I lost patience. ‘You’re round the bend, if you ask me, and halfway up the zig-zags.’
‘I wish I was.’ He pulled at my lapel, but I shoved him off. ‘And not only rats. I heard voices.’
‘Voices? You’re getting my bloody goat.’
He came close again. ‘In Bennett’s wardroom somebody laughed and it wasn’t Bennett. They were talking, all gruff and matey. Wilcox was at the controls, you was at your gear listening to Geraldo, Rose was at his table doing noughts and crosses, Appleyard was in the mid-upper, Nash was in the tail, and Bull was sleeping on the parachutes. That left me on my tod – hearing voices.’
It was the wind, the shaking, the drone of engines as we changed height. The effect was to make you hear things.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it was that, was it? Do you think I don’t know? I’ve logged more flying time than you’ve spent listening for the first cuckoo in spring.’
He took another swig from the flask and, wanting a drink as much as anyone, I thought him more funny than dangerous. But I was angry at knowing there was liquor on board, and wondered who else was getting at it. ‘Does Bennett know the mess is no longer dry?’
He ignored my question. ‘I’m bloody freezing.’
I envied him having no work, unlucky as he was in being crippled with either drink or toothache. His expression of malice diverted me from worrying overmuch at his boozing. The only fit response was to do the impossible, and laugh. I pulled a blanket from the rack and let it fall.
He belched his thanks. ‘You’re a babe unborn, Sparks.’
The floor of the plane dropped under our feet and, while I held on, Armatage crumpled into the bunk and was straightaway unconscious. I had no further weather reports to listen for, so had time to watch the others opening a packing case with crowbars. Bull fixed the claw under a batten, strained like a sailor at the capstan, shirt off, arms chevroned by elaborate tattoos, lips clamped as if knowing that the noise of the engines would drown any shanty. Nash and Appleyard held the crate from sliding.
‘Do you need help?’
‘We’ll manage.’
I stood by, but kept clear. The cases were labelled ‘Engine Spares’. An outboard motor for the dinghies? Tents and equipment? Shining nails gave without trouble. A smell of oil and paraffin floated up as side planks splintered away, leaving plywood and thick card to pull free. ‘We should get Armatage on this stunt,’ Bull said. ‘A bit of hard labour would do him good.’
Appleyard took the crowbar. ‘He’s as pissed as a falling flare.’
‘He’s down with the toothache.’ Nash steadied the crate. ‘Leave him for a while.’ They rested when the work was all but done. ‘We’ll give him an hour to spruce up.’ He turned to Appleyard, who was rolling down his sleeves. ‘Why don’t you boil some water for coffee? Make a start on cobbling a meal together. You’ll find tins of M and V, a bag of spuds, a wheel of rat-trap, and some fresh bread.’
Bull agreed. ‘Flying makes me ravenous. I once ate a whole packet of cream crackers over Berlin.’
‘Me,’ Nash said, ‘I smoked fifty Players.’
‘I said my prayers,’ Appleyard called before he went, ‘and bit my nails. Bull got drunk. He ought to pull his finger out and sweat like the rest of us.’
Beneath the cardboard, sacking was darkened by grease stains. Nash braced himself to pull one container free. ‘They’re our stingers. Or will be when they’re assembled. We’ll sweat like pigs to get ’em up in time.’ He cut into the coils of string with a black clasp knife. ‘Treat ’em nicely,’ he said to Bull. ‘When the job’s over we’ll pack ’em up and sell ’em back. They cost a few hundred each. We can unload them on China for a lot more if we fly our kite up the Yangtse. Might as well make all we can out of the trip.’
‘I wouldn’t care if we chucked ’em in the drink.’ Bull cut the string into small lengths, then peeled away the sacking till bits and pieces of a Browning .303 machine gun gleamed on the floor.
Nash stroked the barrel. ‘We’ve a few hours to work like grease-monkeys and put four of these beauties in the tail.’ After a rapid check on the various parts he laughed at my surprise. ‘You didn’t have a clue, eh? If anyone comes up the fjord and tries to stop us, we’ll rake ’em.’
In the guise of a mechanical skeleton, the gun looked ominous. ‘Maybe they’ll have a similar shock for us.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But listen, Adcock, the world’s full of bloody maybes. You can’t live on ’em, I’ll tell you that. And in my experience one maybe is as good as another. All you’ve got to do is get yourself ready to meet one maybe. And if any turn up that you don’t expect, you’ll just bloody well defeat it, if you’ve prepared properly for the first maybe. That’s the only system I know, and it hasn’t failed me yet. Now we’re out of territorial waters we’ll gun the old flying boat up like it was always meant to be, and once they’re mounted there’ll be no trouble we can’t get out of.’
The more the flying boat went on, the more I was disturbed, a condition strange and painful because I had been trained to create order from a multiplicity of signals. Confusion in myself was unfamiliar and therefore insoluble. The only way of staying calm was to close down the wireless, hold back from the one thing that might help me to bear it – which would be as impossible as pulling open a door and letting myself fall into the icy air. I envied Armatage his drunken sleep.
The headset back on, I immersed myself in an endless waterfall of static. Vital gen known to everyone in the plane would not be imparted to me. Latched to the outer atmosphere, I was certain to stay innocent. It was not a matter of knowing nothing, but of believing that what I did know was not worth knowing, and of assuming that what I didn’t know was the only thing worth knowing. The balance was crucial, yet as gentle as the motions of the flying boat following that invisible line of the Antarctic Convergence, where warm and cold water mixed to give high winds and thick cloud above the troubled surface.
7
A landslide of static was swept aside by a continuous signal. As my tuning needle went over it became an attenuating whistle, like a bomb falling into infinity and unable to explode. By the time I thought to take a bearing it had disappeared. It should not have been there. Someone had inadvertently leaned on his key, or was tuning his transmitter. If the latter, who did he expect to contact? To judge by the intensity of that accidental signal, if that’s what it was, and allowing for skip distance and freak reception, he could be up to a thousand miles away, in which case he was likely to be on or over the sea in the direction of Kerguelen. Perhaps he was interested in our whereabouts.
Such deductions might sound like so much magic. Intuition was not evidence. Assumptions were not facts. Feelings could not rate as intelligence by which to assess danger. In the imagined conversation, Bennett told me to pull my finger out and find clues he could work on. My job was to inform him, not worry him.
The green eye glowed. Atmospherics dominated. The universe of noise was like a house of many mansions latched on each ear, doors and windows firmly bolted against lunatics scratching inside. Maybe, like Armatage, I was hearing things. A long bomb-like whistle had no symbol for the logbook.
The knowledge of the Browning machine guns made every sound seem like a threat, and kept me extraordinarily alert. I had to do my job well, though sworn loyalty to Bennett hardly meant helping to find bullion which did not belong to him. Yet if I didn’t chip in to the best of my ability the sudden onset of peril from any direction would be as much a threat to myself as it was to the others. Having signed my way into the trap, I must learn to live in it.