The tail banged into a trough as we picked up speed. An odd chop shook the aircraft, and the subtle but deadly winds of dawn were set for a rampage. Bennett slowed his taxi-ing, and I felt a steady washboard grating under the hull. A blade of weak sun lit the nose of the south-pointing promontory. The water was speckled white towards our turning point, faint breakers creaming both shores. The low hill where we had buried Wilcox was outlined.
Maybe Bennett waved goodbye. ‘What news, Sparks?’
We turned to starboard, under the lee of the cape. ‘Sounds like they got aboard and signed him off. Smashed his gear. They’re coming for us.’
‘Press on remorseless,’ Nash said.
‘Remorseless it is.’
A pale grey glacier rose between the flanks of two basaltic mountains, a broken expanse of other glaciers beyond, in places pink, and merging into a semicircle of cloud. Crevasses, ice ridges, solidified waterfalls stretched to the south as far as we could see. ‘Better than the view from Boston Stump,’ Nash said. ‘It was worth coming this far for!’
The sea was calm, straits widening. Engines on full power muffled the bang and drowned the whistling shell which preceded a waterspout in front. The earphone-lead enabled me to look out and see a ship coming from behind an indentation of the western coast.
‘Two miles,’ Appleyard said, ‘and it ain’t made of cardboard.’
‘Nor is that 88-millimetre screwed on the deck,’ Nash told him. ‘And I’ve just got the last clue.’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Perseverance – it must be.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Bennett. ‘We’re back on form.’
Another shell exploded so close that a wall of water swept the canopy. ‘Third one has it, Skipper.’
I was flung at the navigating table while Bennett did as tight a circle as he dared without smashing the port float, the hull in a cloud of shooting spray. I grabbed the radio handle as if to wrench it from the fitting.
‘They should be put on a charge for dumb insolence,’ said Appleyard. ‘They’re trying to drown us.’
‘Kilroy was here,’ said Nash. A shell exploded to port. ‘Give ’em the figure of eight, Skipper. We can take it.’
‘Get on your radio, Sparks, and tell them that if we go up in flames, everything on board will sink to the bottom.’
He turned to starboard, and another half circle took us so close we could no longer be seen by the ship’s gunners. Bennett hurled back up the straits, and when he drew level with our old mooring place and saw the way clear for five miles ahead, let all engines have full throttle and began moving for take-off.
During these manoeuvres it had been impossible to send his signal, but when on the straight I was about to do so he told me to scrub it.
‘Prepare for take-off.’
‘Minefield starts at four thousand yards,’ said Nash.
‘Give or take the odd furlong,’ Appleyard added.
‘Fact noted,’ Bennett said.
‘Is our new address to be Carnage Cottage, then, or the “Old Bull and Bush”?’
Rather than give up the gold, he would kill us and send it to the bottom. Morse from the Nemesis (or whatever name the other ship had) was fast, but so faulty in rhythm that it was difficult to tell dots from dashes, though the message was unmistakable. ‘WE HAVE YOU CORNERED STOP SURRENDER HEAVE TO.’
They knew we were hellbent for a minefield, but I told them to get stuffed as we flogged up speed – tactically flexible, and versatile unto death.
‘Salt water for breakfast,’ Nash said.
‘On toast,’ laughed Appleyard.
Expecting flak from above and below, we trusted Bennett to get us clear. He saw no reason not to proceed, and sped by the cliffs. But there was no lift, meaning we’d get through the minefield only to crash into the hill blocking the end of the channel. The same text from the Nemesis was repeated, demanding capitulation. They imagined us skulking behind the headland, contemplating the damage they had caused, and debating what to do next while we adjusted our reading glasses. ‘We’ll get up,’ said Nash. ‘We aren’t in a bloody railway carriage, and that’s a fact.’
We seemed to be travelling between the sleeve of the cliffs forever, pounding forward too slowly for our ominous weight. There was little wind to help. No one spoke. For better or worse, Bennett’s fight was ours and we left him to it, sat tight and prayed to get airborne without suddenly ceasing to exist. I looked out of the porthole to see, if only for a second, the nipple or big apple of a mine that would demob us for good and take us into a dream impossible to wake from. Supposition as to life after death watered my fear while we went through a zone marked on the chart as dangerous, and I wondered whether they were as thickly sown as eyes in a plate of sago, or as thinly as balls on a wet-day bowling green.
The Nemesis wouldn’t follow, and that was certain, but with a long-range gun it didn’t need to, though the dilemma of boarding was for them to crack. Their ship had not yet turned the final headland to watch either our spectacular fireball demise, or see us wiggle our tail as we lifted into the wide blue yonder. Bennett was too much locked in his fight to wonder about the seaplanes. Every rivet spar and panel vibrated as if, should we put on another knot of speed, we’d come to pieces.
The shakes diminished, but the hull scraped against the carborundum wheel of the water which seemed intent on grinding us down to the extinction of a wafer. In spite of the universal thrust, our boat was dead if it couldn’t lift – and so were we. Disintegration beamed on us, but a hummed tune came through the intercom and while I mulled on an end to our history, I recognized words which I joined in though only under my breath so as not to break our luck. Why that song rang out I’ll never know, nor who was the instigator, but in that couple of minutes I loved it for melting the wax of menace from us all.
Perhaps it was a case of spiritual buffoonery carried to its greatest extent, considering our crucial situation, but the words took me out of this perilous fjord and back to the palm-beach coast of Malaya where our staging post had been, and I heard again Peter Dawson’s voice booming from a loudspeaker nailed halfway up a tree, singing ‘The Road to Mandalay’. And now we were mocking it blind with tears in our eyes, but singing all the same as if it were a hymn.
‘On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flying fishes play …’
and we were one of those fishes, about to lift off for longer than any flier of the deep sea could, which no one in the history of the world would be able to gainsay, our great flying boat ascending, its twin along the surface of the blue water accompanying as if to see us safe into the air, when we would say goodbye because we’d no longer be either visible or necessary to each other, and so slide apart. We sang as if China really was across the bay, and Bennett would get us there and beyond to a safety of his own devising.
The test-bed roar of four engines increased the distance between the port float and the water. A white bird spun from the windscreen. ‘Per ardua ad astra,’ Nash muttered, and the intercom almost went u/s with laughter.
The hull banged, destroying hope for a second, but the float lifted and the cliffs changed aspect, turned brown, then green, then opened out into sloping rocky hills, till underneath was a peace which meant contact with water had been lost. Ahead was a spur of black mountain, avoided by a quarter turn to port.
Bennett’s voice came: ‘Log the time for QAD, Sparks.’