Endangered Species (15 page)

The woman lost her grip and fell back on to the junk's deck. Alongside the Captain, Stevenson, alerted by Mackinnon's shout, could see her lower legs were a bloody wreck.'

‘This is no fucking good,' muttered the Captain, then he raised his voice: ‘Mr Rawlings! This is useless! I'm going to stand off. We'll have to use a boat. Get the motorboat away as quickly as you can!'

Rawlings had to shout at Taylor to get him back inboard. The Third Mate seemed transfixed, staring down at the
injured woman alone on the bare patch of deck while splinters struck from the junk's gunwale fell about her and the other refugees remained motionless. Eventually Rawlings got him on deck and they followed Braddock and his bundle aft.

On the bridge Mackinnon turned to Stevenson. ‘You take the boat, mister. Don't overload it, for God's sake. We'll hoist you up with each load.' Mackinnon glanced up at the sky. ‘I don't think we've much time.' He strode over to the telegraph and rang full astern, then rubbed his forehead, an expression of extreme perplexity playing over his face. ‘Wait here a moment and keep an eye on that junk.'

Stevenson looked over the side again. With a shudder the ship gathered sternway. Seeing the two white men disappear with the baby, and left with the unconscious body of the unfortunate mother bleeding on the deck, the hitherto motionless refugees suddenly began to surge towards the nets. One or two leaped upwards, but most faltered, the violent motion of the junk dissuading them. Then the
Matthew Flinders
began to back away, her greater windage forcing her down upon the junk, while her stern swung into the wind. The frail junk disappeared under the flare of the bow, the terrified occupants wailing piteously at their apparent abandonment.

Stevenson, expecting the junk to reappear on the other bow in a capsized state, was relieved to see her still upright but the anguished cries of the refugees left him in no doubt as to the dangers of swamping once he got alongside in the motorboat. He rang stop engines as Mackinnon puffed back on to the bridge.

‘Here.'

The Captain nudged him furtively, masking something from the helmsman with the bulk of his stocky body. ‘Keep it out of sight. It's loaded. That's the safety catch. Tuck it inside your life jacket and don't use it unless you have to. We don't want to antagonise those people.'

Stevenson failed to grasp the significance of Mackinnon's last remark. He was staring at the cold object pressed into his hand.

‘The Mate's nearly ready,' Mackinnon said. On the boat-deck below the bridge a crowd of officers and men were mustered to swing out the motorboat. ‘If they look like swamping you a shot in the air should do the trick, but if it doesn't work,' Mackinnon sighed, ‘I leave it up to you . . .'

‘You mean . . .?'

‘Yes, of course I bloody mean it,' Mackinnon snapped. ‘I can't
tell
you to use it, but I want boat and boat's crew back in one piece, mister.'

The Welin-Machlachlan davits rumbled down their trackways and threw the swaying motorboat outboard until, tamed by the tricing pennants, it swung with a bump alongside the edge of the boat-deck.

‘Go on, son. Get on with it.'

He watched Stevenson leave the bridge, saw him vanish for a moment, then reappear with an orange life jacket.

‘Second Mate's taking the boat, Mr Rawlings,' he roared.

Three or four men jumped in. The Fourth Engineer's greasy boiler suit bent over the engine. A moment later Stevenson hung over the boat's stern, forty feet above the sea, and shipped the rudder.

They had done well to man the boat so quickly, Mackinnon thought. Their compassion had lent speed to their actions. The Captain waited anxiously, wondering if the engine would let them down. The humped backs over the crank jerked in unison and a cloud of thick black smoke belched from the exhaust, then died. Three times the cloud appeared before a shattering roar sounded from the boat. Rawlings held a thumb up towards the bridge.

‘Lower away!'

The tricing pennants were slipped as the
Matthew Flinders
rolled to starboard, the boat swung outwards and began to descend, crashing inboard as the rolling ship heeled to port.
The motor lifeboat struck the ship twice more before she slammed into the water, shaking her volunteer crew.

A swell picked the boat up and the falls hung slack.

‘Unhook! Into gear . . . give her full ahead . . .'

The boat sheered out from the ship's side, her crew dodging the swinging hooks and a moment later was clear of the protecting mass of the
Matthew Flinders
. The immensity of the sea was born in upon Stevenson as a physical reality rather than an intellectual consideration. The flat familiarity of the distant horizon was gone, replaced by the rearing crests of the waves and the physical onslaught of the rising wind. It was no longer a benign cooling agent, but the implacable, unseen force generating the huge irregularities of the sea's surface.

A wave burst on their bow and their thin cotton clothes were instantly saturated. Stevenson felt suddenly, shockingly cold. Astern of the motor lifeboat, the
Matthew Flinders
, which only a few moments ago had loomed over them, was lost behind the swells, vanishing as both lifeboat and ship fell into the hollow troughs. She diminished in size with startling rapidity as they drew away from her. From the bridge fifteen minutes earlier, it had seemed to Stevenson no more than a short distance to the junk; now it appeared much greater.

Mackinnon's sense of urgency and this feeling of isolation twisted a worm of apprehension in Stevenson's belly. He leaned on the tiller, cleared his throat with an assumption of authority, and bellowed instructions at his crew.

‘Whatever happens,' he concluded more confidently, ‘we mustn't let them swamp us. We'll have to make several trips.'

They climbed over the crest of a wave, the bluff bow of the boat throwing spray out on either side. The white foam broke around them with a seething hiss and a fulmar petrel swept out of the wave trough, turned neatly on rigid wings and quartered their wake, otherwise unperturbed by their presence.

Then, on the next wave crest, hard-edged against the sky, Stevenson saw the overcrowded hull of the helpless junk. He
put his free hand inside his life jacket. The steel butt of the .38 calibre Smith and Wesson dug uncomfortably into his stomach muscles.

Taylor had delivered the message given him by Rawlings and stood beside Mackinnon, watching the progress of the boat.

‘The saloon's fine,' the Captain said, absently approving the Mate's dispositions and intentions. Recollecting Taylor's earlier nervousness he added, ‘You and Braddock did well down there.'

Taylor was exhilarated. He envied Stevenson's command of the boat, but there was no denying he had enjoyed the sensation as he had swung outboard with Braddock in a futile but gallant attempt to assist the refugees aboard. Somehow their failure added to his heightened sense of achievement, for he had been
there
, at the point of action, his disease quite forgotten in the thrill of it. He felt for the unfortunate woman, of course, but some primitive instinct had been undeniably assuaged by her injury, for the sudden red of blood conferred upon the incident a savage reality.

As the motor lifeboat closed with the junk, a profoundly shocking realisation hit Taylor: he had forgotten his own chronic dilemma in the acute agony of the woman's pain. It was a quite irrational, inexplicable thought, the kind a man can never publicly admit to,
schadenfreude
of a most private type. It was not himself that was hurt; someone else was in pain. Suddenly the indifference of the woman's companions was comprehensible.

While he waited alongside Mackinnon, Taylor realised he had discovered something important. His illness, debilitating and reprehensible though it was, was a result of
life
; he could not deny an intensity of feeling as this realisation occurred to him. He quite suddenly understood that he had, in his expectations, calculated his entire future in terms of safety, and his disease threatened this stability. His ruined
marriage was seen thus when set against the expectation of perfection he had thought it should produce. It was, he now realised, extremely foolish, based entirely upon the arrogant assumptions made by civilised and sophisticated western man.

This, he realised, staring about him from the Olympian height of the bridge at the white dot of the motor lifeboat as it ploughed through the deteriorating conditions, this was adventure, an enterprise of hazard, an exciting and stimulating experience. He felt a surge of new-found confidence, aware he had caught an echo of the past, in tune with the intrepidity of his ancestors, excited by his proximity to risk and death. Such sentiments, he was convinced, came to him as of birthright. He was piqued Stevenson had command of the boat, but a typhoon was in the offing, and the sea state and sky promised far worse was to come. Like a hound he sniffed at the wind, seeking opportunity.

As to his present predicament, it was no more than bad luck.

Standing on the windswept bridge-wing he resolved with quixotic intensity to see Sharimah again. He could, no, he
would
travel home via Singapore, use his leave up if necessary, for there could be no denying the warm passion of the girl, her own affliction notwithstanding. It almost made him laugh to consider the disease might draw them together. It was shaming but curable

The resolution, once formed, was irrevocable. He braced himself, drew the rising wind into his lungs and felt full of vigour. The venereal infection was a temporary embarrassment. Great men had suffered thus and it had not affected their achievements. Caroline was forgotten, dismissed as she had long ago dismissed him in the moment of his departure.

Raising his glasses he observed Stevenson with a critical eye as the motor lifeboat bumped alongside the junk.

Stevenson wished he had had the foresight to bring one of the
Chinese with him to act as interpreter, but they had melted away when the boat was being prepared. It occurred to him that he did not know whether or not Cantonese and Vietnamese were mutually comprehensible, then concentrated on bringing the lifeboat alongside.

The refugees surged across the junk, their faces alight with expectation; the waterlogged craft wallowed dangerously.

‘Ease her, Tony,' he called to the Fourth Engineer and the engine note dropped. A crescendo of excited jabber rose above the hiss of the sea and the noise of the wind. They were to leeward of the junk as it rolled, drifting towards them. He ought to get the injured woman off first, Stevenson decided, his heart thumping as he measured the rapidly closing distance by eye.

‘Stop her!'

They were a boat's length from the junk as they lost way, the sea tossing the two craft wildly about.

‘Anyone speak English?' Stevenson called and was surprised by a stir in the crowd. A girl in shapeless slacks and a cheap cotton blouse emerged from the press of humanity. She looked utterly exhausted.

‘Yes. I speak English.'

Stevenson's relief was overwhelming. ‘Good. Listen carefully. I want the woman who is hurt first, then the children. Not more than twenty-five people at a time.' He held up the extended fingers of his right hand five times. ‘You savvy?'

She hooked a strand of black hair back behind an ear. ‘I understand.' She turned away, explaining. The refugees listened for a moment, then wailed and remonstrated in protest. The sudden movement on the junk made it wallow sluggishly, so that Stevenson knew it was not far from foundering.

The two boats bumped alongside each other. The castaways surged towards their rescuers and the junk again listed dangerously. Only the example of the injured woman,
the relative motion of the two craft and the exhaustion of the refugees prevented disaster. This hesitation saved them from catastrophe. A moment later and the alerted boat's crew were staving off a too-hasty evacuation of the junk.

‘I promise we come back,' Stevenson shouted at the diminutive figure of the girl as the first group of Vietnamese settled in the tossing motorboat. ‘I want you,' he said, pointing at her with deliberate emphasis, ‘to wait until the last time. Okay? You wait. Tell the people I will come back.'

It took forty minutes to make the first trip, ten of which were spent in hooking the lifeboat on to the long wire falls with their heavy steel blocks. Lifeboats were designed for evacuating a ship; they were not working craft to be hoisted back on board with any ease. Braddock, the bowman, nursed a gashed forefinger uncomplainingly for the remainder of that long, arduous afternoon. Lifted to promenade deck level, willing hands helped the refugees aboard, especially the now-senseless woman whose legs had been roughly bound and upon which crude tourniquets had been improvised. Then they descended again on the second of what would prove to be seven trips, taking over four hours to complete.

As the boat headed back to the junk for the last time, the wallowing craft was visibly lower in the water. Stevenson was seriously concerned about the wind. Captain Mackinnon had patiently worked the unwieldy bulk of the
Matthew Flinders
upwind of the junk, cutting down the transit time, but the disparate sizes and windage of the two vessels caused the ship to drive to leeward faster than the waterlogged junk. To avoid overwhelming it he had been compelled to move away as the penultimate load of refugees was disembarked.

Having made several of his trips almost entirely in the shelter of the ship, Stevenson now found himself exposed. There was a savage note to the wind and the sea was building rapidly. The wave crests broke about them with a malevolent roar, striking the sides of the boat with a jar.

Mackinnon had passed a message down to the Second Mate
that he was to personally check the junk before finally leaving it. As the last of the wretched boat people scrambled or were pulled aboard the motor lifeboat, Stevenson jumped nimbly across on to the bare timbers of the pathetic craft.