But we were still headed straight for them.
This time it seemed that every officer aboard had found his way to the bridge for a grandstand seat, and Curtis wasn’t the only one wearing a lifejacket either. I shouldered my way through the silent silhouettes, feeling the soft breast of kapok nudging me as they stood back, still perplexedly staring ahead. In the wheelhouse I stopped beside the nervously gum-chewing quartermaster at the wheel and peered anxiously at the course board, praying to God we’d changed back to our original heading for some reason while I was below. But we hadn’t.
‘How’s her head?’ I asked sharply.
‘Steady on 143, Sir,’ the man at the wheel answered, confirming what I already knew. I glimpsed his white, scared eyes shining in the green-washed face as I turned sharply to meet the Old Man who had entered the wheel-house behind me.
‘Aye, Mister Kent… It’s got to be a different bloody ship that’s doing that little lot,’ he said quietly.
I nodded numbly. For the original firework exhibitionist to have moved through a ten-degree arc from us to the horizon meant the anonymous ship travelling some twenty-five to thirty miles in half an hour, or at sixty knots, which was impossible. Ergo — there were two separate ships. At least! My stomach started to churn acidly as I realised the implications. Our gateway to Cape Town, continuing from our present position, was clamped firmly shut.
‘I wonder what clever remark Mister Braid’s going to have up his sleeve this time?’ Evans grunted sourly, turning to face the corvette running slightly ahead of us, lit up like a Christmas tree in the glare from the distant spectacular. He didn’t have to wait long to find out.
COMESCORT TO… PARDON MY SLIP IS SHOWING… COURSE ALTERATION STARBOARD TWO FIVE DEG TO 168 DEG T REPEAT 168 DEG BEING WEST LEG OF REPETITIVE ZIG-ZAG PATTERN… STANDBY FOR FURTHER FIVE DEG PORT ALTERATION EIGHT MINUTES FROM NOW EXECUTE IMMEDIATELY SIGNED BRAID END.
Which meant that, instead of using any fancy zig-zag plan involving several alternate headings at varying, predetermined intervals we were settling for a happy medium by sailing a compensating zig-zag with only five-degree swings at firm, eight-minute intervals. We would lose less ground but the safety factor was proportionately smaller. In the chartroom the Old Man braced himself against the vicious heel of the ship as we tore round in a wide, two-point arc and settled on the new course. He deftly snatched the pencil up as it rolled across the chart and, using the parallel rules, drew a faint line from our present dead reckoning position along 170 degrees, this being the approximate mean of our new heading. We were now running well away from the West African coast, with our only possible landfall several thousand miles ahead in the region of the Norwegian island of Bouvet, around 54 degrees south. I looked gloomily over his shoulder. In the glaring light of the Anglepoise lamp our marked course over the past twenty-four hours looked like a deformed dog’s hindleg.
Evans threw down the pencil irritably and glared at the chart for a long time without speaking. Then he looked up and shook his head. ‘It’s not bloody good enough, John. A few more hours on this heading and we’ll be so far out we’ll never make good the time lost.’ He shrugged. ‘And there’s another factor to consider. Any extension of our sea time automatically increases our risk. Commander Braid may be wrong in his assumption that all the danger lies between us and the coast.’
I looked as I felt — dubious. ‘I suppose there is a time when the advantages of steering away are outweighed by the disadvantages, Sir, but…?’
He waved his hand at the chart. ‘Look at our track, man. We’re buggering about over the ocean like a man scared stiff of his own shadow. Nearly every time something’s happened it’s forced us to swing farther west. Another few imagined spectres like those and we’ll end up in bloody South America!’
‘Those lights we saw out there weren’t imagination, Sir, I said anxiously. ‘They established one solid, incontrovertible fact… that there are at least two, maybe even more, vessels between us and the coast. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. More significantly, if it had been a Royal Navy stunt we’d've been informed, while merchantmen just don’t carry that kind of illumination, so…’
He switched the light off and opened the door. The horizon had reverted to a dim, black, unbroken line on the edge of the world again, while the unexplained cascade of colour had died away as suddenly as its predecessor, leaving the darkness of the night and the twinkling stars and the only sound the rush of water past our vibrating hull. We stepped back inside and Evans switched on the Anglepoise again. He tapped the pencil thoughtfully against his teeth as I reached up and brought two cigarettes out of the old tar’s tin.
The smoke tasted good on my palate as Evans looked at me strangely and snapped the match in two. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, John, that there seems to be some kind of pattern to what’s happened recently?’
I frowned, ‘Pattern?’
‘Some form of intent, of deliberate provocation, to drive us farther and farther west. Away from the coast.’
It didn’t make any sense. ‘Why?’ I said, inhaling nervously. ‘What possible reason could anyone — the Bosch, presumably — have for doing that? I mean, even if they can anticipate our movements, which that would presuppose, then surely it would be more logical for them to sink us here and now.’
I couldn’t see it but, at the same time, something Larabee had said in another context back in the radio room after old Foley had died, jumped into my mind. I looked at the curving, erratic line on the chart again. Larabee had used the expression ‘Sheepdog’ and, from the way the lines had almost continuously veered westwards, they could be construed as the tracks of an animal being driven deliberately along some pre-determined track. We were the sheep, and the assorted U-boat scares, the Kent Star message and the mysterious displays of distant lights, the collie dogs.
‘Sorry, Sir,’ I said again, shaking my head with a certainty I didn’t feel, ‘it looks more like coincidence to me. I can’t see it as being anything deliberate, I can’t even begin to imagine any motive behind it, for a start.’
‘Neither can I, John. Not one that stands up, anyway. But, in that event, surely it’s equally likely that there could be ships farther to the south-east as well? That, to my mind, indicates that all we’re doing is chasing round in circles, putting off what will eventually be inevitable — the need for a breakthrough to the Cape.’
I didn’t like it but I couldn’t disagree. The suggestion of deliberate intent was obviously too far-fetched to be considered seriously. He seemed to come to a decision and reached for a message pad. I watched silently as he furrowed his brow then, abruptly, slid open a drawer under the table and brought out a tattered, thick old book. My eyebrows shot up in involuntary surprise as I recognised it. It was the Holy Bible.
He must have caught the look on my face because he grinned, and the big red face crinkled up into little white lines round the corners of his eyes. ‘Our friends in the Royal Navy don’t have the monopoly on humorous signals, Mister Kent,’ he murmured.
I watched him as he leafed through the pages with a deft hand. ‘I thought you said you weren’t a religious man.’
He smiled again, softly. ‘I’m not. But the Bible makes a bloody good story-book anyway, you know. There’s a lot of sense to it, even for an agnostic.’