It was then that Ferguson volunteered; if the first drop were successful and the gear landed in a place that was accessible, then he’d make the jump and organise the setting up of the breeches buoy. It faced Standing with a difficult choice. He had now received my second call. He knew there were at least five men marooned on Sgeir Mhor and only seven hours of daylight left. The risk of one man’s life against the almost certain death of five; rightly or wrongly, he accepted Ferguson’s offer. It was then eleven forty-five. Ten minutes later Ferguson was on his way. Field went with him: also a sergeant and two men, all of whom had completed a parachute course. And while the staff car started its forty-mile dash to Stornoway, Standing got through to the airport and asked them to find Fellowes and have him ring Northton immediately. He also asked them to arrange for the life-saving apparatus to be brought to the airfield and the parachutes to be got ready. Menatime, the tug was ordered to put into Leverburgh in the hopes that the Army’s life-saving gear would be located.
This was the situation when I made my next contact with Base. I had found an alarm clock in the remains of the cook-house and the time by this was 12.53. Standing was then able to tell me that Fellows had agreed to attempt the drop. The wind speed at Stornoway was slightly less than the reading shown by Cliff Morgan’s anemometer. It was beginning to fall off and he was optimistic. I suppose I should have warned Standing. The wind speed had fallen at Learg, too. But there is a difference between a drop from around 50 knots and a drop from the fantastic wind speeds we had been experiencing. It was still coming down off the Saddle in gusts of considerable force. Whether it would have made any difference if I had warned him, I don’t know. Probably not. Nobody sitting in his office almost a hundred miles away could possibly have any idea of the battering Laerg had received and was still receiving. In any case, I was thinking of those men out on Sgeir Mhor. If the pilot was willing to try it, then it wasn’t for me to discourage him. The ETA Standing gave me for ‘ the plane’s arrival was 14.15 approximate. In an hour’s time the wind might have dropped right away. I had known it happen with storms of this intensity. And if it did, then the whole situation would be changed, and a plane overhead could make the difference between life and death to the survivors. It was up to the pilot anyway.
Standing was still talking to me, explaining about the tug and that Adams was standing by in the hope that conditions might improve sufficiently for him to fly the helicopter. Suddenly he stopped in mid-sentence and I heard him say, ‘Just a minute.’ And then another voice — a voice I recognised, much fainter, but still quite audible: ‘Please. I must see you. You can’t do it. If you make Mike jump
‘I’m not making him. He volunteered.’
‘Then stop him. You’ve got to stop him. He’ll kill himself. It’s murder expecting him to jump in this wind, just to prove he can do it.’
‘For God’s sake, Marjorie. Pull yourself together. He’s not trying to prove anything.’
‘Of course he is. You’re taking advantage of him.’ She was beside herself, her voice shaken with the violence of her emotions.
‘It isn’t fair. He’ll be killed and…’ I heard the clatter of the phone as he dropped it and his voice was suddenly farther away: ‘Look, my dear. Try to understand. This isn’t just a question of Mike Ferguson. There are survivors out there and the one chance of getting them off…’ 7 don’t care. ‘I’m thinking of Mike.’
‘Your father’s with him. He’ll see he doesn’t do anything rash.’ But she didn’t accept that. ‘Daddy and Mike — they’re both made the same way. You know that. They’ve both … ” She hesitated, adding, ‘He’ll jump whatever the conditions.’ And then on a different note: ‘Is it true Mr Ross is one of the survivors? Major Rafferty said something about…’
‘I’m just speaking to him now.’
And then I heard him say, ‘Marjorie!’ his voice sharp and angry. She must have grabbed hold of the phone for her voice was suddenly clear and very close to me, trembling uncontrollably so that I caught her mood, the desperate urgency of her fear. She might have been there in the hut with me. ‘Mr Ross. Help me — please. Mike mustn’t jump. Do you hear? You’ve radio. You can contact the plane.’ And then, almost with a sob: ‘No, let me finish.’ But he’d got the phone away from her. ‘Ross? ‘I’ll call you back at fourteen hundred hours.’ There was a click, and after that silence.
Fellowes took off from Stornoway at 13.40 hours. Conditions had improved slightly with the wind easterly about 30 knots. The overcast, however, had come down again and there were rain squalls. They were in cloud before they’d reached 1,000 feet and they had to climb to more than 6,000 before they were above it. Field was in the co-pilot’s seat; Ferguson, the sergeant and the two men back in the fuselage. The plane was an old Consul, the metal of the wings burnished bright by hail and rain, by subjection over many years to the abrasive forces of the elements. They flew for almost forty minutes in watery sunlight across a flat cotton-wool plain of cloud. Airspeed 120, the altimeter steady at 6.5 and towards the end, the pilot searching for an orographical cloud, a bulge in the overcast that would pin-point the position of Laerg. But there was no orographical cloud and at 14.20 they started down through the overcast.
Fellowes’ dead reckoning was based on course and speed. He had corrected for drift, but he had no means of telling whether the wind had remained constant and he was doing his sums the way the early fliers did them, his navigational aids on his knee. And all the time he was having to fly his plane in strong winds. He had spoken to me on the radio. But I couldn’t even make a guess at the wind speed, for it was broken by Tarsaval and Malesgair and came down from the direction of the Saddle in violent eddies. All I could tell him was that the ceiling was under a thousand. Creag Dubh was just over the thousand and Creag Dubh was blanketed.
Coming down like that through thick cloud couldn’t have been very pleasant. Field told me later that he didn’t dare look at the altimeter after it had unwound to two thousand. He would like to have been able to shut his eyes, but he couldn’t; they remained fixed on the grey void ahead, his body tense and strained forward against the safety belt. The engines made hardly a sound, just a gentle whispering, the wing-tips fluttering in moments of turbulence. Fellowes, too, was strained forward, eyes peering through the windshield. They were both of them waiting for that sudden darkening in the opaque film ahead that would mean hard rock and the end. Theoretically, Fellowes had overshot by five miles and was coming down over empty, unobstructed sea. But he couldn’t be certain. Tarsaval was 1,456ft. high.
Five minutes — one of the longest five minutes of his life, Field said. Finally, he tore his eyes away from the empty windshield and glanced at the altimeter. Eight hundred feet. The cloud darkened imperceptibly. His eyes, with nothing substantial to focus on, were playing tricks. He was on the high slopes of a great mountain again, the cloud swirling about him. And then suddenly there was a pattern — streaks of black and white, long foaming lines coming up towards them. The sea, and the long march of the waves had their tops torn from them by the wind.
The aircraft banked sharply, the wing-tip seeming almost to touch the crest of a roller that reared up, curling and then breaking in a great surge of thrusting water. They straightened out, skimming the surface, the black curtain of a rain squall ahead. Bank again to skirt it and then momentarily blinded as water beat against the windshield, driven by the force of the wind into long rivulets that were never still. And on the other side of the squall a dark wall coming to meet them, towering cliffs of black rock sliding back from the starboard wing, the glimpse of two stacs, their tops hidden in cloud. Fladday. Course 280° then and Shelter Bay opening out ahead. Fellowes came right into it, flying at just over 500 ft., and when he turned the wind caught him and flung him like a wounded gull across the top of Sgeir Mhor.