after the other, and no sooner did they hit water than they were as if by magic transferred back to the sky, to descend again, up and down, as if they would go on until the sky burned itself out. Closer to hand, Venus was rising, and shone on the sea.

I followed him down the temple of the fuselage. Half in and half out of the turret, his back to the guns, he resembled a gnome in spite of his bulk, outsized perhaps, and balancing to avoid too heavy a grip. His glint was amiable, but the lower lip showed anxiety. The boat grumbled underfoot as I crouched, and wondered how I would know if he was telling the truth, or whether there was any truth left to tell. Curiosity satisfied meant being told the worst more often than it meant knowing the best.

‘The stars are flashing their peepers, so Rose can find out where we are. The skipper would like to know, I expect.’ He shuffled his feet. ‘I could never abide not seeing stars when we were on ops, even if it was dangerous. When I can’t see stars or the ground, my level goes, if you see what I mean. Being in fog or cloud always scares me. I might see something I don’t like, though I can’t think what that would be. Or we might smash into a house, or a ship, or a cliff-face even though we are at ten thousand feet. My bloody sins coming back to haunt me, I expect, if it’s anything at all.’

I moved to get at my cigarette case. ‘Bit late to talk about our sins.’

He spat, though nothing came, then struck a match for our smoke. ‘There’s no time better than now when it comes to atonement.’ The light which united us showed him to be smiling. ‘But what I can’t understand is why a young chap like you volunteered for this sort of job. What the heck have you got to atone for?’

‘If I knew I wouldn’t be here, though if you ask me where I would be if I weren’t here I don’t think I could tell you.’ His jungle of atonement had no attraction for me, as he surmised, but I told him I was here because of money, adventure, work and a broken marriage. If he reversed the order he might well get it right.

‘I thought there was more to you than met the eye.’ We smoked, and listened to the test-bed grind of the engines rather than to our own thoughts. Darkness brought more ease, screened us from peril, and generated a denser element of companionship. ‘Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?’ he said at last.

‘I thought religion and politics were out on this trip?’

‘Well, we’re not in the French Foreign Legion, either,’ he said. ‘But nothing will be out before it’s ended. Bennett’s on a treasure-hunt, and there’ll be no let-up till it’s over. The gold’s got to be lifted quick, because we aren’t the only people after it. Someone knew enough to set another combine working against us, but we’re on our way there first, as far as we know. If they should see our fuel ship and board it, they’ll find nothing, because the stuff will already be away – by flying boat. Bloody neat, eh?’

We sat through the space of two cigarettes. ‘The trouble is,’ he went on, ‘that Bennett lives in a world of his own. Nobody can get at him. But it’s important to the rest of us that we know everything, so you’ve got to listen for any ship close enough to bash out morse so strong it parts your hair: it’s bound to be on the same game as us, because no others get to where we’re going – except maybe the odd whaler. Tell me as well as Bennett all you hear. You’ll earn your keep, and our gratitude.’

It was wise not to show emotion or surprise at being plainly asked to divide my loyalty between him and Bennett. The reason did not seem clear, and if it had maybe I would have liked his advice even less. I was jolted as if, sitting in a room with a clock on the shelf, I began to hear its ticking again, when in fact it had never stopped. The noise of four engines rushed back into my ears as the war-surplus flying boat churned its airscrews through black sky, leaving a wake of exhaust fumes, the only roar for thousands of miles, and undetectable because no other vehicle was within range. We had the air to ourselves.

‘There’ll be hardly a pint of juice left in each engine by the time we get there,’ he said. ‘If these tail winds weren’t pushing us along we’d have a ditching to look forward to. I’ll certainly be glad when we’re bobbing about on that fjord like a cork in the sink at Christmas!’

‘I can’t understand why we’re so well-armed,’ I said: ‘Browning machine guns seem a bit excessive.’

He reached out and patted their grips. ‘They aren’t for shelling peas. Nor are we going to make a wartime shit-picture. It might be all show, but it would be a shame if we got everything on board and somebody tried to pull it away from us.’

‘But who?’

He stood up, about to push by me. ‘I can’t see into the future. But if anybody tries to get that gold from us, I’ll blast ’em out of sky or water, let me tell you.’

I was aware of Bennett, immovable at the controls, mindless in his set purpose. Our lives were in his hands. But they had been in our own individual hands before we had delivered them into his. ‘Are you glad to be on this trip, Nash?’

He turned, still stooping. ‘I’d rather be here than in jail, which is where I was three months ago. I’ll never go there again. It’s paradise being here, compared to that.’

‘Paradise can sink,’ I said.

He grunted, and went on his way before me, saying: ‘I’d rather go down from paradise than from any other place.’

13

When an aircraft on 6440 kilocycles informed Cape Town – ZSC – of his time of arrival from Durban – ZSD – his morse had a hollow tone, like someone clapping hands in the distance. I passed their messages to Bennett, but he stuffed the paper in his chart bag. ‘No action.’

Caught by the hiss of ether, thermionic valves worked overtime trying to interpret the emptiness. The headset was my balaclava comforter, supplying atmospherics that sounded like a load of gravel shooting from the back of a tip-up lorry.

Another shadow dissolved mine under the angle-lamp. Bennett’s eyes were surrounded by grey flesh. ‘Tell me as soon as anything happens. You’re the only one who can.’

Why me? There was no answer. He left Wilcox at the controls and went down the ladder. What plain talk entered the earphones would be pounded out myself, sending me through a black hole and searching along the space lanes, away from a world whose morse no longer made sense. Now that Bennett had gone to rest I could transmit. Wilcox was too concerned with keeping the artificial horizon and his splintering coughs in synchronization to notice, though what messages I would send, and to whom, I did not know. I could hear from further away than my signals would reach, but even with a more powerful transmitter my text would be distorted beyond readability.

Even so, I was tempted to put my hand on the key and try to contact another soul beyond the flying boat’s periphery. Perhaps a ship was close, though few kept continual watch, while those that did were unlikely to come this way, and the frequency they listened on had little range. What would I say? I did not know, but maybe: Who are you? Where are you? Can you hear me? QRA? QTH? QRK? If he replied, I might enquire: Why am I here? But there was no ‘Q’ Signal for that. Never ask questions that cannot be answered, otherwise there will be no end to what you want to know. Yet an end was needed, was vital, though you may never get it. Emptiness is a desert, whether sky or water, and being in the wilderness tells you that there is no limit to sense or consciousness. Send that on your morse key and see how far it gets you! Mad bastard! Give us the proper griff, the pukka gen. Whatever there is to seek, you will not find it there. Your dots-and-dashes go into space, and vanish from weakness. The same with thoughts, unless there is a God to count the ricochets back into your heart and explain why you are alive.

Circular reflections induce fatigue. What grip is to be got on space? Nash asked why I had come, and I could have replied that if you have to there’s no alternative. No one can tell why, though if a reason has indeed triggered off your impulse then you are faced with the fact that no reason can prevail against an impulse. It is useless to argue, or otherwise repine at the fundamental vagaries of fate. But do not come out the same as you went in.

‘Some char, Sparks. It’s the Relief of Mafeking. Everybody’s nodding off. If it wasn’t for Wilcox, the kite would have pranged by now.’

‘Don’t get that biscuit tin near the tapper,’ I said, ‘or a short circuit’ll send a howl of pain through the sky.’ Appleyard laid a stack of biscuits like a gambler’s winnings on my log book. ‘It’d sound as if somebody’s stepped on a mongrel’s leg, and Sirius would jump a mile. He wouldn’t like it.’

‘He’d have to lump it, then. One sugar, or four?’

‘Is it strong?’

‘Enough to rot a wedding ring. No bromide, though, like in the old days.’

‘Put in a couple, then take your bucket to Rose. He can do with a drop before his next star sight. Tell him that the bright pointer of the Southern Cross is coming up abeam, if I’m not mistaken.’

The tea separated nerve wires at the back of my eyes. I heard them pinging, and was awake, thoughts once more in a Ben Hur race. Chasing gold was not for me, unless of another sort, but of what quality I hardly knew. My place was with Anne, though not in the state I had left her. She would never want what I craved. We couldn’t exist together, so there was no point in hankering. I was as alone as everyone else in that airborne assembly of walking wounded.

Rose must have given Wilcox notice before getting star sights, because it felt as if we were cruising over black velvet. Every man froze at his station. If the engines went fatally and we were forced to ditch, we would know our position to within five miles or so, which was some comfort, providing Bennett allowed me to send an SOS before smacking the chop.

I pressed my finger to emit one dot – breaking radio silence by the single letter ‘E’. What information would anyone get from that tick of electricity in their earphones? Only the fact, according to Bennett – who did not hear that shortest letter of the morse alphabet while he slept – that another transmitter was close by.

One part of me had surely known of my intention, but the other did not. That which knew had got the upper hand, while the other was aware of nothing. To accept responsibility for the error that had been committed, I needed to believe that the side which knew of my intentions had been to blame, but I could only feel guilty if that part of me which did not know had initiated the action.

I had been unconscious of outside phenomena for five minutes, proved by the last entry in my log. The crackle of atmospherics had been so deafening that no ear could have intercepted that single absconding dot – which vanished like a fish in muddy water. The only noise I can tolerate is static, out of which I gather information, or into which my thoughts melt. I prefer to be controlled by chaos rather than order. Whatever comes from order is written down and forgotten, whereas chaos rules by patience and subterfuge. When I was twelve I was walking home from school and hearing Handel’s Largo still in my ears from the classroom. Wanting to sing the words on the street, I was unable to. I’d had to wait to make my own rhythms, and send them out in morse from a stricken flying boat plunging along the wind lanes of the Roaring Forties, Antarctica to the right, and space to the left as far as Asia. ‘Where e’er you walk’ played out the letter ‘Q’ of the eternal question, and I did not know what it signified – nor ever would.

From the mid-upper turret, beyond my D/F loop and across the bows, I saw the port and starboard wing broken only by an expanse of the leading edge which glowed in the darkness. Someone switched on the mike of his intercom and blew as if to cool a saucer of tea, glad to hear even the rush of his own breath.

Sirius, the brightest star, was behind us, and I picked out Canopus to the southeast. Far in front loomed another escarpment of bad weather, and the crate would soon begin a slow climb to get over the top. A blue glow came from the flame-dampened exhausts, and through the astrodome I could just make out, inside our huge flying belly, the dim light above Rose’s navigation table, and the lamp of my wireless operator’s position. A tug at my leg was a signal from Nash to climb down.

‘You’re all to cock,’ he snapped. ‘Stick to your own trade.’

I clamped my headphones on, informing Bennett, back at the controls, that the loop aerial indicated a stormy passage.

‘I’ll go right through. Can’t afford to lose this flying wind. We’ll be longer with the murk, but will overtake it in the end. So pull in the trailing aerial.’

If it was out, and lightning struck, I would be the first to get a knocking. A gutted set and a stunned operator might be the final safeguard for radio silence, but I didn’t think Bennett would want to go that far. I got the trailing aerial in, but let it go again, thinking that maybe a dose of shock would clear my head, and that wireless operator’s roulette was a fair game to play.

Word came for safety belts, and I clipped myself in. Turning the page of my log book, I felt the secondhand aeroplane rear where no air was, then float as if on snow. The feeling underfoot was curious, as if we were held in the palm of some being to whom our flying boat was made of balsa wood. The electricity of anticipation ran through me, and my fingers moved without thought towards the morse key, which I would have pressed except that a sudden drop banged my knees at the table, and forced wide open eyes to witness every angled corner.

Rose, huddled over charts, grabbed the sextant, while his Dalton computer chased a perspex ruler down the ladder towards the galley. The good side of his face sheered by the bulkhead, and I felt a pang at the thought that he would be scarred there as well – till my neck was wrenched the other way and I saw the skipper holding grimly on, stability his sole aim. Rain splashed the windscreen, and we seemed under the ocean instead of two miles above. Over the intercom a steel door banged regularly on a wet plank, never tiring, till I thought to tighten the aerial connection. Nash was secure in his mid-upper, but when the plane levelled for a moment said: ‘Do that again, Skipper!’

Which brought a curt response from Bull: ‘Nearly broke my fucking elbow.’

While Bennett and Wilcox struggled to get out of a corkscrew descent, my hand gripped the morse key as if that action alone would bring us through the storm. I felt aileron wires and rudder joints cracking under the strain, and waited for that last ounce of pressure to pitch us hell-bent into the drink. I was otherwise too wary of losing equilibrium and being slammed against the click-stops to be afraid. Stresses and strains were matched to four engines, and there was no better plane in which to have a thirteen-rounder with the sky.

‘If you believe that, you’ll believe anything,’ said Appleyard. My hand rested a couple of seconds on the key, making a letter ‘T’ which, if joined to the last symbol sent, would make ET. And what then? The floor slipped sideways and fell. I wanted to play the morse key like Niedzielski his piano, and instead of sending no more than a pip and a squeak bash out a heartache letter-telegram to Anne, explaining that my love for her was even more intense because I was in a situation where to think of it blunted my attitude to danger.

Bennett fought to get us higher, as if he had in mind a definite ceiling to the storm. Lightning danced along the wing, fixed by a trap of blue steel, which caused the plane to fall as if to get out of its way. ‘Who gave us that weather forecast?’ Nash croaked along the pipeline. ‘I’ll have his guts for garters.’

‘They won’t taste good.’ I passed on a forecast which I had not taken down:

= SOUTH INDIAN OCEAN FROM 40 TO 50 SOUTH LATITUDE BETWEEN 50 TO 60 EAST LONGITUDE FOR NEXT TWELVE HOURS STOP FALLING 933 VEERING NORTH FORCE 9 OR 10 STOP VISIBILITY I TO 2 MILES = +

A cumulo-nimbus fist struck the hull, as if we were on a rough sea meeting an anvil-rock thought to be hundreds of miles away. ‘There are tree trunks in the sky,’ Nash said. ‘Or army lorries, I can’t tell which.’

The craft levelled like a dead log, and flew miraculously for half a minute. ‘A monsoon in the wrong season,’ Bennett said. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

I composed the telegram and sent it out: Once fall in love do not give up, I told her, skip-distance and sunspots notwithstanding. Listen to own voice only, stop. Look into nightsky for your face. My sending sounded like fingernails scraping along a washboard, but there was no chance of being heard. Only the proper rhythmical thump of a real transmitter could get anywhere.

Could words of love break through by will alone? I sent a mixture of four short and three long signs, the Lucky Seven of her name going into the storm and getting nowhere, as the flying boat skated through black rain.

The night part of our trip was shortened by going easterly, yet seemed endless. Electricity hovered in and out. I felt like a fly which, primed by the good pickings of a long summer, and sensing an autumn death approaching, is filled with the strength to live forever.

The craft charged on, pushed without mercy by the wind. To move the body was a hazard. A descent to the galley might break a limb. Ordered to stay by my receiver, I searched for a significant message and, getting nothing, knew I would have to invent one. As long as operational gen was passed to Bennett, I could pluck down any telegrams and scan them for myself alone. Greetings from Anne who felt the pain of our separation would come in clear out of Portishead or Rugby:

Missing you. Come home as soon as you can. You did wrong to go. Why ever did you?

I didn’t, I tapped back.

You did. Remember? I had big trouble finding where you were.

The ether was livid with the gibbet-rope of the question mark. Do you love me? Will you ever come back? Are you serious? You never were, were you? I don’t think you ever really loved me.

I did.

You didn’t.

Well, I love you now.

Do you? How can you be sure?

I’m sure because I know.

Whipcracks of recrimination decorated the sky – till I put a stop to it. My hand on the morse key sent HAPPY BIRTHDAY. What did it matter whose? Only whales might hear, if they had the right antennae.

‘All stations are forbidden to carry out the transmission of superfluous signals. Messages must not be transmitted to addresses on shore except through an official station. Private communications are strictly forbidden.’ The rule book was peppered with such heavy type, but we were too far out for hand or eye or the ear of authority to reach, and though the power was mine, natural forces governed its effectiveness.

Rose, before being impelled to more work when we came again into the clear, dozed with his head resting on the chart table. He had put into abeyance the dread that if the overcast was higher than our service ceiling for a thousand miles in front he wouldn’t be able to get a fix and find Kerguelen. Without stars, dead reckoning would put us out by such a margin we would miss our landfall, in spite of its spread. Beyond the point of no return in fuel, we would be all but lost if the stars stayed shut. Radio bearings on Durban or Mauritius, over two thousand miles away, were no substitute for an astro fix. In any case, with so much static, I could barely distinguish call signs.

Someone had picked up my foolish telegraphic greetings to Anne, because a strong signal through the atmospherics asked who was calling, which could only have meant me. I switched the aerial to D/F, ready to rotate the loop and find his general direction.

There were longer intervals between eruptions of static. I waited for a signal from whoever had heard me sending, so as to get a bearing. Had he already taken one on me? My doodling had lasted long enough. Perhaps he had been too surprised to act and, like me with him, was only waiting to hear me send again in order to confirm our direction. My hand stayed off the key, as no doubt did his. If he asked again who was calling, I would know that he was merely curious as to who or where I was. But if he didn’t send, and waited for me to do so, he was someone to beware of.

A cold sweat clammed my forehead, and my heart thumped as if belonging to a drunken man about to zig-zag over a level-crossing with an express coming. We were flying straight, and everyone on board sighed with relief. The ship was less at the the whim of back-draughts and upcurrents. As if a work bell had sounded, Rose picked up his sextant and took readings from the astrodome. Bennett’s voice came over the intercom: ‘How’s the radio silence, Sparks?’

‘Thought I heard someone, Skipper.’

‘Any idea who?’

‘Too much interference.’

‘What did he send?’

‘Wanted to know if somebody was calling him.’

‘And was anybody?’

‘Not that I heard.’

‘Did you hear, or didn’t you?’

‘There’s nothing I don’t hear if it’s hearable. I’m waiting for him to come back. If he’s somewhere close I’ll get a decent bearing.’

‘Let me know as soon as you can.’

I said something about the ungodly behaviour of skip-distance, to which he responded that, if we did but know it, skip-distance, like everything else, was anything but ungodly, though I was no doubt correct in assuming there was no method by which such phenomena could be tamed.

He left the controls, and stood close, the angles of his face emphasizing a funereal determination to push on at all costs, though it was plain that he wasn’t as fit to pilot a flying boat on an exploratory haul over the ocean as he had seemed before setting out. I had never seen anyone with a deadly illness, which fact may have suggested that I was doing so now, but the glare of his right eye made it appear dead, as if struck by blow after blow from the inside. He’s for the sick bay, I thought, but since we were still flying I supposed I must be wrong. My news of a ship somewhere ahead may have been a shock, but he kept the composure that was expected of a skipper: ‘Nail him with a bearing if you can. I’m going to the galley to see who’s working on breakfast.’

Fully determined to do as I was told, I fell asleep.

14

I lay by a stream with no clothes on. Neither had Anne, and we laughed on the grass in the sunshine as she tried to pull a rusty blade out of my stomach. The water made a hissing sound, and tree branches crackled in the wind. The knife would not come loose, but I felt no pain. When the jaunty trilling of a bird said: ‘Who is calling me?’ she stopped tugging at the knife-handle. Why should a bird ask such a question?

Neither body nor spirit, half gone and half not, I was cushioned by dreams, shorn of care or will. But I awoke instantly to hear morse singing CQ CQ CQ DE ABCD ABCD = QRZ? QTH? QRA? QRK? QSA? QRU? = + K K K and got enough of a bearing out of his garrulousness to tell that he was east-north-east, though without knowing the distance.

Perhaps I had inadvertently pressed the key while dozing, and he was trying to discover whether I had been calling him. Rose was working out star shots for our position, locking us in a box of airspace among broken bars of cloud. By the time he knew where it was we’d be some miles further on – as if we had never been there. But from that vital fix an alteration of course would make for an accurate landfall, and leave a reserve of fuel so that we could search for our alighting place. We had been airborne seventeen hours, and Wilcox had long since got the pumps working to bring the second instalment from tanks in the hull.

A bluebottle-green in the sky came and went. Nash bumped me on the back. ‘It’s downhill from now on, Sparks.’

‘I hope it’s not too steep.’ I felt grime at the eyes that only proper sleep would cure. With daylight beaming in at half past four, the hole we made in the sky moved as we moved, leaving a vacuum tadpole tail behind, a warm envelope refilled by sub-zero cold. A welcome smell of coffee spread from the galley. Appleyard was at the stoves preparing breakfast. A healthy hunger prevailed, but the skipper sent back his platter of chops and beans, and Bull who played the waiter stood by the ladder eating it with his fingers, mess-irons sticking out of his pocket. He wiped his mouth on Bennett’s linen napkin. ‘Two dinners are always better than one!’

The sky was empty, blue overhead but almost white to port where the sun stood on the horizon like the yolk of an egg looking cold enough to begrudge what warmth we might get when we landed. Morse rippled on every note of the musical scale, and there was nothing to do except let it settle, and wait for the nearby ship to ask again who was calling and why.

I had no will to track my tracker, if such he was, because the easy life was here, and for a few minutes, while breakfast was eaten, the duty I was paid to do lost its influence. If Bennett gave me a call to make I would sweat out a few pokes at the tapper, and the person I was supposed to find would no doubt come back loud and clear, wondering why the hell I had been sleeping my head off when we could have been playing an exciting game of wireless-telegraphic noughts-and-crosses.

The hollow-sounding signal began to bleed over my frequency, so I changed to the higher daytime band and reset the transmitter should I be asked to bleed back at him. I wanted to find out whether the other operator knew the day frequency. If he did, and called me, he was homing in and no mistake.

I listened, laughing to myself. The longer I waited, the more it was certain that he was exploring a few other frequencies first. We were sharpening our wits on each other.

Appleyard came up with breakfast, and a huge jug of coffee to fill our mugs. ‘We’ll soon be at Kerguelen,’ I said.

‘Where’s that?’

‘I never know where a place is when we fly there,’ I told him. Nash bustled up the monkey climber to join the queue: ‘Pull your finger out. I’m croaking.’

I winked. ‘Do you know where Kerguelen is?’

He cleared his throat, and paused before drinking. ‘I did ask the navigator, but he didn’t know. When he asked somebody in Blighty, they told him all he had to do was to go to fifty degrees south latitude, then turn left for a couple of thousand miles, being sure to cut all meridians at the same angle. I expect he’ll get us there.’

‘Sounds like something from Alice in Wonderland,’ I said.

Armatage looked up. ‘I was born in Sunderland.’

‘Didn’t know there was such a place,’ said Nash. ‘Did you, Sparks?’

‘Thought it was blown up in the war.’

‘I left when I was eight,’ said Armatage. ‘The old man died, so we went south. My mother lived with her brother, and so did I. He was a real bastard.’ His lower lip trembled as he reached for the plate of toast and eggs that came as a second course for those still hungry. ‘Sunderland was a lovely place, all the same.’

Nash lifted his coffee mug. ‘I’ll drink to it, then.’

‘So will I. It’s near Cullercoats, isn’t it? GCC, if I remember.’

After some talk, Nash set his empty mug on the tray and gave Armatage a nudge. ‘Come on, then, get your nose out of that trough and let’s give the guns another lookover.’

When the clandestine sender again trespassed on my beat, I jumped as if 250 volts had shocked up my spine, made worse by expecting him. He couldn’t know that he had made contact, but he had, though he seemed too wily not to realize. His morse was off-whistle, clicks like the rattle of a cup and saucer carried upstairs by a man who did not want to wake his wife until she could see his wonderful surprise. I brought him on frequency and back to the usual bird-whistle. He called every five minutes, cued in to the second, but he was fishing blind. When I passed an account of his antics to the flight deck, Bennett said: ‘Don’t answer,’ telling me that the ship certainly wasn’t that which carried our fuel for the return journey.

15

Oil pressure on the starboard inner had gone down. Wilcox wiped a red inkblot from his mouth. The engine was healthy enough. Must be the gauges. Nothing to worry about on that score. He would check oil and all contacts when we were moored. You do your job, I’ll do mine, he said. We were touchy on that point.

Bennett came up the ladder, after resting in his stateroom, but with hardly the energy to mount each step. I turned in time to hear the same ship calling for an answer. His hand shook, holding a message sheet before me. ‘Next time he fishes, send this.’

I was to use the callsign GZZZ, and make my position known as QTH 49 50 SOUTH 69 10 EAST. Bennett laughed, the dim light emphasizing his pallor. ‘They’ll search for a ship, not a flying boat: on the south side of the island instead of the north.’

Radio countermeasures had begun. All the same, he seemed unhealthily certain that they would work. ‘They may get a bearing while I’m sending.’

‘It won’t occur to them the first time. They’ll wait for a second message, which we’ll never send. So just transmit.’

And shut up. We’ll make rings around them. He thrust the paper into my hand. I’ll lose my ticket for spreading false information. He couldn’t care less. He had lost everything already, though God alone knew what it was. The rest of us didn’t matter. I’d rather walk on top of the fuselage while the plane was in flight than pump out an inaccurate position.

My hand drew back from the morse key. There was an atmosphere of tension on board. Clouds lined up on the horizon resembled an escarpment of ice. Bennett’s breath stank when, sensing my hesitation, he leaned closer. ‘Not only does our getting the gold hinge on you sending that decoy position, but our lives are going to depend on it.’

If I obeyed, I would be up the creek, in a leaking canoe, and without a paddle. Should engine trouble force us to ditch, who would answer our distress call when we had already sent one fake message? The issue was as simple as that. To pay for a falsehood with our lives was not my idea of a bargain. There was no point in telling him. The captain’s word is law. I knocked the morse key by way of assent as he returned to the cockpit, which brought such an immediate response that for a moment I believed the other operator’s signal to be no more than a freak echo of my own.

His gleeful reply registered my surrender to an illegal act. If he was listening so intently, what chance had I of sending a false position without him taking a bearing on my message and knowing soon enough that I was not where I said I was? Our dirty tricks so early on would nudge them into their own deceptions. Perhaps snares were already spread, and Bennett was right to take precautions. Since they also were after the gold, dirty tricks would be a necessity rather than an exception. Thus I justified complying with the skipper’s immoral request.

Their ship could not cover more than a single entrance or exit of the extensively indented islands. We had the location of the gold, and they would have to trace us before we could lead them to it. Because my bearing confirmed them to be north of the island, Bennett wanted me to give our QTH as being to the south, so that they would look for us in that area while we, unmolested in the northwest, could find the gold, load it, tank up from our supply ship, and take off into the wide blue yonder.

The plan made sense, but would they dance to our tune? If they already knew the location of our fuel vessel, they had only to keep it in view till we came close, as we would sooner or later have to do. Probably they had sighted nothing, but suspected that a ship (which might be us) was on its way, because my inadvertent tapping had advertised the fact to their alert operator.

To steel myself into carrying out Bennett’s instruction, I sent two dots instead of one, and no sooner had they gone than two dots bounced from the Heaviside Layer as if in an attempt to meet mine before they got into his receiver – stabs of morse that set my brain going like a jelly. But I already had a bearing on him, and he did not know. Such was his speedy self-confident response to my tap of the key, that he could not believe me to have been so quick. We were already in contact. I wanted to take full advantage of his underestimation of me, and the best way was to make sure I would not make a similar assessment of him.

The multiplying strands of the situation were hard to disentangle. To strip down a transmitter, and disembowel a receiver, and put them together again, is a matter of following circuit diagrams; but the complexity of the relationship between myself and the other operator, and between the eight of us and whatever numbers he represented, would be impossible to illustrate by any blueprint.

The result of our kittenish game was that my scruples at sending Bennett’s false position vanished, to the extent that I worried as to whether or not the one I had been ordered to transmit would get the most advantage out of our situation. Would it not be best, I thought, to hand out two position reports? First, I would send Bennett’s, on which I hoped the other operator would not get a bearing. Then the second, which would be my own, would put us two hundred miles further away from the island than we were, and it wouldn’t matter whether he got a bearing or not, because it wouldn’t in any way confirm our distance.

For Bennett’s message I would vary the note of my transmitter, and disguise the pulse of my sending to make the operator assume that we were a ship. The chart of the island showed that sixty miles separated one side from the other, with a six-thousand foot peak and sundry glaciers between. The signals of a ship on the southern shore would not bounce as evenly as those coming from a ship – especially a flying boat – approaching over level sea from the west. So apart from reducing the power of my transmitter for the first false message, I would also alter the tone, and make sure the rhythm of the morse bore no similarity to that which would bounce out the second false message to be sent later.

The scheme was like something cooked up in the officers’ mess of RAF Bigglesworth, so simple that it would trick no one. And yet simplicity was the essence of duplicity, the first step towards success. When a plot begins to unfold, only direct moves can lead to subtlety. Effects might grow out of patience and cunning, and seem no moves at all, but certain doses of noise can have the desired result. A wireless operator is not a man of action, but an interpreter and manipulator of sounds, and however much our scheme was open to detection, it was the only confusion to which we could put them.

I would be going against the skipper’s instructions in sending a message of my own, but I would do so because I was in two minds about entering into the scheme at all. Of those two minds, the primitive won, claimed acknowledgement and stated its price – which was that I should reserve the right to send a further decoy message. My own sensibility could cross from one mind to the other only at the orders of some force over which I had no control. One side of my brain deployed the values I believed in, of obedience to someone who knew more, who was older, perhaps stronger for that reason, who was rightly in command because of experience, and who deserved loyalty because not only my life but the safety of the aircraft depended on it. The other side of my brain was unpredictable and chaotic, yet equally fitted to deal with whatever seemed to be threatening us from the world beyond the flying boat.

I was also breaking the law on sending false data. Perhaps the other ship only wanted to make contact for reasons of mutual safety in an unpredictable sea thousands of miles from the depots of civilization. This I would not believe. Once the rules had been put aside, it seemed easy to disobey the skipper in our interests, and from there but a short step to deceiving another ship in the hope that it would be to our advantage.

The flying boat droned on, and I was never more part of it than now. I tapped the key twice, and the other operator, as expected, wanted to know who I was. Without preamble, and using the four letter ship’s call sign that Bennett had given, I sent the decoy location in a jazzed and rapid rhythm: 49 50 SOUTH 69 10 EAST. When the operator requested further information, I jubilantly concluded that he had not taken my bearing and now wished he had. I made as if to send what he needed to hear, at the same time diminishing my power into a natural fade out, and winding in the trailing aerial, as if the frying pan noise of atmospherics, as well as the glacier that was supposed to separate us, together with the uncertain bounce of the Heaviside Layer, had between them done for my signals.

16

The milky white of the sky was the kind from which visions came. We went through the air as if all sails were spread, but the ribs of actual green water raced each other towards land, while we were the umpire-clipper left behind. I remarked that I didn’t yet have my airlegs, otherwise I would not have noticed when the boat lost its smooth ride and seemed to strike solid but invisible rocks underfoot, but Nash, the stubbled flesh slack at his cheeks, said every tremor registered because you were never up long enough to become deadened.

The following wind which had given a satisfactory groundspeed had saved much fuel, but such luck was too good and now, instead of the prevailing westerly on which Bennett had depended, the wind backed sufficient to clip our speed by almost thirty knots. When Rose had adjusted his airplot I reflected that the change of wind had worked to the advantage of the false message Bennett had induced me to send. I had transmitted almost at sea-level when the smoke flare was released to confirm the new bent of the wind, which helped the authenticity of my morse as coming from a surface ship, and the uncertain power of our signals coincided with the supposedly intervening mountains and coastlines. Another advantage was that when our enemy (the only word I could use), believing the message to be genuine, went full steam ahead for that gold-taking vessel on the south side of the island, he would sensibly avoid the old whaling settlements on the east in case they were inhabited, and sail down the west coast instead, in which case there could be a danger of his seeing the Aldebaran approach from the west. But because the change of wind made us an hour late, there would be less chance of this.

Now that the time for my own false signal came, I wanted him to believe I was on a ship much further away, and that I was not the same person who had condescended to give him a position report twenty minutes ago. This illusion was helped by us being back at five thousand feet. Unlike his ham-fisted music, I rattled away in my own sharp style, giving him world enough and time for all the bearings he liked – though I wondered whether he had had sufficient wireless direction-finding experience to take the opportunity. His requests to make myself known – QRZ? QRA? QTH? – had been brash, the blade of his morse cutting sharply through the layer-cake of atmospherics, and so well pumped as to be almost aggressive.

Now that it was my turn, I knew that any attempt to match him would create suspicion, so I merely kept my signals healthy and distinct. No distance to travel, the flutey chirping came off a conveyor belt set into motion by my hand on the key, and I sent as if my only object was, out of courtesy and safety, to contact whoever was in the area.

A line of sun from between rolls of cloud marked my receiver. When he thanked me for my reply, I requested a weather report from his area, since I would be passing to the north on my way to Hobart. He told me to wait, meaning he had gone outside to cook one up, or was consulting with others as to whether or not I should have one. If he didn’t send any gen, my suspicions that he was not friendly would be confirmed – something he would want to avoid. But if he was not well-intentioned the report would be false, or at least unhelpful. He would reason, in the latter case, that since we were, as I had indicated, two or three days distant, it wouldn’t matter if it was false or not, because weather changes so rapidly in this part of the world that we would never be able to accuse him of having lied. He could not know that we were in a flying boat, and barely an hour away.

While he was sending I got a rough bearing – though in the phase of minimum signal I missed the temperature – and afterwards jotted down: = WIND WEST 35 KTS ............... VISIBILITY 10 CLOUD 2/10 AT 8000 SEA FRESH = + There was no certainty that close to the island the weather wasn’t spinning around in circles, but from where we were visibility was half of what he said, and the cloud base four instead of eight thousand feet. His wind direction was the opposite to the one we had ascertained with the smoke flare. But what proved beyond doubt that he was lying was that the latitude and longitude he gave in no way tallied with the bearing I had taken – as approximate as it had been under the circumstances.

My work was done. I had him taped. He would not call me for a while, and I would not be calling him. Who had used who was hard to say, but I was beyond caring, and went to the bunks where I slept as one who had no interest in the future. The scarred side of Rose’s face pushed me into sleep of a kind, and kept me away from billows of snow, but guilt with good reason weighed on me like a sack of bloody offal. I felt as if I had given up my soul.

17

We came through a three dimensional archipelago of cloud and sighted the jagged basalt of northern Kerguelen. From four thousand feet and twenty miles away, the black rock, three parts surrounded by turbulent water, acknowledged the accuracy of Rose’s navigation. We cheered. Bennett had existed by the minute to get this view, keeping his impatience in check before entering the flying boat for a long grind over the water area of Mother Earth.

We had ten minutes to look at the black cone over whose summit course would be altered towards the Tucker Straits. I had visualized Mount Oben, on the thick paper chart, as rising to a seventeen-hundred foot peak above the three-sided blue sea, witnessing a benign image when confronted by hachures surrounding a dot. I got the coast right, and the hilly configuration more or less correct, but the elements were missing, and the black rock of desolation only came alive at the impact of reality.

Rose showed no pride at his navigational success, but Nash came up to tap him on the back: ‘Bang-on! A bloody good show, Nav!’ No more than a flicker passed Bennett’s lips. His determination had driven luck before him like an explorer his dog team over the snow. From the moment he sighted Mount Oben he orientated himself by every islet and feature that he had studied four years on the chart. There were slight variations, but the view was tormented into conformity, and he hardly counted the nine main capes before turning into the allotted fjord. As each passed under the hull he felt as if he had taken part in creating the splashed shape of this island by the fact of his own birth, which he was revisiting after decades of painful absence. Mine, all mine. We weren’t meant to hear, his voice fainter over the intercom than the normal drone of instructions.

Ebony cliffs stood in yellowish vegetation along the starboard shore. Dark sand formed a moustache on either side of Elijah Cove, and shadows of brown kelp swayed in the water. The wind was feeling its way around the compass. Lines of foam streaked up the cliffs like desert religionists in white robes intent on making everyone in the world the same as themselves.

The plane bucked, and grated on its descent between rocks sticking out of the water like blunt pencils. I listened on 500 kc/s, setting the needle at the bottom left of the yellow semicircle, the volume two thirds over in spite of static, the filter button down, and the green eye glowing steadily because nothing came.

A thirteen-minute run on a bearing of 135 degrees from Elijah Cove took us by claw-like capes to where we turned south-south-easterly along narrowing straits. Headphones on a longer lead allowed me to see outside. Bennett announced action stations for Appleyard, Armatage and Bull, and I wondered why guns must be manned against such desolation, until recalling my inconclusive radio contacts at dawn.

Belly rolls of grey and white cloud hugged fjords that snaked their massive ways inland and seemed to vanish underground. Mist lifting from an island peak showed a glacier: snow lit by a gleam almost immediately doused. The plane turned ninety degrees on a southerly heading, and descended for its five-minute leg along Rhodes Bay. Cliffs with huge boulders at their feet glittered after a deluge of rain, and glacial water spread into a shallow bight.

It was impossible to tell one element from another, and I returned to search the band of hope on the radio, thinking that even to contact an enemy would be better than hearing no one. But when clipped morse spoke our signal letters, I let the magic eye wink on. Sweat melted as I got his zone of silence, the goniometer indicating him well to the southwest, where we hoped he was steaming towards the position given in our false report. I informed Bennett. The ship’s call decreased in strength as the mountains faded his signals. Bennett laughed at the success of his ruse, then ordered me to close down the radio.

The boat was held steady while Nash took a back-bearing on Hallet Island. He subtracted 49 degrees magnetic variation, and passed it to the skipper, who centred the plane for the narrows leading to the Tucker Straits. Granite slabs shelved up fifteen hundred feet along both shores, and funnelled us towards the spectacular slopes of Mount Sinai. So formidable on the journey in its fight against storm clouds, the Aldebaran now felt like reinforced cardboard, and I expected to break through the floor when the cliff struck, feet following head to suffocation under water.

We went over brown tentacles of kelp, weaving along the sleeve of the fjord and unable to see out of it. The interior of the plane seemed to darken as Bennett coaxed our hundred-foot wingspan to where it looked impossible to get through, and instead of crumbling like cardboard the old kite was urged into a forty-degree turn. I noted gulls’ nests built into the cliffs, the channel about to close forever. But Bennett flew as if he had all the space in the world, and my fear was subdued by a sudden and total confidence.

Nash came from the rear turret, and ambled up the ladder bearing the hand compass like an Olympic torch. Our way widened to an ample stretch of water, but one which seemed without exit, whose walls would cut us off from the rest of the world. We went to our stations. Veering to starboard, there were neither markers nor buoys to line up on. Rocks dotted the surface, the water calm in its protected state. We must get down without damage, or never lift off again. ‘Don’t make me cry,’ said Nash. ‘We’ve enough tools on board to rebuild the bloody thing if it prangs.’

Wilcox was going through the landing procedure with Bennett, free of his cough. Full flap and throttle back. There was no circuit, just a straight-in approach along the middle of the mile-wide water. Among the alien minefield, Bennett quipped. No rocks or snags. Going down. The channel widened. No side slip.

A wind struck beam on, rippling the water. There was one direction for landing. To try the opposite would set us among the whizz-bangs. ‘Must have been there when the sub came in with its gold,’ Nash added. ‘But the sub went out by the back door, through which the fuel ship will come to us.’

‘Can’t see any door.’

‘Nobody ever can.’ He pointed: ‘It’s in the fold of that cliff, I expect.’

Use what run you need. Not too slow. Ease back. No side slip. A touch of power on the inners. Everyone held breath, as if giving more to Wilcox whose lungs were working over the intercom, said Bull, like a bilge pump on a sinking ship. Engines and water roared. A scrape tickled my feet, but getting down so soon was too much to hope for. A glance outside, and we were taxi-ing, full flap, inner engines cut, lost in a cloud of spray tracking along the surface.

Bennett kept her moving towards a patch of sand where the anchor might grip. Getting out would be no problem, said Nash. ‘I’ve no intention of going for a Burton. Not on this bloody operation, anyway. We’d cut loose if need be.’ A slight swell developed. There were black rocks under the surface, but Bennett had an eye for sand where a stream pushed its grit into the fjord, a bay for protection from swell and storms. The engines idled. A smell of fresh snow and wet slate rushed from high ground, and jackets were fastened. I pulled in the deepest breath of my life.

The island coastline, with scores of inlets, bays and zigzagging fjords would make it impossible for anyone to find us. Bennett summed up our situation after he stopped engines. He was laughing. So were we all. I thought he would do a dance of triumph. We heard our voices again, and laughed at the fact that we were shouting. Even if they suspect we’re here it’ll take weeks to find us, by which time we’ll be away. He told Nash to let go the anchor, then passed an uncapped whisky flask to Wilcox, who doubled up from coughing and was unable to drink. So the rest of us had a stab at it.

Nash saw the heap of steel chain diminish into six fathoms. We drifted, and wondered whether the anchor had bitten. The shore receded. Anxiety was tangible as to whether the chain would snap, or the anchor drag. ‘At this stage,’ Nash said, ‘there’s no difference between mishap and catastrophe.’

With a slight tug, the boat was secure, and only then did I say to myself that we were safe.