San Andreas (15 page)

‘Goodness me! That's a very serious allegation, Sister. Sorry. Margaret.'

‘Gossipy old women speak in low voices or whispers. Whenever any two of them or three of
them or indeed all four are together they speak in low voices or whispers. You can feel the tension, almost smell the fear—well, no, that's the wrong word, apprehension, I should say. Why do they whisper?'

‘Maybe they've got secrets.'

‘I deserve better than that.'

‘We've got saboteurs aboard.'

‘I know that. We all know that. The whisperers know that we all know that.' She gave him a long, steady look. ‘I still deserve better than that. Don't you trust me?'

‘I trust you. We're being hunted. Somebody aboard the
San Andreas
has a transmitter radio that is sending out a continuous location signal. The Luftwaffe, the U-boats know exactly where we are. Somebody wants us. Somebody wants to take over the
San Andreas
.'

For long moments she looked at his eyes as if searching for an answer to a question she couldn't formulate. McKinnon shook his head and said: ‘I'm sorry. That's all I know. You must believe me.'

‘I do believe you. Who could be sending out this signal?'

‘Anybody. My guess is that it is a member of our own crew. Could be a survivor from the
Argos
. Could be any of the sick men we picked up in Murmansk. Each idea is quite ridiculous but one has to be less ridiculous than the others. Which, I have no idea.'

‘Why would anyone want us?'

‘If I knew that, I'd know the answer to a lot of things. Once again, I have no idea.'

‘How would they take us over?'

‘Submarine. U-boat. No other way. They have no surface ships and an aircraft is out of the question. Praying, that's what your whisperers are probably at—praying. Praying that the snow will never end. Our only hope lies in concealment. Praying, as the old divines used to say, that we will not be abandoned by fortune.'

‘And if we are?'

‘Then that's it.'

‘You're not going to
do
anything?' She seemed more than faintly incredulous. ‘You're not even going to try to do anything?'

It was quite some hours since McKinnon had made up his mind where his course of action would lie but it seemed hardly the time or the place to elaborate on his decision. ‘What on earth do you expect me to do? Send them to the bottom with a salvo of stale bread and old potatoes? You forget this is a hospital ship. Sick, wounded and all civilians.'

‘Surely there's
something
you can do.' There was a strange note in her voice, one almost of desperation. She went on bitterly: ‘The much-bemedalled Petty Officer McKinnon.'

‘The much-bemedalled Petty Officer McKinnon,' he said mildly, ‘would live to fight another day.'

‘Fight them now!' Her voice had a break in it. ‘Fight them! Fight them! Fight them!' She buried her face in her hands.

McKinnon put his arm round her shaking shoulders and regarded her with total astonishment. A man of almost infinite resource and more than capable of dealing with anything that came his way, he was at an utter loss to account for her weird conduct. He sought for words of comfort and consolation but as he didn't know what he was supposed to be comforting or consoling about he found none. Nor did repeating phrases like ‘Now, now, then' seem to meet the case either, so he finally contented himself with saying: ‘I'll get Trent up and take you below.'

When they had arrived below, after a particularly harrowing trip across the upper deck between superstructure and hospital—they had to battle their way against the great wind and the driving blizzard—he led her to the little lounge and went in search of Janet Magnusson. When he found her he said: ‘I think you'd better go and see your pal, Maggie. She's very upset.' He raised a hand. ‘No, Janet, not guilty. I did not upset her.'

She said accusingly: ‘But you were with her when she became upset.'

‘She's disappointed with me, that's all.'

‘Disappointed?'

‘She wants me to commit suicide. I don't see it her way.'

She tapped her head. ‘One of you is touched. I don't much doubt who it is.' McKinnon sat down on a stool by a mess table while she went into the
lounge. She emerged some five minutes later and sat down opposite him. Her face was troubled.

‘Sorry, Archie. Not guilty. And neither of you is touched. She's got this ambivalent feeling towards the Germans.'

‘Ambi what?'

‘Mixed up. It doesn't help that her mother is German. She's had rather a bad time. A very rough time. Oh, I know you have, too, but you're different.'

‘Of course I'm different. I have no finer feelings.'

‘Oh, do be quiet. You weren't to know—in fact, I think I'm the only person who does know. About five months ago she lost both her only brother and her fiancé. Both died over Hamburg. Not in the same plane, not even in the same raid. But within weeks of each other.'

‘Oh Jesus.' McKinnon shook his head slowly and was silent for some moments. ‘Poor bloody kid. Explains a lot.' He rose, crossed to Dr Singh's private source of supplies and returned with a glass. ‘The legendary McKinnon willpower. You were with Maggie when this happened, Janet?'

‘Yes.'

‘You knew her before then?'

‘Of course. We've been friends for years.'

‘So you must have known those two boys?' She said nothing. ‘Known them well, I mean?' Still she said nothing, just sat there with her flaxen head bowed, apparently gazing down at her clasped
hands on the table. As much in exasperation as anything McKinnon reached out, took one of her wrists and shook it gently. ‘Janet.'

She looked up. ‘Yes, Archie?' Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

‘Oh dear, oh dear.' McKinnon sighed. ‘You, too.' Again he shook his head, again he remained silent for some time. ‘Look, Janet, those boys knew what they were doing. They knew the risks. They knew that, if they could at all, the German anti-aircraft batteries and night-fighter pilots would shoot them down. And so they did and so they had every right to do. And I would remind you that those were no mere pinpoint raids—it was saturation bombing and you know what that means. So while you and Maggie are crying for yourselves, you might as well cry for the relatives of all the thousands of innocent dead that the RAF left behind in Hamburg. You might as well cry for all mankind.'

Two tears trickled down her cheeks. ‘You, McKinnon, are a heartless fiend.'

‘I'm all that.' He rose. ‘If anyone wants me I'll be on the bridge.'

Noon came and went and as the day lengthened the wind strengthened until it reached the screaming intensity commonly found in the hurricanes and typhoons of the more tropical parts of the world. By two o‘clock in the afternoon when the light, which at best had never been more than
a grey half-light, was beginning to fade, what little could be seen of the mountainous seas abeam and ahead of the
San Andreas
—the blizzard made it quite impossible to see anything abaft of the bridge—were as white as the driving snow itself, the shapeless troughs between the towering walls of water big enough to drown a suburban house or, to the more apprehensive eye, big enough to drown a suburban church including a fair part of its steeple. The
San Andreas
was in trouble. At 9,300 tons it was not a small vessel and the Bo'sun had had engine revolutions reduced until the ship had barely steerage way on, but still she was in trouble and the causes for this lay neither in the size of the ship, nor the size of the seas, for normally the
San Andreas
could have ridden out the storm without much difficulty. The two main reasons for concern lay elsewhere.

The first of these was ice. A ship in a seaway can be said to be either stiff or tender. If it is stiff, it is resistant to roll, and, when it does roll, recovers sharply: when it is tender it rolls easily and recovers slowly and reluctantly. Tenderness arises when a vessel becomes top-heavy, raising the centre of gravity. The prime cause of this is ice. As the thickness of ice on the upper decks increases, so does the degree of tenderness: when the ice becomes sufficiently thick the vessel will fail to recover from its roll, turn turtle and founder. Even splendidly seaworthy ocean-going trawlers, specially built for Arctic operations, have succumbed
to the stealthily insidious and deadly onslaught of ice: and for aircraft carriers operating in the far north, ice on their vast areas of open upper decks provided a constant threat to stability.

McKinnon was deeply worried by the accumulation of ice on the decks of the
San Andreas
. Compacted snow from the blizzard had formed a certain thickness of ice but not much, for apart from the area abaft of the superstructure, most of the snow had simply been blown away by the powerful wind: but for hours now, according to the ever-changing direction of the constantly shifting masses of water, the
San Andreas
had been shipping copious amounts of water and spray, water and spray that turned to ice even before it hit the decks. The vessel occasionally rode on an even keel but more and more frequently it lurched into a sudden roll and each time recovered from it more and more slowly. The critical limit, he was well aware, was still some time away: but without some amelioration in the conditions, it would inevitably be reached. There was nothing that could be done: sledgehammers and crowbars would have had but a minimal effect and the chances were high that people wielding those would have ended up, in very short order, over the side: on those lurching ice-rink decks footing would have been impossible to maintain. For once, McKinnon regretted that he was aboard an American-built oil-burning ship instead of a British-built coal-burning one: boiler ashes spread
on the deck would have given a reasonably secure footing and helped considerably towards melting the ice. There was nothing that one could do with diesel oil.

Of even more immediate worry was the superstructure. Except when on even keel the overstressed metal, shaking and shuddering, creaked and groaned its protesting torture and, when it fell into the depths of a trough, the entire structure shifted quite perceptibly. At the highest point, the bridge on which he was standing, McKinnon estimated the lateral movement to be between four and six inches at a time. It was an acutely uncomfortable sensation and a thought-provoking one: how much of a drop and how acute an angle would be required before the shear factor came into operation and the superstructure parted company with the
San Andreas
? With this in mind McKinnon went below to see Lieutenant Ulbricht.

Ulbricht, who had lunched on sandwiches and Scotch and slept a couple of hours thereafter, was propped up in the Captain's bunk and was in a reasonably philosophical mood.

‘Whoever named this ship the
San Andreas
,' he said, ‘named it well. You know, of course, that the San Andreas is a famous—or notorious—earthquake-fault.' He grabbed the side of his bunk as the ship fell into a trough and juddered in a most alarming fashion. ‘At the present moment I feel I'm living through an earthquake.'

‘It was Mr Kennet's idea. Mr Kennet has, at times, a rather peculiar sense of humour. A week ago this was still the
Ocean Belle
. When we changed our paint from grey to the Red Cross colours of white, green and red, Mr Kennet thought we should change the name too. This ship was built in Richmond, California. Richmond is on the Hayward's Fault which is a branch of the San Andreas. He was of the opinion that
San Andreas
was much more of a romantic name than
Hayward
'
s Fault.
He also thought it was an amusing idea to name it after a potential disaster area.' McKinnon smiled. ‘I wonder if he still thinks it was an amusing idea.'

‘Well, he's had plenty of time for reflection since I dropped those bombs on him yesterday morning. I should rather think he's had second thoughts on the matter.' Ulbricht tightened his grip on the side of his bunk as the
San Andreas
fell heavily into another trough. ‘The weather does not improve, Mr McKinnon?'

‘The weather does not improve. That's what I came to talk about, Lieutenant. Force twelve wind. With the darkness and the blizzard—it's as strong as ever—visibility is absolutely zero. Not a chance of a starsight for hours. I think you'd be far better off in the hospital.'

‘Certainly not. I'd have to fight my way against a hurricane, not to say a blizzard, to reach the hospital. A man in my weakened condition? Not to be thought of.'

‘It's warmer down there, Lieutenant. More comfortable. And the motion, naturally, is much less.'

‘Dear me, Mr McKinnon, how could you overlook the most important inducement—all those pretty nurses. No, thank you. I prefer the Captain's cabin, not to mention the Captain's Scotch. The truth of the matter is, of course, that you suspect that the superstructure may go over the side at any moment and that you want me out of here before that happens. Isn't that so?'

‘Well.' McKinnon touched the outer bulkhead. ‘It is a bit unstable.'

‘While you remain, of course.'

‘I have a job to do.'

‘Unthinkable. The honour of the Luftwaffe is at stake. You stay, I stay.'

McKinnon didn't argue. If anything, he felt obscurely pleased by Ulbricht's decision. He tapped the barometer and lifted an eyebrow. ‘Three millibars?'

‘Up?'

‘Up.'

‘Help is at hand. There's hope yet.'

‘Take hours for the weather to moderate—if it does. Superstructure could still go at any time. Even if it doesn't, our only real hope lies with the snow.'

‘And when the snow goes?'

‘Then your U-boats come.'

‘You're convinced of that?'

‘Yes. Aren't you?'

‘I'm afraid I am, rather.'