Endangered Species (2 page)

It was only after Taylor had finally departed and left Second Officer Stevenson to the magnificent loneliness of the night that the latter wondered if Taylor had been less than
ironic earlier, in doubting his own sanity.

The approaching ship passed two miles to starboard, heading westwards, its phosphorescent wake splashing into the bow wave of the
Matthew Flinders
.

Stevenson began to pace the bridge, from wing to wing, passing regularly through the wheelhouse where the dull hum of gyro-compass and radar, and the orange flicker of the automatic pilot rendered a helmsman redundant. Only the isolated lookout two hundred feet forward on the old-fashioned forecastle head maintained the vigil above decks. A few other lonely souls stood their watch in the engine-room below.

The London-born child of Scots parents, Alex Stevenson had nursed an ambition to go to sea since childhood. Characteristically he had never wavered from his intention. Up to the beginning of this present voyage he had been quite content, his master mariner's certificate secured at last, the passport to eventual command.

But the
Matthew Flinders
was on no ordinary voyage; this was to be her last, for she was already consigned to breakers in the Far East, one of a last pair of cargo-liners which had once formed part of a substantial, privately owned British merchant shipping company. Relegated first to the Isle of Man registry her disinterested owners had recently flagged her out under the ensign of Panama to avoid complying with British government legislation and the supposedly ‘high' wages demanded by British seafarers. Mercifully, for this final trip, the owners, anxious to rid themselves of their last ships, had not bothered to import a crew from Taiwan or the Philippines, but merely scooped up whatever was available on the international pool. By a perverse coincidence the complement of the
Matthew Flinders
was largely as it had always been, with British seamen on deck and Chinese greasers below. Her deck officers and engineers were a handful of the company's
remaining long-term employees, hanging on in the forlorn hope of redundancy payments.

This uncertain future had contributed to Stevenson's rupture with Cathy. Casting about for possible alternative employment he had been forced to face the fact that his country had turned its back on its maritime past; no one gave a tuppenny damn about the so-called Merchant Navy. There were, quite simply, no more ships.

Walking up and down, his bitterness grew. Others were cushioned against the inevitable. Captain Mackinnon was retiring, as was the Chief Engineer. Mr Rawlings, the Chief Officer, had some contingency plan, while Taylor's family had money. Besides, the lovely Caroline was rumoured to be something smart in her own right in the City of London. But Stevenson, with the indigent respectability of the lower-middle class, needed his job, the only job he had ever wanted to do, the only job he had trained for. In fact it was his very way of life that was to be torn from him by the harsh facts of economic change.

Resolutely, he turned his thoughts away from such embittered contemplation. If this was to be his last voyage, or at least the last voyage before he had to hawk his skills round manning agencies, sell himself to any bidder and sail for his subsistence in ill-founded rust buckets, he wanted to enjoy it.

But he no longer had the consolation of Cathy; he had ended their affair, as he had said, when he received instructions to join the
Matthew Flinders
. He leaned disconsolately on the rail and reflected on the wisdom of his act, painful though it was. Taylor had spliced his life to that of the beautiful Caroline and it was clear that he was unhappy. Even so, they had been a month at sea and the sensuous warmth of the night was compelling . . .

He gave in to the insistent vision of Cathy in the shower, her dark hair piled on her head and her face held up to the splashing rose. He could see again her straight nose and the
ever-so-slightly receding chin which threw her lower lip into pouting prominence. Hers was not the patrician beauty of Taylor's Caroline, yet it was the flaw in her looks that gave them their special charm.

‘What are you staring at?' he could hear her ask from beneath the hissing water, turning those level grey eyes on him lying in bed. ‘Eloquent eyes' he had privately and poetically named her, for she seemed to say more through them than through her lips, as if the latter were maintained for purely carnal purposes.

‘You,' he answered, suddenly embarrassed that he had spoken out loud. But it was insufficient to drive Cathy's image from his mind. She emerged from the shower, pink and brown and deliciously shameless, bending to towel her thighs so that her breasts swung with a detached and lascivious oscillation . . .

Stevenson lit another cigarette and resumed his furious pacing of the bridge, silently cursing the girl.

Cathy had been the first woman with whom he had had more than the briefest of relationships and he had ditched her. She would, he guessed, probably marry a farmer and have dozens of healthy children, farmers being the very antithesis of seafarers. The thought of farming brought him back to Chas. With Cathy and people like her, the presence of mankind on the earth was scarcely ‘an unforseen accident', but rather a preordained fruition of some cosmic purpose provided with its own internal dynamic.

‘And here I am back to God again,' he muttered irritably to himself. Dismissing the whole train of thought he made for the compass repeater and occupied himself by taking an azimuth of Jupiter.

In his cabin below the bridge Captain Mackinnon tossed restlessly, unable to sleep. He too wished to savour this last voyage, for though he looked forward to its end, he knew that retirement, no matter how well-deserved, diminished
him as a man. At that moment, and for all the succeeding moments until he handed the
Matthew Flinders
over to her Chinese breakers, he and he alone was responsible for the ship and her company, some thirty-six souls, as tradition had it. And he was master under God, elevated to a most culpable position, not merely responsible but answerable for many of the misdemeanours of his crew. Sometimes the burden of it weighed upon him intolerably, but he was shrewd enough to know that he would miss it.

Besides, he had a most unsailorlike affection for the ship herself, having been her very first Third Officer, sent to Belfast to join her at the builders because Mrs Dent had specifically ordered it.

‘You've impressed the Old Woman,' the Marine Superintendent, Captain Shaw, had said to him, referring familiarly to the widow of the company's founding chairman, a woman whose influence in the Eastern Steam Navigation Company remained pre-eminent. ‘She insists on you occupying the Third Mate's berth.'

Shaw had regarded him through his rheumy eyes, his yellow face already betraying the cancer that, with the overwork of six years of war, would lay him in his grave before the maiden voyage of the new
Matthew Flinders
was over.

‘Don't let the Old Woman down, laddie,' Shaw added, repeating the nickname by which Mrs Dent was known throughout Eastern Steam.

‘I'll do my best, sir.'

‘Aye, see that you do or I'll have your hide.'

He had stepped happily out into Water Street, disregarding the sleeting rain driving up from the Pier Head and the restless chop of the grey Mersey beyond. He and Shelagh had high hopes now the war was over, and the approbation of the Old Woman and a berth on a brand new ship meant that they would be able to marry soon, their future secure. Britain, he had thought with the experience of war behind him, would always need her Merchant Navy.

It was odd, Mackinnon thought, how easy it was to remember these things: the elation, the rain, and Shelagh's pleasure when he had phoned and told her he would be crossing to Belfast that night. And all because the ‘Old Woman' approved of him.

Mackinnon's memory flashed back to the events that had earned him the Old Woman's good opinion.

It had been raining that black night, a stinging rain coming up astern of the convoy with a following sea that made the old
Matthew Flinders
roll and scend in a twisting that racked the creaking hull. The first of her name, she grossed eight thousand tons, a coal-fired steamer capable of no more than nine knots, built for profit out of the reparations greedily scooped up by Dent and his partners after the First World War. She had been obsolete when she had slid down the ways and into the grubby Tees and was over twenty years old that foul and bloody night the U-boats found her off Rockall.

‘Almost home and dry,' Taffy Davies had said as Apprentice Mackinnon relieved him on the starboard Lewis gun at midnight and about five seconds before the first explosion. Mackinnon had still been shaking the sleep out of his weary young frame after what seemed like weeks of endless, mind-numbing watch-and-watch, four hours on and four off, with sleep in short snatches of three hours if undisturbed by the ship's motion or the enemy. When the night split apart and the gouts of orange and yellow flame shot skywards to die to a flickering before the concussion rolled over the water towards them, he was conscious of shock, and then the relief of knowing it was not them.

‘Jesus!' blasphemed Taffy as he made way for Mackinnon in the sand-bagged gun pit, ‘that's the
Patagonia
.'

Mackinnon needed no further enlightenment. After days of weary plodding across the Atlantic, they knew the relative position of every ship in those four, strung-out and irregular columns; knew the dawn reshuffling that took place after the
destruction of the nights as the Commodore of Convoy HX 987 rearranged his battered charges. They knew the
Patagonia
well, having laid ahead of her in Newport News and become friendly with her apprentices, penniless like themselves.

‘The poor bastards,' whispered Davies as the flames were extinguished by the sea and the night was lit by the cold glare of the starshells thrown up by the questing escorts. The SS
Patagonia
had ceased to exist, for she had been laden with high-explosive ammunition.

‘Can you see anything?' a voice asked, as behind the two boys the Second and Third Mates stared through their binoculars.

The adjacent ships were thrown into monochrome relief by the flares. Only a gap in the extreme starboard column attested to the missing
Patagonia
, a gap into which, her Aldis light flickering, the corvette
Aubretia
was moving. Of the U-boat which launched the attack there was no sign.

‘They won't have known anything,' observed the Third Mate with an exhaused sigh, and then the night blew apart again, blew up around them with a fiery savagery that seared them as a torpedo struck the
Matthew Flinders
. Momentarily blinded by the flash of the impacting warhead, Mackinnon felt the deck beneath him rear up, throwing him against the gunshield. Its steel angle caught his shoulder with a sickening pain which brought the taste of bile into his throat as he fell to the deck.

Shakily he got to his feet. He was suddenly, inexplicably, alone.

He felt sick from the effect of the blast, but conscious that he was less frightened and more aware of his surroundings. Above the increasing roar of escaping steam he could hear the klaxon alarm, and someone shouting an unintelligible order. The angle of the deck increased sharply, then seemed to stop, and this sudden change enabled him to recover his wits. He scrambled out of the gun pit and up the tilting deck, like an
animal in a flood, instinctively seeking high ground. Oddly, there was no one in the wheelhouse and he continued upwards until he came to the opposite side of the bridge where his watch mate, Apprentice Dave Kingsley, should have been.

‘Dave?' he shouted, casting about with a sudden panic as the starshells were extinguished by the sea. The utter darkness filled him with a rank, sweating fear. Then above the venting steam he could hear orchestrated shouting.

‘The boats!' he cried in sudden comprehension, and halfslid, half-skidded back down the sloping bridge through the deserted wheelhouse, making a grab for the ladder rail that wrenched his shoulder again. Then he stumbled down on to the boat-deck where, in the gloom, he could see the white flash of men in singlets, the dull gleam of oilskins and the grey outline of the starboard lifeboat.

‘Is that you, Mackinnon?' Captain Robson's harsh voice cut through the wet night air above him. Mackinnon turned. At the head of the ladder the Master stood, the pale stripes of his pyjamas showing beneath his bridge coat. A pale square of paper fluttered from his right fist.

‘Sparks is waiting for this in the radio shack . . .'

Reassured that some discipline prevailed and aware that the Captain must have been in the chart-room while he scuttered foolishly about the bridge, Mackinnon ran back up the ladder and took the message form. The radio shack was abaft the tall funnel and inside, under the battery-powered emergency light, the Radio Officer was dragging on a cigarette, his headphones clamped round his balding skull and a nervous hand poised over the morse key. Without a word he tore the chit out of Mackinnon's hand and began transmitting the fate of the SS
Matthew Flinders
to the outside world. Mackinnon stood for an uncertain moment, then the sparks flung off his headphones, pulled a duffle coat from a hook on the bulkhead and shoved past the apprentice.

‘Come on, she's going!'

The ship gave another lurch. More starshell burst
overhead and the crump of exploding depth charges could be heard in the distance above the shouts and the roar of the steam.

‘Come on.'

Mackinnon followed the Radio Officer. Back on the boat-deck the struggling figures were thrown into stark relief by the flares. Above their heads a white plume vented from the funnel and then a series of tremors rumbled beneath their feet and the ship suddenly fell back on an even keel.

The surface of the sea, tossing up towards them with the curl and hiss of breaking crests, was much nearer as the
Matthew Flinders
began to settle in the water.