‘Don’t believe that signal. They’d kill us on sight. We’ve given ’em too much stick.’
He gave a bitter smile of resignation, the sort of expression that must have been on his lips when he heard his prison sentence. Under Bennett’s rule he had become mortally pliable. Then I saw a flicker of his former self. ‘The only way to maintain height is to lighten the load. If we get as far as the shipping lanes and then come down we might be rescued.’
I felt the blow of defeat. The cardboard world was coming to an end. ‘Tell that to Bennett.’ There was bitterness in my smile too. ‘He’ll chuck us off, rather than the gold.’
‘He’s in no condition to do any such thing. There’s nothing to throw out that weighs so much.’
‘What about the guns?’
‘They’ll go last of all. And it would take too long.’
The blockage in the oil feed pipe had righted itself. We were flying level. Renewed hope was the measure of our desperation. We drew another tot of whisky. When I got back to the radio, the operator from the ship was repeating his message. To maintain silence seemed senseless, so I tapped sufficient to indicate that I had received and understood his text, and added that they could go to hell, because we were taking the gold to Shottermill as prearranged. Let them chew on that, and Shottermill bite the bullet if ever they got to him. In the meantime I told them to wait, wait, wait – till the crack of doom – as we must surely wait to find out whether we had any chance of getting beyond their range. That their signals were diminishing was due as much to the passing of time as to increase of distance. But at more than a hundred knots we had no difficulty leaving their orbit behind. To use a flying boat had been a fine ploy, though whether it had been good enough we didn’t know.
Checking the gauges, there was a vibration underfoot, as if the fuselage was trying to explain its sickness. Too much cargo had been put on, and a substance was not getting freely through to the engines. The life force was failing. Endurance was one thing, but the weight of dreams was another. Perhaps Bennett, in his central position, was not aware of our tonnage grinding against the sky. Calmness in the midst of adversity had become a serenity which he did not want to lose even to save himself. After getting the aircraft off the water he had settled into a brittle senility of purpose. He threw the ship’s message down, and smiled because the figures from the engineer’s panel had not altered in ten minutes. His expression said that he would prove us wrong.
19
The sea was roughened by a breeze from the west. Airborne for two hours, we were out of the influence of the island. In the good conditions just after dawn there seemed more life on short wave. Even on low there was traffic between ships, though most was faint and indecipherable.
It was impossible to ignore the flow from the inner engines, or not to take note of the fact that the third reading of the fuel gauges showed a fall in pressure. Nash in the galley had seen the fumes. ‘If the Skipper doesn’t feather those props the engines will either catch fire or disintegrate.’ The circular spirit-cap of the primus was about to burn itself dry. ‘Or the whole caboodle will go up in smoke. I wouldn’t forget where your parachute is if I was you.’
He pumped a flame under the kettle. ‘I never thought there was much future in such things. But don’t worry. It may not come to it. Bennett once brought a Lanc back from Germany on one engine and half a wing. Or near enough. We’re still in the Queen Mary compared to that.’
He heaped six dessert spoons into the large pot as if we still had a full crew. The aroma of brewing tea came even through the smell of fuel and, connected to some comfortable past, seemed to promise a future. Who cared about danger anymore? Reality slotted to a lower level of my mind.
Nash swore but did not flinch when the vibration of the plane threw drops of scalding water across his hand. ‘I wouldn’t worry, Sparks. Bennett’ll get us back to base.’
I was angry at his assumption that I was afraid, and slopped a third of the tea out of my mug ascending the ladder to the wireless. Nash followed with two mugs hooked on one hand and spilled none. He sat in the co-pilot’s seat and, with the controls on automatic, he and Bennett looked at the sea, and at the clouds they could not reach, as if they had only to stare long enough for land to appear a few miles to starboard.
I stayed tuned to the distress and general calling frequency, both for what I might hear, and to send our lifesaving message should the emergency come. Nash appeared uninterested in our common peril. Anxiety made it hard to devise a policy of salvation. He and Bennett were paralysed by optimism, or an ancient friendship difficult to break. I saw no alternative but to wait until that instant when we had to decide how to save ourselves.
Daytime atmospherics were in full sway, but an SOS had a habit of getting through. The Cape Town to Australia shipping route began 300 miles north of Kerguelen, and we had done almost that distance. There was no need yet to send an SOS, but I stayed alert for the sign of another ship. Every hour they would listen for fifteen minutes in case any vessel was in distress. I might try 8280 or 6040 for more long distance rescue, not in the hope of being reached in time, but so that there would be a record of our final plunge. The necessity of an SOS seemed a long way off. To send it not only admitted defeat, but would pull us into defeat even sooner – when it might not otherwise come at all. It was easy to be infected by the optimism of Nash and the skipper.
I put a hand towards my transmitter, fearing it would work loose from the mounting and fall forward. Thus the juddering of the airframe pulled me from my only refuge. Tea drops straddled the logbook like a stick of bomb-bursts. I steadied it and, gripping my morse key, managed to drink. With earphones around my neck I looked out, and saw the propeller of the inner port engine come to a stop, the distorted metal like a wave of greeting that had gone wrong.
Bennett emerged from his torpor. A hand went to the throttles, and he switched off the starboard inner for fear it would explode and scatter bits into the sea. This righted our slide-and-bump across the sky, and the two engines seemed tinnier and further away. He pushed the two outers onto full throttle so as to maintain speed, and prevent us skimming like a stone into the sea.
Nash noted all readings on the panel, the most significant being those from the air speed indicator and the altimeter. Bennett had set the barometric pressure at take-off, which made our height fairly accurate, but such a load on low power meant that the only solution was to shed some weight.
I stood behind, phone-lead trailing. Neither spoke. Each minute was another victory. Nash glanced at the altimeter like a fox at the horizon with the hounds behind. The hand spoke an inevitable descent, the arm of a failing clock coming back to the zero of the ground.
I could hear the sky, ions shifting in millions and making their own peculiar noise. The subtle river formed and unformed, a world to which I belonged. One morse signal would shaft a path through, man-made like a sword. They had no option but to give way for such rocket-pulses. None came. I searched and waited. The sensible course was to send a CQ call and contact whoever heard. If Bennett knew that a ship was close perhaps he would ditch within its radius.
The sea was a sheet of steel taken from a fire after the last heat had gone, ragged and corrugated, with pieces of blue clinker still attached. At three thousand feet, Bennett fought for every inch of height. ‘I can call a ship, in case we go down.’
Nash waved me angrily away. Bennett was cool. ‘Radio silence, Adcock. We’ve got to hang on to those boxes. You’re too young to know what they mean. A life without worries means freedom. Now I’ve got it. You lack the imagination to know what it signifies. As for you, Nash, I’ll buy you a fish-and-chip shop! You deserve no less.’