The flying boat moved on. Rose passed a new course of 138 degrees when we reached, by astronomical computation, 45 north and 40 south. The local time was 11.52, three hours and forty-seven minutes after setting out. A rippling stream of high speed telegraphy tinkled between Singapore and Home Base. My crow’s nest could monitor half the world, but I only needed to beware of ships steaming in the area we were heading for. The first headland was over 1700 nautical miles away, though it wasn’t too far if I kept my fingers at the corrugated tuning wheel as pertinaciously as a safe-thief trying to unravel the combination of a lock.
The second leg of the trip meant we were making progress, said Nash. ‘The Alpha Rats are on their way.’
‘Skimming along at 120 knots,’ said Rose.
‘How much is that in Dolly Mixtures?’ asked Appleyard.
‘Damn near a hundred-and-roaring-forty, if you’re talking about statute miles,’ said Bennett. ‘The speedier this old bird shivers along, the better for my blood pressure.’
‘Do you measure that in millibars?’ Wilcox wanted to know.
‘Mars Bars,’ said Appleyard.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Armatage.
‘If you aren’t careful,’ said Rose, ‘I’ll sing “The Navigator’s Lament”.’
‘I put men on a charge for less,’ Bennett said, ‘when I was Orderly Officer.’
Rose took another look at the sun, and Nash hoped he wouldn’t drop his Mark IXA Celestial. My eavesdroppings were brief. I roamed to either side of three chosen frequencies, and static sounded as if the world was wrapped in a scarf of water, heightened crackles like rocks or fallen trees in the way of the liquid’s headlong route. I caught news-agency morse from Tass in Moscow, crackpot claims about life in Stalin’s paradise. Silence on my own frequency was more golden. ‘The less heard, the better, Sparks,’ Bennett said. ‘We want to be the only ones in a thousand-mile radius when we get there.’
‘As long as we have no trouble from the Gremlins, Skipper,’ said Wilcox.
I cursed the jungle of static. ‘Or the Marcolins. They eat the filaments out of the valves, and chew at the connections, and gnaw the impedences.’
‘I’ll sing “The Navigator’s Lament”,’ said Rose.
Bennett at the controls lit a cigar. ‘Let rip, if you like. We can be happy till it’s time to dig up the doings, pull out the plum, refuel our tanks, and fly away like good little blackbirds. God is with us, don’t forget. He’d better be.’ His laugh swamped all rejoinders.
Rose was so busy that his Dalton computer was in danger of seizing up – he said. But maybe he could spare a moment. Appleyard was duty cook: ‘Like me: both burners going, and a stack of plates to fill.’
‘Gangway!’ Nash called. ‘I hear a throat being cleared.’
Rose tapped his tuning fork against the Bygrave slide-rule.
‘Stap me if I too didn’t hear the dull click,’ said Wilcox. ‘He can use the tattooed gunners for a chorus.’
‘Shut your soupbox,’ Nash growled. ‘If you put him off you’ll be confined to the port float on bread and seaweed. Jankers has nothing on that.’
‘Navigators never lament. If they can’t get a fix they break down and cry.’
‘You remember “O My Darling Clementine”?’ said Rose. ‘Well, my song sings to that banshee wail. I didn’t write the music.’
Armatage came up from the depths of his boozy snooze. ‘You bloody wronged it, if I remember.’
‘It was the highlight of the old squadron concert party. The comb-and-paper melted in my mouth at the thought of how many of us would be gone by the morrow.’ When he could get space on the intercom he put out his melody, in which the others joined without waiting for the chorus:
Bennett broke in: ‘Cut it out. Nash, get those guns into position.’ A lace-curtain network of high frequency stations came to pieces before an onslaught of atmospherics. Blinded by so much din, I put down the volume, detached the headphones and stood by Wilcox to look into the dazzle of oncoming sky that was like drink to my spirit. Space we needed, space we got. Four engines propelling the weight of our flying boat, we rode the air smoothly, however the boiling sea behaved two miles below. I had known no other life. The rest was a dream. Nothing and no existence prospered beyond our fuselage.
Wilcox held the controls so that Bennett could go to a meal in his room. By rights on a long journey over the sea there should have been a double crew. A nineteen-hour stretch or more at the wheel, wireless rig, navigation table, or engineer’s panel was too long a time for comfort or safety. But a double crew, as well as entailing double cost, would also mean double weight, and almost equal that which we expected to load on board.
Below, on another floor level, Nash manoeuvred a Browning towards the front turret. We would defend ourselves from all directions. Elaborate rearmament was not carried out unless to stop others taking the gold. ‘We should run up the skull-and-crossbones.’
Wilcox coughed his cough to the end. ‘If we get into a jolly-roger scrap, we’ll blow ’em out of sea or sky. We haven’t come this far to take chances. Anybody tries to stop us, and they’ll walk the plank.’
I was a prisoner of their harebrained scheme, and had too much pride to express regret at the speed of my conversion to the general cause.
8
The skipper wanted to see me, Appleyard said, so I climbed the ladder and found him at a table laid not with odd knives and forks but a silver set resting across the remains of his meal on a large dinner plate – a pitcher of water and half filled glass by his elbow.
‘Hearing any funny noises on your box of tricks, Sparks?’
‘Not so far.’
Plywood walls made his compartment seem solid and soundproof. A plantpot adorned a metal shelf under the porthole, and a small plan chest against a partition had the bottom two drawers half open. He told me to sit down. ‘The time to glue yourself to the radio is when we’re five or six hundred miles away. In the meantime, take a rest if you feel like it. I want you as sharp as a needle for the few hours before landfall.’
The bunk opposite had its bedding neatly stacked, and above was a framed photograph of a Lancaster bomber, Bennett prominent among the crew lined up on the ground. ‘What exactly should I listen for?’