Endangered Species (14 page)

In the chart-room he pulled out the chart on which first Stevenson and then Taylor had plotted the positions of the tropical revolving storm, for so it had been denoted at the first report. By the time Taylor had bent over this chart the previous evening, it had already been upgraded to the sinister dignity of a typhoon and given the code name ‘David'.

Mackinnon studied the two positions. Whilst he realised the early movement of such disturbances is both unpredictable and irregular, the data about them can confuse. Premature judgements based on scanty information mislead, but the distance between them was suspiciously short and
the predicted recurvature unusually abrupt. The mistake he should have spotted earlier was now so obvious that he found it difficult to understand why he had not questioned it before.

He knew, too, that the almost (at least in meteoreological terms) sudden generation of the storm meant that it was probably relatively small. That would account for both the size of the swell and the present moderate wind force they were experiencing. It would, however, be foolish in the extreme to think of its lack of size as grounds for dismissing it. The warning spoke of winds of force twelve, sixty-five knots. His only consolation seemed to be that it would probably not last long. But, equally, its arrival could not be far away.

Fourteen, fifteen hours ago the centre of the typhoon had passed over the
west
coast of Mindanao and must by now have traversed the Sulu Sea and be assaulting Palawan. Unlike Mindanao, Palawan was only about twenty-five miles wide. No wonder there was a swell . . .

Mackinnon strode out on to the starboard bridge-wing. He had not misjudged the steady rising of the wind. The inevitability of their passage through the typhoon and his estimation of its likely duration made the whole matter bearable. There was nothing he could do about it beyond nursing his ship through it. Shelagh would be waiting for him in Hong Kong. It was something to look forward to; a carrot to dangle in front of the donkey, allowing him to thrust to the back of his mind the stick of his own guilt which threatened to beat him. He must turn out the crowd and send them round the decks to make all secure, double-check the derrick lashings and tighten the wires on the drums of deck cargo on the after well-deck.

Young Stevenson was on watch and Mackinnon found him staring to windward through his glasses. There was no purpose in pointing out the error in the plotting of the typhoon warning. Stevenson would be better employed supervising the securing of the upper decks.

‘Mr Stevenson, I want a word . . .'

Stevenson turned. ‘Ah, sir, I was just about to call you. I think you'd better have a look at what's four points to starboard.' He held out the binoculars to Mackinnon. ‘Four points to starboard, sir,' he repeated.

Mackinnon took the glasses, levelled them at the horizon and, focussing them, swung them forty-five degrees on the bow.

He did not want to acknowledge what he could see. For upwards of a minute he stood staring at the image in the glasses. Suddenly his confidence waned. The memory of his dream and Captain Hooper's words came back to him. Eastern Steam's eponymous heroes had mostly come to a sticky end. Cook hacked to pieces on the beach at Hawaii; Hudson and his son frozen in a small boat after the mutiny of their crew; Dampier dying of neglect; Fitzroy by his own razor, and Flinders, poor Flinders, whose luck changed after his encounter with Entrecasteaux . . .

Slowly Mackinnon lowered the binoculars.

‘Put the engines on stand-by, Mr Stevenson,' he said expressionlessly. ‘Get a man on the wheel and then ring down and ask the Mate to come up.'

‘We are about to make our own encounter,' he murmured to himself and then chid himself for his foolishness. He remembered the law of imbuggerance and the premonition he had sensed in Singapore. He had run out of luck, sure, but it was nothing he should not be able to handle.

Captain Mackinnon raised the glasses again and, on the rim of the typhoon, he considered how best to recover the sodden refugees in the waterlogged boat to windward.

The jangle of the engine-room telegraph alerted almost everybody on board the
Matthew Flinders
to the fact that something unusual was happening. On some merchant ships it had once been the practice to ring it at noon by way of a test, allowing bridge and engine-room clocks to be synchronised. Telegraphs are rung when a vessel moves into fog, heavy rain or snow, but the crew are usually alerted to this by other symptoms such as their own senses, a call for lookouts, or the peremptory blare of the siren. Normally the telegraph remains silent from manoeuvring at one port to manoeuvring at the next. When, therefore, Stevenson rang it that afternoon, even those dozing in their watch below stirred uneasily in their bunks.

Only for Taylor, alone in his cabin after lunch, did the noise come as a welcome distraction. Unable to relax despite the fitful and unsatisfactory drowsiness of the past nights, he was exhausted to the point of nervous insomnia. He had come to dread his watches below and the awful isolation of being unable to live with himself.

The headaches he had complained of were secondary symptoms of his malaise, products of his intense anxiety and lack of sleep. For several days now he had suffered the agony of the damned without respite, too ashamed to confess it to Mackinnon, too obsessed with the conviction it
masked a more terrible disease. The periods of acute pain were interspersed with long intervals of worry, of putting off the next onslaught, yet all the time imagining the desire to urinate was pressing. The foul truth of the gleet would not let him forget, while the greater fear of either syphilis or AIDS burdened every thought he had. And though Taylor had made a reprehensible mistake in the matter of the misinterpreted typhoon warning, he clung to his sanity and hid his shame with an almost heroic determination. When the telegraph rang, Taylor reacted immediately, beating Chief Officer Rawlings to the bridge.

The seamen, just turning to on deck after their dinner, crowded to the rail. Off-duty engineers and greasers appeared and the T-shirts of stewards and the cook sprinkled the gathering as that other, esoteric shipboard telegraphy sent the fact of their encounter through the vessel with the speed of rumour.

Mackinnon shouted down to a seaman on the foredeck, summoning him to the bridge. Macgregor came up and took the wheel as Stevenson switched from automatic to manual steering. With her engines slowed and her helm hard over, the
Matthew Flinders
worked round the wallowing boat.

‘Midships . . . full astern . . . stop her.' Macgregor and Stevenson obeyed Mackinnon's commands as he stood on the starboard wing and brought his ship to windward of the castaways. When she finally lost way, the ship lay motionless some hundred yards from the object Stevenson had sighted eighteen minutes earlier.

The
Matthew Flinders
, beam on to wind, sea and swell, rolled heavily and drifted slowly to leeward. Her greater windage thrust her inexorably downwind towards the junk. From the bridge Mackinnon, Rawlings, Stevenson and Taylor watched the gap between the two disparate craft narrow.

‘East meets West,' murmured Rawlings.

The wooden vessel was some seventy or eighty feet long
with an ugly midships superstructure. The remains of what had once been a tall mast was capped with a single navigation light, proclaiming her conversion to diesel propulsion, but a ragged sail lay collapsed and unused upon the cabin top.

Stevenson took in these details automatically. What impressed his consciousness was the junk's human deck cargo. It was only later he learned one hundred and forty-six persons were crammed together in that tiny hull. For the moment all he saw were the upturned faces, pale with privation and despair, apparently unmoved by the appearance of the great ship above them.

‘Poor bastards,' said Mackinnon. Along the ship's rail similar opinions were being expressed in similar vein. East and West indeed met and in that moment of suspended animation, each adjusted to the other's presence.

Stevenson watched the gap between them diminish, the heavy leeward listing roll of the old cargo-liner drawing closer to the wallowing, waterlogged lolling of the overloaded junk.

Taylor stood appalled. He felt cold, chilled by so much misery, so many people in a desperate situation like himself, for he was incapable of entertaining any consideration which did not, in some way, reflect his own plight. As he stared down, a very curious thought occurred to him. Since the outbreak of gonorrhea he had wiped any thoughts of Sharimah from his mind, neutralising his memory of her, for fear he should find that attraction he had felt for her turn into hatred. He knew from some primitive instinct that if he let this happen such hatred, cheated of outlet, would introvert. Suicide would disgrace his name. Instead, seeing the upturned faces, he felt a keen and overwhelming compassion for Sharimah in which a measure of self-pity was to be found.

‘Cargo nets,' said Mackinnon, galvanising his officers. ‘Get some cargo nets over the side, and the pilot ladder for those who can climb.'

Rawlings duplicated the Captain's orders, shouting down
on deck. Turning to Taylor, he said, ‘Come on, Three-O,' and slid down the bridge ladder to take charge. The staring groups of seamen burst apart, running about the decks in search of the bundled nets and the rolled and lashed ladder by Number Three hatch.

‘Work up a DR position, mister,' Mackinnon ordered and Stevenson obeyed, glad of something to do.

‘Christ,' he muttered to himself, surprised at the strength of his own emotional response. There were women and children down there . . . Unaccountably he thought of Cathy, then he dismissed the thought and picked up the chart pencil.

Mackinnon remained staring down at the junk as it crashed alongside the
Matthew Flinders
's shell plating. Hull struck hull with a loud grinding, splinters flew and the human cargo aboard the junk shifted away from the point of contact causing it to lurch dangerously, rolling her outboard rail under. Anxiety passed across the faces of the occupants as, from the great ship rolling high above them, they transferred their attention to the dark slick of water suddenly running over their feet. A moment later, squealing with fear, they stared up again.

Mackinnon shook off the appearance of those faces. They haunted him, disturbing old ghosts, reminding him of the faces he had seen in Singapore in 1945. He closed his eyes momentarily and became aware of someone beside him. It was Taylor, standing white-knuckled as he clasped the scrubbed teak caprail. The Third Mate was glaring down into the junk, rooted to the spot, oblivious to Rawling's order. His face was sallow and oiled with sweat, like a seasick man. Shaken himself, Mackinnon put it down to emotional response, forgetting Taylor's fault and, in a rare, paternal gesture, he patted Taylor's shoulder.

‘Best to do as the Mate says, Mr Taylor. You'll get over it. Nip down and lend a hand.'

Taylor gazed blankly at the Captain. ‘Aye, aye, sir,' he
said mechanically. As he went below the Captain's words echoed in his head. Would he get over it? Would this anxiety and guilt ever leave him? For Taylor had not been seeing the seven score faces as he stared down. For him they had fused into the half-closed eyes of Sharimah, Sharimah bucking in sexual ecstasy beneath the urgent thrusting of his own body with an enthusiasm that had both surprised and pleasured him. It had rarely been like that with Caroline, especially lately . . .

But the pleasure was short-lived, and cold comfort to him now, for the Malay girl had chilled as soon as she ignited, had used him as he had used her, and left a legacy of their mutual self-abuse. He felt no personal animosity to her; but the thought that she herself might have sought her own revenge on him, that the source of her disease was someone like himself, made him feel ill. His palms sweated afresh as he stumbled down the ladder to the main-deck, and he fastened his mind on the Captain's advice to assist the Mate with a desperation no longer rational.

The cargo nets had not been over the side more than a minute before Mackinnon realised they were useless. To Rawlings and his men it was quickly obvious that the occupants of the junk were too weak to attempt the fifteen-feet climb to the
Matthew Flinders
's deck. Braddock and Taylor scrambled over the side to help and clung like monkeys by one hand, the other extended to assist at the point at which the junk ceased her upward surge, before she fell back into the trough of the swells. None of the Vietnamese moved; they stared impassively at the well-muscled and bronzed white men. Braddock began shouting encouragement and the exasperated words floated up to Mackinnon fifty feet above.

‘Come on, you daft buggers . . . come one! 'Ere you, missus, for Christ's sake give us the kid . . .' Braddock's free hand beckoned frantically.

The woman moved forward slowly. Others helped her, passing her forward until she was on the edge of the crowd. A foot or two separated her from Braddock's outstretched hand. Swaying uncertainly she held out her baby.

Mackinnon could already see what was going to happen.

The junk rolled inwards. The woman was propelled two steps forward, losing her balance. She cannoned into the steel wall of the ship's side. Braddock had anticipated it too; with surprising agility he moved sideways and leaned down. He caught the child as the woman found her footing falling away from under her. He wrenched the tiny bundle from her arms before she was even aware what was happening and was too busy recovering himself and his prize to see her dragged down the ship's side. Her hands scrabbled and caught in the netting. Taylor moved across to help her. Her feet had left the junk's deck before it reached the bottom of the swell. Taylor, stretching across the net, could not get her to let go one hand and seize her wrist as he descended as far as he dared. He reached out to grasp her arm, but she reacted violently, twisting and screaming before the rising junk caught her legs. The wild cry of fear turned to a piercing screech of agony as her feet were crushed. Mackinnon shouted a futile warning while the crowd on the junk, watching helplessly, seemed to draw a corporate breath. It was all they could do, for the thing happened so quickly.