The pattern was too late to dismember. Harker-Rowe leaned by the shelf and, looking at himself in the mirror, ceased to smile. ‘We’ve done our investigations. A minesweeper was bought from the Argentine navy three weeks ago, but you’ve a head start because it’ll take at least a month to get seaworthy. Their first stop is Madagascar. We know about them, but they don’t know about us. You can’t help but get there first, with your flying boat.’
‘Are you certain they aren’t aware of us?’
‘They knew there was a submarine, but assume it was destroyed with no survivors. They may wonder. I credit them with that. But they’re quite happy to believe the best. Like everyone else. Though not us.’
‘Madagascar’s a good jumping-off place,’ Bennett said. ‘So why didn’t we think of that?’
‘We did,’ Harker-Rowe said. ‘But your story about an exploration company looks good, and it’ll be easier for us to make arrangements for you in South Africa. You do your work, and we’ll do ours.’
They showed an iron grip in protecting their investment, watching too closely for him to feel secure. Once the gold was on board, the danger would be mortal. Only in flying over the sea would he and his crew be safe. He would land where they would not be waiting for him. If he could get safely to the huge Pacific, the flying boat could land anywhere.
‘One more thing,’ Harker-Rowe said.
He reminded Bennett of a group captain who had come from the Air Ministry to go over the details of a spectacular raid, which would have been written up in the official history if it hadn’t gone wrong.
‘For a crew you’ll need a navigator, an engineer, a wireless operator and your old gunner, Nash. That’s five. But take the extra gunners. If there’s trouble, you’ll be glad of them.’
‘It’s flying that counts in this job. Nothing else.’
‘We think you may want more safeguards,’ the man by the window said.
Bennett hadn’t come to be lectured by such a pinhead. ‘I know what I need,’ he said sharply. ‘I’m the captain of this flying boat.’
‘But I’m chartering, with a half share in the gold,’ Harker-Rowe said. ‘If it’ll make you any happier, choose the gunners from your old crew. Appleyard, Bull and Armatage were in that list you showed.’
There was no way out. Bennett assumed they had already been approached, and suborned. They would watch our flight crew – and the gold once it was on board. He would take them. A certain amount of digging and carrying would be necessary when they reached the island.
‘We knew you’d see reason,’ Harker-Rowe said.
But did it make sense? He sweated too much to sleep, but losing such weight made him look fitter and more efficient. Having surrounded himself with so many uncertainties in order to find a way out of a labyrinth, he had reached the stage of wisdom which, such as it was, indicated that they only ceased to matter when you stopped thinking and started to act.
21
We talked in the galley about being able to swim, and Rose with his scar in shadow said he’d never had the ability. At thirty, he was too old to learn.
‘Too lazy to want to,’ Wilcox put in.
Nash had done too much messing about in boats to think of swimming. ‘I don’t even like to walk more than I’ve got to. Walking makes my feet sore, and swimming would make my arms ache.’
‘I tried it once,’ Wilcox said, ‘and started to sink before I could find out whether my arms ached or not. My father yanked me from a premature death by drowning. He was too scared to teach me again.’
Bull grinned at the memory of a few strokes with an inner-tube around his chest, but the valve opened and he saved his life by a panic-stricken dog-paddle to the bar of the swimming bath, a near-miss he had no wish to repeat. In spite of the dim light I saw his face turn pale. Appleyard confessed that his ambition was to be able to swim. He loved seeing people do the breast stroke, especially champions at the cinema.
‘Like Esther Williams?’ said Bull. ‘I’d like to swim up her.’
‘It looks so effortless.’ Because Appleyard knew it wasn’t, he got excited at the memory: ‘To make your way through the water must give you a real sensation.’ He was sure it did. Anyone who said otherwise should creep back into his hole and die like a liar. He had in fact been able to swim. ‘You won’t believe it.’ He sounded as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘Perhaps it was only a few yards, so that with practice I’d get better at distance. And I would have. Once you swim you can go on for ever, providing the sea isn’t rough or cold.’
‘Belt up,’ said Nash. ‘You give me the horrors.’
He ignored the slur that he lacked taste. ‘One day when I was sixteen I got cramp, and that put a stop to it. I’d heard about cramp, but never had it, and I wondered what the hell this wrenching pain was in my left leg.’
‘It would have to be the left, wouldn’t it?’ Bull sneered.
‘I was tied up in a knot. From being happy and lively I was in agony. Luckily a chap knew what was happening, and got me out. So I thought: swimming’s not for me. If you turn to stone when you’re walking, all you have to do is stop. You can’t sink under the pavement. But if you get cramp swimming, you drown.’
‘Fucked by the fickle finger of fate,’ said Bull.
‘Alliteration will do for you yet,’ said Rose.
‘Well, you can sink under the pavement if you get cramp while walking,’ Wilcox said. ‘If some idiot digs a hole and doesn’t rail it off, you’ve had it.’
Nash looked at me. ‘Can you swim, Sparks?’
There was an understandable need for us to be united by a common lack, but I did not want to erode our fellow feeling by saying that I could not swim when I could. Like coaxing a half-buried signal from monsoon atmospherics, I sensed that the common purpose among us was still frail. Each was here in the hope that the expedition would mend a broken dream, make it stronger in fact than it had originally been. To expect something better than before was, however, unrealistic. To pursue a dream is to go backwards. To go forward brings more reward than recapturing old dreams. But whatever state they were in, we were going forward nonetheless.
The life and death realization came too late. Having signed the contract, there was no backing out. But I wasn’t staying on from a sense of honour. Nothing like that. Honour is only a cover for what can’t be rationalized. Even if I hadn’t signed a contract I would have gone if I had really wanted to. We no longer had any minds to make up, could only go to wherever we must, not because our souls or our honour said so, but because we had got into this situation with the single mindedness of a retreat into the Darwinian slime when life on land looked too bleak for comfort.
I told them that I had been able to swim for as long as I could remember. Rose said: ‘I wouldn’t bank on it saving you.’
‘Them as dies will be the lucky ones!’ Nash gloated.
To claim the skill of swimming in such a company of water-haters would be unfriendly. Perhaps the virtue of a flying boat crew consisted in choosing to scorn such life-saving abilities. A foolhardy courage would always be available when the tumultuous sea threatened to break up the boat. The blue of the glassy millpond would be no kinder. Salt liquid would swallow sooner or later. Only four Pegasus engines horsing through the sky held us from the eternal element of water. In any case, we could all swim.
When Rose parted the stem and bowl of his pipe, juice came out like a stream of cold tea. ‘Swim or not, it’s the machines that we rely on, plus the skipper’s handling, my navigation, and your tip-tapping on the morse key.’
They laughed, satisfied that though I could swim I was no threat. All we had to do was keep our feet dry. I joined the hilarity. Apart from the millions of square miles that would churn beneath us, and five thousand horse power in the engines, together with the aerodynamic wings and seaworthy hull, there was a force without a name which had a say in our safety. Perhaps Nash had similar thoughts: ‘As long as the Gremlins leave us alone. Can’t have them little buggers icing us up, or unsticking our ailerons, or unscrewing bits and pieces from the engines.’