‘Some of you have been worried about whether we can ship enough fuel to reach the islands. We can, so forget it. And as for getting back, a steamer called the Difda, of some six hundred tons, will supply us with enough fuel to fly out. You may ask: why doesn’t the same steamer recover the gold instead of us? Speed, is the answer. And secrecy. We can be away quickly, and take the goods to market before any other interested party will even know it’s gone. In a week’s time your valuable services should no longer be required – and we are carrying supplies to last a fortnight.
‘The Kerguelen Islands lie on the Antarctic Convergence, where the northward moving cold water sinks below the warmer, which means uncertainty of weather. But we’re going at the best time of the year, and there are sheltered places where we can get down without trouble. The nearest fjord to the gold is sufficiently sheltered to hide the Aldebaran like a fly in a jar of blackcurrant jam. The snowline lies at about 1500 feet. In January there’s fog on one or two days, and the air temperature is between forty and fifty – bloody cold at night, but we have plenty of equipment for that.’
He rolled white paper around one of his fragile cigars more, I thought, to help put on the expression of boredom he by no means felt, and also in order to discourage questions. ‘Getting there is the most difficult part, but Rose is familiar with the navigational problems, and Adcock will do his stuff with thermionic valves and bits of wire when it comes to making contact with the refuelling ship. The islands are uninhabited, though the French have talked of setting up a scientific station – a fair way from where we’ll be dropping anchor. We’ve got to get the gold out now because it may be more difficult later.’
He went into his stateroom, and there was a lowered atmosphere among us. What had started as a job had become an adventure with too many imponderables. We were going to a place of which there were no adequate maps, and no radio aids, nor even, as far as we knew, any other human beings. The only ships would be whaling vessels, said Nash, which were as rare in any case as spots on a film star’s face. If we alighted in that desolation of glaciers and could not get off again, food supplies would be of prime importance. I felt wary, and daunted. ‘I’m getting cold feet,’ said Armatage, as we moved back to the galley.
‘You’ll be lucky if that’s all you get,’ Appleyard said in his quiet manner.
‘A touch of the old L of M F?’ Nash said. ‘It’ll pass. It always did. And if it doesn’t, what’s death? Just another blackout after a party.’ The primus stoves were lit, and Nash rolled up his sleeves to produce mugs of soup, followed by bacon, omelettes and potatoes that Appleyard had peeled. There was plenty of bread, and during the meal a pot of water was boiled for tea. Armatage scraped his leftovers into a bucket: ‘I wonder what we’ve let ourselves in for?’
‘Stop binding,’ said Nash. ‘You’re getting on people’s nerves.’
I felt that one or two of us would like to back out, though we succeeded in hiding our misgivings. Slip through the hatch and swim. Drown if you must, rather than go on. Don’t, I told myself. We are committed, cocooned in lassitude. I fought paralysis by disputing its effect, point by point as if I were a lawyer rather than a radio operator. But the pall would not go away. I chatted with Nash, however, in as cheerful a mood as I was ever in.
20
When going to see his mother, Bennett would nurse his cigar for twenty-five miles of the road. She was turning senile, and called him by his father’s name. He stepped on that one: a monolithic skipper of the skies who believes in the future can’t afford such memories when boning up for a long stint over the ocean. A two-and-a-half-thousand mile track from all shipping routes could, by an error of one degree on either side, miss the island entirely, in spite of its size, and cause the flying boat to crash through lack of fuel, or loom around the Antarctic for eternity like a ghostly ship of old.
‘Unless we get good astro fixes,’ he told Nash, who saw no reason not to pass on such details which gratuitously came his way, ‘we’re heading for a watery grave. A cold one. If we can’t get angles on the stars, we’ll have to fly low to calculate drift readings for dead reckoning. We’ll get a little help from the radio. But nothing is as certain as the stars.’
He sweated, at the risk, shaking more at such slender chances than he ever had flying through Trojan walls of flak towards Essen or Berlin. They’d ship enough fuel, but too much circling to find the bay and they might run out. Impossible to row those last few miles. He erased the figures and worked them through again. When did not success depend on navigation? Rose was the best, a shining asset to this shower of a crew. If God looks kindly down, we’ll be rich. If he doesn’t, it’s Job’s boils for the lot of us, and cold water for our coffin.
He felt the shock of the optimist who realizes that he has so far survived only by luck. But he did not then become pessimistic. The efficacy of calculations may not always reassure, but they held back mortal damage. Faith in mechanical reliability kept hope in an airtight capsule, like the vacuum of a barometer which enables the needle to show height above the earth when air acts on it. Years of operational flying shifted pessimism sufficiently for him to watch the smoke from his cigar roll over his coloured map of the southern hemisphere.
A Mercator sheet of the South West Approaches would have been overprinted with the purple and green and blue mesh of the Loran grid, which made pinpointing a piece of cake, so that the spot in the north Atlantic where the sub had gone down was fixed for ever to within a mile or two. We would be safer if we had at least Consol to help, Nash my boy, but only the busy parts of the world are covered. Down here you have to pray to the heavenly bodies.
We saw them struggling in the oil, Nash said, as we were about to set course for home: ‘No hope, poor bastards.’ If their gunners had been better we’d have been the ones to drink oily water. ‘I feel like raking ’em, Skipper. They do it to our chaps.’ Between thought and word was no space to Nash, but the route from word to deed followed zig-zags.
Bennett knew his chief gunner’s malady: ‘Have a piss, and forget it.’ The turret full to starboard, Nash machined it back so that he could let Appleyard in. A steep bank to port rolled him over as Bennett, circling for another look, remembered his brother who died in India when his stringbag crashed. Too unorthodox for words: ‘We zap the gollies up the Khyber Pass, and when you press the gunbutton your old orange-box goes backwards!’ So he carried out the Prunish lark of picking up prisoners when you weren’t even supposed to go down for your own pals. The skipper’s intentions, said Nash, became your own.
They were on the skids, like landing in a channel of rocks, halfway into the wind, bumping before able to turn. One survivor was the captain, wounded and full of oil. The copilot flew while Bennett looked them over, and Nash stood guard. The captain’s green face was only alive at the eyes. ‘We should make him eat that Iron Cross, and see if he can shit it out.’
‘I don’t think he’s in much of a state to do either.’ Bennett pulled at a string around the man’s neck. He cut off the celluloid packet and put it into his jacket, while Nash took a revolver and a bundle of wet cigars from the second survivor.
A pattern emerges after a number of considered decisions. Having carried out an action which is divorced from all sensible rules, a split appeared in Bennett’s life, and he knew that it began while reading the U-boat commander’s papers standing by the toilet of the flying boat. They gave details for latitude and longitude, bearings and distances. There were sketches of bays and hills. The positions were precise to a fraction of a second, and must have been worked out by theodolite. He had heard of the islands, a complication of bays, rocky peninsulas, fjords and glaciers.