Stratton was already at the phone. He held it to his ear, waiting. ‘Good…. Well, if you can drain off all the sea water…. Yes, we’ll try and hold her bows-on…. All right. Now what about the tiller flat? … You’ve got a man working on it? Fine…. Yes, we’ll just have to hope for the best.’ He put the phone down, glanced at the radar screen and then at me. His lips moved stiffly in a smile. ‘Hell of a time you picked to come for a sail with us.’ He glanced at the helm. The wheel was amidships again. ‘Answering all right, Quartermaster?’ he asked.
‘Pretty fair, sir.’
But we weren’t making headway any longer and Sgeir Mhor a bare mile away, directly down-wind of us. Stratton produced his packet of cigarettes and we stood there, braced against the violence of the movement, smoking and watching the radar screen. And then, suddenly, the Quartermaster’s voice announcing that the helm had gone dead. ‘Full starboard helm and not answering, sir.’
Wentworth was already at one of the phones. ‘Cox’n reports steering motors shorted. There’s a lot of water.
‘Emergency steering.’ Stratton rapped the order out and I saw the Quartermaster lean down and throw across a lever at the base of the steering pedestal.
A sea broke thundering inboard. A solid sheet of spray crashed against the wheelhouse. And as the porthole cleared I saw the bows thrown off and sagging away to leeward. It had taken a bare ten seconds to engage the hand steering, but in those ten seconds the weight of sea and wind combined had caught hold of the bows and flung them off to port.
‘Emergency steering not answering, sir.’
The ship staggered to another blow and began to heel as the wind caught her on the starboard bow. She was starting to broach-to. And the Quartermaster’s voice again, solid and unemotionaclass="underline" ‘Hand steering’s all right, sir. But not enough power on the engines.’
Only two engines out of four and the bows swinging fast now. Stratton was at the engine-room phone, but I could see by his face that no one was answering. ‘Keep your helm hard a’starboard. You may be able to bring her up in a lull.’
But there wasn’t a lull. The ship heeled further and further, and as she came broadside-on to wind and sea we were spilled like cattle down the sloping deck to fetch up half-lying along the port wall of the wheelhouse. ‘Any chance,’ I gasped, ‘of getting the other engines going?’ And Stratton looked at me, the sweat shining under the stubble of his beard: ‘How can they possibly — do anything — down there?’ I realised then what it must be like in the engine room, cooped up with that mass of machinery, hot oil spilling and their cased-in world turning on its side. ‘We’re in God’s hands now,’ he breathed. And a moment later, as though God himself had heard and was denying us even that faint hope, I felt the beat of those two remaining engines stagger, felt it through my whole body as I lay against the sloped steel of the wall.
I have said that panic is a nerve storm, an instinctive, uncontrollable reaction of the nervous system. I had experienced fear before, but not panic. Now, with the pulse of the engines dying, something quite uncontrollable leapt in my throat, my limbs seemed to dissolve and my whole body froze with apprehension. My mouth opened to scream a warning, but no sound came: and then, like a man fighting to stay sober after too much drink, I managed to get a grip of myself. It was a conscious effort of will and I had only just succeeded when the beat of the engines ceased altogether and I felt the ship dead under me. A glance at the radar showed the screen blank, half white, half black, as the sweep light continued to circle as if nothing had happened. We were heeled so far over that all the radar recorded was the sea below us, the sky above.
It was only the fact that we had such a weight of water on board that saved us. If the ship had been riding high, fully buoyant, she’d have turned right over. It was that and the terrific weight of the wind that held the seas flat.
The time was seven twenty-eight and Sgeir Mhor much less than a mile away now, the wind blowing us broadside towards it. Engines and steering gone. There was nothing we could do now and I watched as Stratton fought his way up the slope of the deck, struggling to reach the radio shack. In less than two minutes the operator was calling Mayday. But what the hell was the good of that? In those two minutes the velocity of the wind had blown us almost quarter of a mile. And it wasn’t a case of the ship herself being blown — the whole surface of the sea was moving down-wind, scooped up and flung north-eastward by the pressure of the air.
Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. I, too, had scrambled up the slope and into the alleyway. Through the open door of the radio shack I saw the operator clinging to his equipment, could hear him saying that word over and over again into the mike. And then he was in contact, reporting to the world at large that our engines had packed up and we were being driven down on to the southernmost tip of Laerg, on to the rocks of Sgeir Mhor.
The nearest ship was L4400, lying hove-to on the far side of Malesgair, a mere four miles away. But it might just as well have been four hundred miles. She didn’t dare leave the shelter of those cliffs. In any case, she’d never have reached us in time. Nothing could reach us. It was pointless putting out a distress call. The ship lurched. I slipped from the supporting wall and was pitched into Stratton’s cabin. I fetched up on the far side, half-sprawled across his bunk. A girl’s face in a cheap frame hung on the wall at a crazy angle — dark hair and bare shoulders, calm eyes in a pretty face. She looked a million miles away. I don’t know why, but I suddenly remembered Marjorie Field’s eyes, blue and serious, the wide mouth smiling. And other girls in other lands…. Would it have made any difference to Stratton that he was married? When it comes to the point you’re alone, aren’t you, just yourself to make the passage across into the unknown?
It wasn’t easy, sprawled on that bunk, to realise that in a few short minutes this cabin would be a shattered piece of wreckage tossed in the surf of breaking waves. I closed my eyes wearily. I could hear the wind and the sea, but the full blast of it was muffled, and I couldn’t see it — that was the point. It made it difficult to visualise the end; flesh torn to pieces on the jagged rocks, the suffocation of drowning. And yet I knew that was the reality; disembowelment perhaps or going out quickly with the skull smashed to pulp.
Hell! Lie here like a rat in a trap, that was no way to go. I forced myself to my feet, hauled my body up into the alleyway crowded now with men. They lay along the wall, big-chested with their life jackets, their faces white. But no panic, just leaning there, waiting. It was all very ordinary, this moment of disaster. No orders, nobody screaming that they didn’t want to die. And then it came to me that all these men saw were the steel walls of the ship. They were wrapped in ignorance. They hadn’t seen the storm or the rocks. Exhausted, their senses dulled with sea-sickness, they waited for orders that would never come.
When we struck, the ship would roll over. That’s what I figured, anyway. There was only one place to be then — out in the open. In the open there was just a chance. Wentworth had seen that, too. With two of the crew he was struggling to force the door to the deck open. I moved to help him, others with me, and under our combined efforts it fell back with a crash, and a blast of salt air, thick with spray, hit us. The Quartermaster was the first through. ‘You next.’ Wentworth pushed me through, calling to the men behind him.