CHAPTER TWO
I had forgotten to get anything to read and for a time I just sat there, watching the backs of the houses until London began to thin out and the green fields showed beyond the factory buildings. I was thinking about my mother and our parting and the way she had referred again to Labrador. She hadn’t mentioned the message my father had picked up. She wasn’t worried that the lives of those two men might be at stake. It was Labrador itself that was on her mind, which struck me as odd. And then I began thinking about my father again, wishing I had known him better. If I had known him better, I might have understood what it was about Labrador that had so fascinated him.
And then I got out the log books and looked through them again. It wasn’t difficult to see why the authorities and the ‘experts’ had decided to disregard the message. The books were such a mess. And yet, running through them, was this thread of the Labrador expedition.
My training as an engineer had taught me to break every problem down to its essentials, and before I knew what I was doing, I had got out pencil and paper and was jotting down every reference in the log books that could conceivably have a bearing on Briffe’s expedition. Disentangled from all the jottings and drawings and scraps of other messages, the thread became stronger and more lucid. It told a definite story, though it was necessary to read between the lines to get at it, for it soon became clear to me that my father seldom took down anything verbatim; a single line of comment or a brief note to give him the gist of the transmission was all he bothered about. This was not surprising since the forming of legible characters had always been a labour to him. Indeed, there were several jottings that it was quite impossible for me to decipher.
In all I found I had isolated seventy-three references. Twelve of these were unintelligible and seven I finally discarded as having no bearing on the subject. From the remaining fifty-four I was able, with the help of a little guess-work, to build up some sort of picture of what had happened. Briffe had presumably started out on his survey sometime around end-July for the first reference to a location occurred on August 10. The note simply said A2 — where’s that? Three days later there was a reference to — Minipi River area: and on August 15 my father had noted: Moved to A3. Then followed B1, B2 and B3. Clearly these were code names for the areas under survey and as Al would have been the first, my father must have been picking up Ledder’s reports almost from the start. There was no indication of the purpose of Briffe’s expedition — whether he was prospecting for gold or uranium or just a base metal like iron ore. He might simply be making a general survey, but this seemed unlikely since he was working for a mining company and was coding his areas and reports. The fact that the location code was dropped in later reports suggested negative results. This happened, not only in the case of A2, but in several other cases as well. Thus A3 later became Mouni Rapids and B2 near old H.B. Post. Against the reference to Mouni Rapids my father had written — Winokapau! The right direction.
By September 9, the expedition had reached Area Cl. This was later referred to as Disappointment, and later still it became obvious that it was the name of a lake. These scraps of information were all apparently gleaned from the same source — VO6AZ. And always at the same time — 2200 hours. An entry for August 3 appeared to be the first reference to the expedition. It simply said: Interesting — some sort of code. The next day’s entry read. 2200. VO6AZ again. Survey report? And he had scrawled in penciclass="underline" EMPLOYED BY THE McGOVERN MINING AND EXPLORATION COMPANY OF MONTREAL?
And on the top of the next page, again in penciclass="underline" KEEP WATCH 20 METRE BAND 10 P.M. Later in August was an entry 2200 — VO6AZ. Code again! Why can’t he report in clear?
And a note on the following page: BRIFFE, BRIFFE, BRIFFE. WHO IS BRIFFE? 75 METRE PHONE. NET FREQUENCY 3.780 kcs. WATCH 2000. But this was so fantastically scrawled over that I had difficulty in deciphering it. Two pages further on I found the name Laroche mentioned for the first time. He had written it in capitals, heavily underlining it and putting a question mark at the end, and had added a note: QUERY LEDDER.
Isolated from all the nonsense and doodles which disfigured pages of his log books, my father’s notes confirmed what I already knew — that he had been picking up messages from Simon Ledder at Goose Bay to the McGovern Mining Company in Montreal and that these were daily reports in some sort of code passing on information received from Briffe at 2000 hours from somewhere in Labrador. I found one half-obliterated entry which appeared to read: 3.780 — nothing, nothing, nothing — always nothing. It suggested that my father was also keeping regular watch on Briffe’s transmitting frequency. But I could only pick out for certain one entry a day at 2200 hours, until September 14. That was the day of the crash, and from then on the pattern changed and the entries became more frequent, the comments fuller.
Two days before that Briffe appeared to have called for air transport to move the party forward to C2, for on September 13 occurred an entry: Plane delayed, W bad. B. calling for usual two flights, three in first wave and Baird and himself in second. If C2 NORTH OF Cl THEY ARE GETTING V. NEAR.
The move apparently took place on September 14, but the first flight proved difficult for at 1945 hours he had made this entry: In luck — Contact VO6AZ. Beaver floatplane not back. Scrawled across this were the words TROUBLE and KEEP CONSTANT WATCH ON 75-METRE BAND. And then an hour later at 2045: Fog cleared, but Beaver still missing. VO6AZ was now apparently transmitting to Montreal every hour at 15 minutes to the hour, for the next time entry was for 2145. But nothing had been written against it and the time itself was barely decipherable amongst the mass of little drawings my father had made. In fact, the whole of this last page of the log book was an indescribable mess and it took me a long time to sort it out. The next entry, however, was only half an hour later — 2275: Advance party safe C2. Beaver back. Hellish W. report. B. going … The last part was completely unreadable. But the comment that followed was clear enough: POOR HOLDING DISAPPOINTMENT — THAT THE REASON? BARELY AN HOUR. THE FOOL! WHAT’S DRIVING HIM?
After that the entries were back to 15 minutes to the hour -2245,2345,0045, right on to 0345. They were all blank. There was a sort of finality about those blank entries, and though it was the soft, warm English countryside that slid past the windows of the train, I saw only the cold and fog and the desolate misery of Labrador, the night closing in on the little floatplane and my father sitting up half the night, waiting to find out whether they were safe or not.
The entries in the log book were, of course, for British Summer Time which is four and a half hours ahead of Goose Bay. Briffe’s report that the plane was back must have been made shortly after 5 p.m. so that my father’s reference to ‘barely an hour’ obviously referred to the fact that Briffe was taking off with little more than an hour to go before nightfall.
The train stopped at Swindon and I sat staring down at that last page of the log book. I couldn’t blame the authorities for regarding him as unbalanced. It had taken me almost a quarter of an hour to decipher that one page. I could see my father sitting in his wheelchair with the earphones clamped to his head, waiting and waiting for the news of Briffe’s safety that would never come, and passing the long, slow, silent hours by drawing. He had covered the whole of that page and all the cover of the exercise book with little pencil drawings — lions and fish with faces and canoes, as well as squares and circles, anything that his wandering hand and brain took a fancy to. It was here that he had written — C2-C2-C2… Where the hell is it? and had scrawled the words: LOST AND GONE FOREVER and framed them with the names — Winokapau — Tishinakamau — Attikonak.