Atlantic Fury (22 page)

The nearest ship was L4400, lying hove-to on the far side of Malesgair, a mere four miles away. But it might just as well have been four hundred miles. She didn't dare leave the shelter of those cliffs. In any case, she'd never have reached us in time. Nothing could reach us. It was pointless putting out a distress call. The ship lurched. I slipped from the supporting wall and was pitched into Stratton's cabin. I fetched up on the far side, half-sprawled across his bunk. A girl's face in a cheap frame hung on the wall at a crazy angle – dark hair and bare shoulders, calm eyes in a pretty face. She looked a million miles away. I don't know why, but I suddenly remembered Marjorie Field's eyes, blue and serious, the wide mouth smiling. And other girls in other lands … Would it have made any difference to Stratton that he was married? When it comes to the point you're alone, aren't you, just yourself to make the passage across into the unknown?

It wasn't easy, sprawled on that bunk, to realise that in a few short minutes this cabin would be a shattered piece of wreckage tossed in the surf of breaking waves. I closed my eyes wearily. I could hear the wind and the sea, but the full blast of it was muffled, and I couldn't see it – that was the point. It made it difficult to visualise the end; flesh torn to pieces on the jagged rocks, the suffocation of drowning. And yet I knew that was the reality; disembowelment perhaps or going out quickly with the skull smashed to pulp.

Hell! Lie here like a rat in a trap, that was no way to go. I forced myself to my feet, hauled my body up into the alleyway crowded now with men. They lay along the wall, big-chested with their life jackets, their faces white. But no panic, just leaning there, waiting. It was all very ordinary, this moment of disaster. No orders, nobody screaming that they didn't want to die. And then it came to me that all these men saw were the steel walls of the ship. They were wrapped in ignorance. They hadn't seen the storm or the rocks. Exhausted, their senses dulled with sea-sickness, they waited for orders that would never come.

When we struck, the ship would roll over. That's what I figured, anyway. There was only one place to be then – out in the open. In the open there was just a chance. Wentworth had seen that, too. With two of the crew he was struggling to force the door to the deck open. I moved to help him, others with me, and under our combined efforts it fell back with a crash, and a blast of salt air, thick with spray, hit us. The Quartermaster was the first through. ‘You next.' Wentworth pushed me through, calling to the men behind him.

Out on the side deck I saw at a glance that we were only just in time. Sgeir Mhor was very close now; grey heaps of rock with the sea slamming against them. Stratton was climbing out of the wheelhouse, the log book clutched in his hand. I shouted to him, and then I went down the ladder to the main deck, my body flattened against it by the wind. It was awkward going down that ladder, my body clumsy in the bulk of my life-jacket. I wondered when I'd put it on. I couldn't remember doing so. The Quartermaster followed me. ‘Out to the bows,' he yelled in my ear, and hand over hand, clinging to the rail, we worked our way along the side of the ship. Clear of the bridge housing there would be nothing to fall on us. A big sea struck the ship and burst right over us. It tore one man from the rail and I saw him sail through the air as though he were a gull. And then we went on, working our way out above the tank deck. Only two men followed us. The rest clung in a huddle against the bridge.

Another sea and then another; two in quick succession and all the breath knocked out of me. I remember clinging there, gasping for air. I was about halfway along the ship. I can see her still, lying right over with water streaming from her decks, the sea roaring in the tilted tank hold and all her port side submerged. And broadside to her canted hull, Sgeir Mhor looming jagged and black and wet, an island of broken rock in a sea of foam with the waves breaking, curved green backs that smoked spray and crashed like gunfire exploding salt water fragments high into the air.

And then she struck. It was a light blow, a mere slap, but deep down she shuddered. Another wave lifted her. She tilted, port-side buried in foam, and Sgeir Mhor rushed towards us, lifted skywards, towering black.

I don't remember much after that – the detail is blurred in my mind. She hit with a bone-shaking impact, rolled and butted her mast against vertical rock. Like a lance it broke. Half the bridge housing was concertinaed, men flung to the waves. And then from where I clung I was looking down, not on water, but on bare rock – a spine running out like the back of a dinosaur. It split the ship across the middle; a hacksaw cutting metal couldn't have done it neater. A gap opened within feet of me, widening rapidly and separating us from all the after part of the ship. Rocks whirled by. White water opened up. For a moment we hung in the break of the waves, grating on half-submerged rocks. I thought that was the end, for the bows were smashing themselves to pieces, the steel plates beaten into fantastic shapes. But then the grating and the pounding ceased. We were clear – clear of the submerged rocks, clear of the tip of Sgeir Mhor. We were in open water, lying right over, half-submerged, but still afloat. Buoyed up by the air trapped behind the bulkheads in her sides, she was being driven across Shelter Bay, buried deep in a boiling scum of foam and spray. I didn't think of this as the end, not consciously. My brain, my body, the whole physical entity that was me, was too concentrated on the struggle to cling on. And yet something else that was also me seemed to detach himself from the rest, so that I have a picture that is still clear in my mind of my body, bulky in clothes and life jacket, lying drowned in a turmoil of broken water, sprawled against the steel bulwarks, and of the front half of the shattered ship rolling like a log, with the sea pouring over it.

People came and went in my mind, faces I had known, the brief ephemeral contacts of my life, giving me temporary companionship at the moment of death. And then we grounded in the shallows east of the camp, not far from the ruined Factor's House. But by then I was half-drowned, too dazed to care, mind and body beaten beyond desire for life. I just clung on to the bulwark because that was what I had been doing all the time. There was no instinct of self-preservation about it. My hands seemed locked on the cold, wet steel.

It was a long time before I realised that the wind had died away; probably because the seas, no longer flattened by its weight, were bigger then. The remains of the bows lay just where the waves were breaking. They beat upon the hollow bottom like giant fists hammering at a steel drum. Boom … Boom … Boom – and the roar of the surf. Fifty thousand express trains in the confines of a tunnel couldn't have made so great a noise.

And then that, too, began to lessen. My senses struggled back to life. The wind had gone round. That was my first conscious thought. And when I opened my eyes it was to a lurid sun glow, an orange, near-scarlet gash, like the raw slash of a wound, low down behind Sgeir Mhor. The toppling waves stood etched in chaos against it and all the cloud above me was a smoke-black pall of unbelievable density. There was no daylight on the shore of Shelter Bay, no real daylight; only darkness lit by that unearthly glow. The crofts of the Old Village, the roofless church, the cleits dotting the slopes of Tarsaval high above me – none of it was real. The light, the scene, the crazy, beat-up sea – it was all weird, a demon world.

So my mind saw it, and myself a sodden piece of flotsam washed up on that shore, too battered and exhausted to realise I was alive. That knowledge came with the sight of a fellow creature moving slowly like a spider, feeling his way down the jagged edges of what had been the tank deck.

I watched him fall into the backwash of a wave, beating at the surf with his arms. I closed my eyes, and when I looked again, he was ashore, lying spread-eagled among the boulders.

That was when the instinct for self-preservation stirred in me at last.

I moved then, wearily, each movement a conscious effort, a desperate aching struggle – down the jagged edges of deck plates twisted like tin-foil, down into the surf, falling into it as the other had done and fighting my way ashore, half-drowned, to lie panting and exhausted on the beach beside him.

It wasn't the Quartermaster; I don't know what had happened to him. This was a small man with a sandy moustache and tiny, frightened eyes that stared at me wildly. He'd broken his arm and every time he moved he screamed, a febrile rabbit sound that lost itself in the wind's howl. There was blood on his hair. Blood, too, on the stones where I lay, a thin bright trickle of my own blood, from a scalp wound.

‘Shut up,' I said as he screamed again. ‘You're alive. What more do you want?' I was thinking of all the others, the picture of the ship crushed against the rocks still vivid in my mind.

My watch had gone, torn from my wrist. How long had it been? I didn't know. Leaning up on one elbow I stared out across the bay. The orange glow had vanished and Sgeir Mhor was a shadowy outline, a grey blur masked by a rain squall. I forced myself to my feet and was immediately knocked down, beaten flat by a violent down-draught. That was when I realised the wind had gone right round. It was blowing from the other side of the island now, whipping across the Saddle between Malesgair and Tarsaval and down into Shelter Bay, cutting great swathes across it, the water boiling in its wake, a flattened, seething cauldron.

I made the grass above the beach, half crawling, and staggered past the Factor's House, up towards the Old Village and the camp. Daylight was a mockery, drab as a witch, and the wind screamed hell out of the confused masses of cloud that billowed above my head. And when I finally reached the camp I barely recognised it, the whole place laid waste and everything weighing less than a ton whirled inland and scattered across the slopes of Tarsaval. And down on the beach, the trailers we'd off-loaded in haste all gone, the trucks, too – only the bulldozer remained lying in the surf like a half-submerged rock. Wreckage was everywhere. The roof of one of the huts was gone, blown clean away, the walls sagging outwards, and where the latrines had been there was nothing but a row of closets standing bare like porcelain pots.

Pinney's hut was still intact. I turned the handle and the wind flung the door open with a crash, the walls shaking to the blast. It took the last of my strength to get it shut and in the relative peace of the hut's interior I collapsed on to the nearest bed.

How long I lay there I do not know. Time is relative, a mental calculation that measures activity. I was inactive then, my brain numbed, my mind hardly functioning. It might have been only a minute. It might have been an hour, two hours. I didn't sleep. I'm certain of that. I was conscious all the time of the shaking of the hut, of the battering, ceaseless noise of the wind; conscious, too, that there was something I had to do, some urgent intention that had forced me to struggle up from the beach. I dragged myself to my feet, staggering vaguely through the hut until I came to the radio, drawn to it by some action of my subconscious.

I realised then why I'd made the effort. The outside world. Somebody must be told. Help alerted. I slumped into the operator's chair, wondering whether there was any point, still that picture in my mind of the bridge crushed against sheer rock and the waves pounding. Could any of the crew have survived, any of those men huddled like sheep awaiting slaughter in the narrow alleyway out of which I'd clawed my way? But the wind had changed and they'd be under the lee. There was just that chance and I reached out my hand, switching on the set. I didn't touch the tuning. I just sat there waiting for the hum that would tell me the set had warmed up. But nothing happened. It was dead and it took time for my brain to work that out – the generator silent and no current coming through. There were emergency batteries below the table and by following the cables back I was able to cut them in.

The set came alive then and a voice answered almost immediately. It was thin and faint. ‘
We've been calling and calling. If you're still on Laerg why didn't you answer before
?' He didn't give me a chance to explain. ‘
I've got Glasgow on the line for you. They've found Mrs McGregor. Hold on
.' There was a click and then silence, and I sat there, helpless, the salt taste of sea water on my mouth. Fifty men battered to pieces on the rocks of Sgeir Mhor and they had to fling Mrs McGregor at me. Why couldn't they have waited for me to tell them what had happened? ‘
You're through
.' The police first, and then a woman's voice, soft and very Scots, asking for news of her son. I felt almost sick, remembering what had happened, the tiller flat flooded and the poor devil's body tombed up there. ‘I'm sorry, Mrs McGregor. I can't tell you anything yet.' And I cut her off, overcome by nausea, the sweat out all over me and my head reeling.

When I got them again, my brother was there. Recognising his voice I felt a flood of instant relief. ‘Iain. Iain, thank God!' I was back on Ardnamurchan, crying to my elder brother for help – a rock to cling to in moments of desperation.

But this was no rock. This was a man as sick and frightened as myself. ‘
Major Braddock here
.' His voice, strained and uneasy, had the snap of panic in it. ‘Iain,' I cried again. ‘For God's sake. It's Donald.' But the appeal was wasted and his voice when it came was harsh and grating; ‘
Braddock here. Who's that? What's happened
?'

The time was then 08.35 and Braddock had been almost six hours in the Movements Office, waiting for news. God knows what he must have been feeling. Flint said he'd paced up and down, hour after hour, grey-faced and silent, whilst the periodic reports came through from our own radio operator and from the man on L4400. Up to the moment when disaster overtook us Movements had a fairly clear picture of what was happening. And then suddenly that Mayday call, and after that silence. ‘Get them,' Braddock had shouted at the Signals operator. ‘Christ, man! Get them again.' But all the operator could get was L4400 announcing flatly that they were in the storm centre steaming for the shelter of the other side of the island.