Philip McCutchan
Warmaster
Chapter One
The sea would have appeared like oily glass if it had been visible; but the night was dark and the fog was swirling thick and damp, so thick that the visibility was no more than a yard whichever way one looked. Albert Morris didn’t even see the door open, though he heard it right enough, and he didn’t see young Bates until the lanky figure was hard up alongside him, and even then he was nothing but a tall, thin outline below the big lamp.
Young Bates sniffed and said mournfully, ‘Tea up, Bert.’
‘Thanks, mate.’ The scalding tea steamed up into Albert Morris’s face and he savoured it gratefully. ‘’Bout time, too… this is what I call proper flippin’ brass-monkey weather an’ all! Eh?’ He peered through the murk at the young man’s face, feeling the deadly cold and clamminess stealing down from the North Sea to numb his bones. ‘Still dreamin’ about the missus and the nipper, then?’
Young Bates swore, briefly and jeeringly. ‘Do you mind? Sooner I get off this flippin’ tub, better I’ll like it! They can flippin’ keep this. I’m chuckin’ in. Be home every flippin’ night, that’s what I want.’ He drew the back of his hand across his nose.
Albert Morris, ex-chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy, gave a deep chuckle. ‘Do us a favour, mate. ’Op it! Go below an’ get warm. Your natterin’ ’as what you might call a depressing effect, this time of a filthy night.’
Young Bates moved away. Morris was left alone with his thoughts, in his cut-off little world, with his thoughts and his cough, which set the phlegm stirring in his chest. He set his tea-mug down on a ledge and swung his arms, slapping them vigorously around thick shoulders. He did this seven times and then he stopped and drank some more of the tea-noisily. After that he blew hot breath on to his fingers, half frozen beneath the thick woollen gloves. He stamped his feet, and hunched his body deeper into the protection of his duffel coat. That duffel coat, and the many sweaters and jerseys which he wore beneath it, gave Albert Morris the appearance of a friendly barrel.
But it still didn’t keep out that vicious cold.
That cold ate right into a man, right into his marrow, seemed to freeze his very thoughts and mental processes so that he was trapped in a tiny world, a private world of wooden decking and steel rails and bulkheads and that hateful fog, which penetrated damply into every nook and cranny, every fold of clothing, and left a film of wetness behind it wherever it went. Moisture hung from Albert Morris’s balaclava, from his nose, from his duffel coat. The great lamp above his head dripped condensation, its beams merged into a solid orb of brightness where the enclosing murk held the light prisoner. It couldn’t have been visible for more than a matter of yards in that pea-souper of a fog.…
Over all, muffled but mournful, was the rapid clanging of the deep-toned bell, the bell which sounded out its individual, self-identifying fog-signal at intervals to warn groping strangers to stand well clear of the Wrangles lightship, moored as usual in her station for the guidance and safety of mariners as they made their way up to Newcastle or Immingham or across the North Sea to Scandinavia; or came up from the Downs to make the London River. Strangers who would move onward to safe harbour and a good night’s sleep and a run ashore next day, while the men of the Wrangles remained in their solitude out at sea.
Albert Morris shivered and then yawned hugely, his thoughts now following much the same pattern as those of young Bates. Those thoughts sped across the cold seas to the little terraced house in Gravesend where Mrs Morris would be warmly and snugly asleep in the big double bed in the front bedroom. Only a few more days and he would be sharing that bed with her — for a spell, anyway, until duty called him back again to the Wrangles, so far out from the Kent coast. They were some fifteen miles east-nor’-east of the North Goodwin, and it was dead lonely at the best of times.
It was 2.46 a.m precisely when Albert Morris heard the stranger’s voice in the night: A syren’s brassy voice; one prolonged blast followed by two short blasts. Less than two minutes later — another three blasts. The nameless stranger was towing something and was under way, and not slowly either, judging by the sound of that second warning. Groping his passage blind through the fog, depending on his radar. Morris gave a loud sniff and wiped moisture from his face. There were plenty of lunatics at large in these days of automated this, that, and the other. He waited, fully alert now. The seconds passed. The stranger was certainly getting closer — the third series of blasts was much nearer, seemed to shatter the night with its roar. It was, as always in fog, difficult to make out just where those syren-blasts were coming from, but Morris fancied it was from astern, and to port. On the port quarter… but he could be wrong.
The lightship’s bell rang urgently.
No matter, of course, if Albert Morris was wrong; there was nothing he could do about it in any case. The Wrangles couldn’t move out of anybody’s way, and the lightship men were well accustomed to ships groping past. Morris muttered a private curse against radar. It was all very fine — but before radar was thought of ships used to stop engines in fog, and lie there, and wait in comparative security until it cleared. Now they bashed on regardless, looking upon their radar screens as divinely infallible little idols that couldn’t tell a lie.…
Albert Morris cocked his head up sharply as another, more distant, set of blasts roared out into the fog. Again one long followed by two shorts.
Another stranger. A second, almost certainly the partner in the tow, adding its cry to that of the first. The first bleated again now, and Morris fancied she was clear, hauling across the lightship’s stern, possibly after plotting her on the radar. But there was still the other one, and she seemed to be approaching the lightship from the port side unless Albert Morris was very much mistaken.
He listened hard, moving silently to the full extent of the little vessel’s beam. All his attention was concentrated now as a pinprick of fear touched him. He could have sworn he heard the approaching swish of water past a ship’s hull — even the beat of engines; and voices, high and urgent voices in an unknown tongue. The hair seemed to bristle at the back of his neck and he didn’t waste any more time. Above the furious clanging of that warning bell, he yelled out, ‘All hands… all hands on deck! There’s a mad bastard out there, going to hit—’
He ran into the little deckhouse, reaching out for the alarm rattlers and a voice-pipe. Then the next blast came. The din nearly burst Albert Morris’s eardrums and he felt the rigidity of real fear invade and lock his limbs. A fraction of a second later he saw the high steel bows slice through the swirling fog, even saw the stranger’s starboard anchor hove home in the hawse-pipe, heard the startled shout from the bridge high above, and then those bows had knifed into the lightship’s fo’c’sle, and all Albert Morris could hear after that was the grinding, tortured shriek of lacerating steel as the stranger cut in deep, cut right through. Her sides scraped past, little more than inches from Albert Morris’s face. Then came the scream of trapped and injured men as the Wrangles lightship tilted for’ard and to starboard, deprived of her whole length before the midship super-structure. The oily sea was rushing now into her exposed innards. Morris clung to the rail. Already the stranger was lost in the fog; she had passed on heedlessly, was evidently not stopping to help, to make some amends for what the madman on her bridge had done. Red fury filled Albert Morris’s brain, and he yelled after her, calling obscenities into the night and the fog, his voice high and hoarse and breaking with passionate anger. Then a giant’s hand slapped him, slapped into the left side of his face, sending him spinning to the reeling deck to fetch up in a corner by the athwart-ships rail. Dazed, he shook his head. He was aware of men’s urgent voices in the after part of the vessel, men who would be getting the seaboat lowered — if they could! He was also aware of something else: a singing in his ears, a curious hum — a sound that his innate sense of seamanship, his instinct, at once identified for him. He scrambled up, trembling, and reached out with his gloved fingers. He grasped a thick wire hawser above his head, a hawser that ran fast and raspingly through his hand, tearing the material of the glove, tearing his flesh. His brain ticked over mechanically. This was one of the towing wires—and it was running right across the lightship.