At one o’clock I contacted the destroyer. She had Laerg clear on the radar at thirteen miles range. ETA approximately, one-thirty. Alf Cooper appeared at my side, a khaki gnome, his head encased in a woollen balaclava. ‘Grub up.’ He put the tray down on the table beside the radio — a Thermos flask of oxtail soup and two mess tins full of corned beef and potato hash all steaming hot. ‘A night for the flippin’ bears, ain’t it. ‘Ibernation, that’s my idea o’ paradise this time of the year. You reck’n that destroyer’ll be able to do any good?’
‘No,’ I said.
He nodded, sucking at his soup. ‘That’s wot I fort. Ruddy waves must be breaking right over the poor bastards.’ I asked him about the men from the helicopter. ‘Sleepin’ their ruddy heads orf,’ he said. ‘Orl right for them. They got full bellies. Me, I’m fair famished.’ He reached for one of the mess tins. “Ope yer don’t mind bully. Easy ter make, yer see. Fillin’ too.’
At one-thirty we went out of the hut and stood in the teeth of the wind staring into the black darkness that hid Sgeir Mhor. It was drizzling, a wet, driving mist. Suddenly light blazed, the pencil stab of a searchlight that threw the blurred shape of Sgeir Mhor into black relief. It probed the mist, producing strange halos of light in the damp air. A gun flashed, a small sound against the thunder of breaking waves. The overcast glimmered with light as the star shell burst. It was a minute or two before it floated clear of the clouds over Keava; for a moment the bay and the surrounding rocks were bathed in its incandescent glare. It was an unearthly sight; the waves marching into the bay, building up till their tops curled and broke, roaring up the beach in a welter of foam, and all around the horseshoe curve of breaking water, the rocks standing piled in ghostly brilliance. Rock and cliff and sodden grass slope all looked more hellish in that macabre light. I saw the spume of waves breaking over the lower bastions of Sgeir Mhor. Then the flare touched the sea and was instantly extinguished, and after that the night was blacker, more frightening than before.
A signal lamp stabbed its pin-point of light just beyond the tip of Sgeir Mhor: Help arriving first light. Stick it out four more hours and … That was all I read for the destroyer was steaming slowly westward and the stab of her signal lamp was obscured by the rocks. The searchlight probed again, searching the far side of the rock promontory as though trying to count the survivors. And then that too went out and after that there was nothing but the pitch-black night.
I re-set the alarm and lay down again on Pinney’s bed, not bothering this time to undress. Time passed slowly and I couldn’t sleep. The mouse came back. I could hear its claws scratching at the aluminium of the mess tins, but I didn’t switch the light on. I lay there with my eyes closed waiting for the alarm, thinking of those men out on the rocks drenched by the mist and the spray, wondering whether it would be possible to get them off.
At four-thirty I was at the radio and the tug came through prompt on schedule, my brother’s voice requesting information about sea and landing conditions. I was able to tell him that the wind was now west of south. But it had also increased in strength. It was definitely blowing a gale now and it was raining heavily. However, if the wind veered further, as seemed likely, there was a chance that a landing could be made in the western curve of the bay, close under Keava where there would be some shelter. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We’ll recce the lee side of Sgeir Mhor first and if that’s no good, we’ll anchor and attempt to make the beach on inflatable rafts.’ It was still dark when they came into the bay and all I saw of the tug was the two steaming lights, one above the other, swinging and dipping. She came right into the bay, almost to the break of the waves, and then the lights moved apart and the distance between them increased as she turned westward. The green of her starboard navigation lights showed for a while, still half-obscured by rain. And then that vanished, together with the steaming lights, and I caught glimpses of her stern lights as she browsed along the western arm of the bay, a will-o’-the-wisp bounced from wave-top to wave-top. A searchlight stabbed a brilliant beam, iridescent with moisture, and the rocks of Sgeir Mhor showed ghostly grey across tumbled acres of sea; columns of spray like ostrich feather plumes waved behind it, sinking and rising with the surge of the Atlantic.
Dawn came slowly and with reluctance, a sheathed pallor stealing into the curve below the encircling hills. The tug lay close under Keava, just clear of the narrow, surf-filled gut that separated it from Sgeir Mhor. She didn’t anchor, but stayed head-to-wind under power, and they came ashore in rubber dinghies where the surf was least.
I was coming along the foreshore when my brother staggered dripping out of the suck of the waves, dragging a rubber dinghy after him. He was dressed like the others in a frogman’s suit and I can see him still, standing there in that twilit world that was the dawn, finned feet straddled at the surfs edge, not looking at that moment at his companions, but staring up at the cloud-hidden heights. There was a stillness about him, an immobility — he seemed for an instant petrified, a part of the landscape, his body turned to stone, statuesque like a rock.
Then the others piled in through the surf and he was a man again, moving to help them, going back into the waves to pull two more rubber dinghies ashore.
I met them on the beach. ‘Thank God you made it,’ I yelled to him above the wind.
He stared at me. His face looked haggard, his eyes wild. I swear he didn’t recognise me.
‘Iain. Are you all right, Iain?’
For a moment his face stayed blank. Then his eyes snapped. ‘Ross.’ He glanced quickly at Field standing at the surfs edge. Then he came towards me, gripped my shoulder. ‘The name’s Braddock, damn you,’ he hissed, his fingers digging a warning into my flesh. His mouth had hardened and his eyes blazed black. He’d have seen me dead and drowned before he’d have admitted to his real name.
Field wiped a smear of phlegm from below his nose. ‘We saw several men clinging to the rocks.’ His eyes looked dead and tired, bloodshot with the salt. ‘Where are the parachutes — the life-saving gear you dropped?’ Braddock asked.
‘Up there.’ Field nodded to the heights of Keava, the long slope leading to the spine.
‘Yes, up there,’ I agreed. But the rain-dimmed dawn showed nothing on the slopes — only the clouds writhing in white pillars.
Their clothes, tied in plastic bundles in the dinghies, were safe and dry. They changed in the bird-oil stench of an old cleit, and then we climbed, strung out across the slopes, climbed until we met the clouds, gasping wet air. The daylight had strengthened by then and ragged gaps in the overcast showed the slopes of Keava bare to its spine and to the cliffs beyond. The parachutes had gone. Some time during the night, I suppose, a gust had filled the nylon canopies and carried them over the top and far out into the sea beyond.
Braddock shook Field’s arm. ‘Are you sure that’s where you dropped them?’
Field nodded.
‘Then they’re gone.’
Field’s face was set in a wooden look as he agreed they’d gone. Up there in the wind and the driving clouds, with the thunder of the waves breaking at the foot of the cliffs, i he and I, we could both recall the solitary parachute lifting and sailing out into the Atlantic. ‘Wasted. All wasted.’ There were tears in his eyes, but it may have been the wind.