Atlantic Fury (24 page)

Visibility was better now. I could see the rocks falling sheer to the turbulence of the sea, the cracks and gullies, and a figure moving like a seal high up on a bare ledge. There were others crouched there, sheltering from the swell that still beat against the farther side, covering the whole mass with spray. I counted five men lying tucked into crevices, the way sheep huddle for protection against the elements.

Five men. Perhaps there were more. I couldn't see. Just five inert bodies and only one of them showing any signs of life, and now he lay still. I started back then, keeping to the edge of the beach which rose steeply and gave me a little shelter. The burn forced me up on to the bridge and as I entered the camp a blast hit me, flung me down, and a piece of corrugated iron went scything through the air just above my head to hit the sea and go skimming across its flattened surface.

Back in the hut I called Base and was immediately put through to Colonel Standing.

CHAPTER FOUR

RESCUE

(October 22–24)

Long before my first contact with Base, before even our Mayday call had gone out, all Services had been alerted and the first moves made to deal with the emergency. Coastal Command at Ballykelly had flown off a Shackleton to search for the
Viking Fisher
; the Navy had dispatched a destroyer from the Gareloch. Weather ship
India
had left her station headed for Laerg, a fishery protection vessel north-west of the Orkneys had been ordered to make for the Hebrides at full speed and a fast mine-layer was getting steam up ready to sail if required. By nine o'clock the emergency operation was being concentrated on L4400, then a battered wreck running before the storm somewhere to the west of Laerg. The destroyer was ordered to close her with all possible speed and either stand by her to take off survivors or to escort her to Leverburgh or back to the Clyde if she could make it. A second Shackleton had taken off from the Coastal Command base in Northern Ireland with orders to locate her and circle her until the destroyer arrived or until relieved by another aircraft.

That was the situation when I contacted Base with definite news of survivors from the wreck of L8610. Neither the Shackletons nor the destroyer could be of any help to the men on Sgeir Mhor. Both the fishery protection vessel and the mine-layers were too far away to be effective and conditions made the use of Northern Air Sea Rescue's helicopters out of the question. The task was allocated to the Naval tug. Not only was she a more suitable vessel than a destroyer for working close inshore among rocks, she also happened to be much nearer. She sailed from Lochmaddy at 09.17 hours.

In these conditions and in these northern waters the Army was largely dependent on the other Services, and their resources were limited. Standing had to make use of what was available and in the circumstances improvisation was probably justified. When I spoke to him I think his mind was already made up. It's easy to be wise after the event and say that it was a panic decision, but considered from his point of view, he hadn't all that much choice. The tug couldn't possibly reach Laerg before nightfall. In those seas, even allowing for the fact that such a violent storm was bound to die down quickly, it would be good going if she were in Shelter Bay by dawn, and the forecast for dawn next day was not good. The depression, which had been stationary to the west of Ireland, was on the move again and expected to reach the Hebrides within twenty-four hours. Instead of a polar air stream there would then be southerly winds force 6, veering later south-west and increasing to force 7, possibly gale force 8. He had checked with Ferguson and with Field, both officers who knew Laerg well and who had climbed over Sgeir Mhor. They confirmed what I had told him, that the rocks were sheer on the side facing Shelter Bay and that the only possible landing place was on the seaward side. And since that was the side exposed to winds between south and west it was obvious that the forecast not only made it extremely unlikely that any landing could be attempted the following day, but also that there was a grave danger of the survivors being overwhelmed by the force of the waves. That there were any survivors at all was obviously due to the change of wind direction that had occurred almost immediately after the ship had struck, and by dawn they might all be dead of exposure.

Time was, therefore, the vital factor. Moreover, both Ferguson and Field agreed that the only practical way of getting them off was to fire a line to them from the Butt of Keava and bring them over the gut by breeches buoy. That meant a rocket life-saving apparatus. The only equipment of this sort possessed by Guided Weapons had been allocated to the Laerg detachment and nobody was certain whether it had been shipped out or not. Rafferty thought not, but the Movements Officer disagreed and a squad was dispatched to search the stores heaped behind the quay at Leverburgh. Meantime, Adams had been called in. The wind at Northton was around 35 knots, gusting 40 plus. He refused point blank to fly his helicopter anywhere near Laerg. He had come to Standing's office direct from the Met. Office. He was well aware of the urgency of the situation. He also knew that the turbulence of the air around Laerg made it quite impossible for him to make a landing there.

Time was wasted contacting the two main lifeboat stations. They were standing by, but though they had breeches buoy equipment available, they were even less well placed than the tug for getting it there. There was only one answer, then, to parachute the life-saving gear in. But no Shackleton would dare fly low over the island and a high-level drop would almost certainly result in the parachutes being blown out to sea.

It was Adams who suggested a possible solution. A small aircraft owned by one of the charter companies was waiting at Stornoway for weather clearance back to the mainland. He thought the pilot, a Canadian named Rocky Fellowes who'd done a lot of bush flying in the North West Territories, might have a shot at it. And at Stornoway there was the life-saving gear they needed.

It was then that Ferguson volunteered; if the first drop were successful and the gear landed in a place that was accessible, then he'd make the jump and organise the setting up of the breeches buoy. It faced Standing with a difficult choice. He had now received my second call. He knew there were at least five men marooned on Sgeir Mhor and only seven hours of daylight left. The risk of one man's life against the almost certain death of five; rightly or wrongly, he accepted Ferguson's offer. It was then eleven forty-five. Ten minutes later Ferguson was on his way. Field went with him: also a sergeant and two men, all of whom had completed a parachute course. And while the staff car started its forty-mile dash to Stornoway, Standing got through to the airport and asked them to find Fellowes and have him ring Northton immediately. He also asked them to arrange for the life-saving apparatus to be brought to the airfield and the parachutes to be got ready. Meantime, the tug was ordered to put into Leverburgh in the hopes that the Army's life-saving gear would be located.

This was the situation when I made my next contact with Base. I had found an alarm clock in the remains of the cook-house and the time by this was 12.53. Standing was then able to tell me that Fellows had agreed to attempt the drop. The wind speed at Stornoway was slightly less than the reading shown by Cliff Morgan's anemometer. It was beginning to fall off and he was optimistic. I suppose I should have warned Standing. The wind speed had fallen at Laerg, too. But there is a difference between a drop from around 50 knots and a drop from the fantastic wind speeds we had been experiencing. It was still coming down off the Saddle in gusts of considerable force. Whether it would have made any difference if I had warned him, I don't know. Probably not. Nobody sitting in his office almost a hundred miles away could possibly have any idea of the battering Laerg had received and was still receiving. In any case, I was thinking of those men out on Sgeir Mhor. If the pilot was willing to try it, then it wasn't for me to discourage him. The ETA Standing gave me for the plane's arrival was 14.15 approximate. In an hour's time the wind might have dropped right away. I had known it happen with storms of this intensity. And if it did, then the whole situation would be changed, and a plane overhead could make the difference between life and death to the survivors. It was up to the pilot anyway.

Standing was still talking to me, explaining about the tug and that Adams was standing by in the hope that conditions might improve sufficiently for him to fly the helicopter. Suddenly he stopped in mid-sentence and I heard him say, ‘
Just a minute
.' And then another voice – a voice I recognised, much fainter, but still quite audible: ‘
Please. I must see you. You can't do it. If you make Mike jump …
'

‘
I'm not making him. He volunteered
.'

‘
Then stop him. You've got to stop him. He'll kill himself. It's murder expecting him to jump in this wind, just to prove he can do it
.'

‘
For God's sake, Marjorie. Pull yourself together. He's not trying to prove anything
.'

‘
Of course he is. You're taking advantage of him
.' She was beside herself, her voice shaken with the violence of her emotions. ‘
It isn't fair. He'll be killed and …
'

I heard the clatter of the phone as he dropped it and his voice was suddenly farther away: ‘
Look, my dear. Try to understand. This isn't just a question of Mike Ferguson. There are survivors out there and the one chance of getting them off …
'

‘
I don't care. I'm thinking of Mike
.'

‘
Your father's with him. He'll see he doesn't do anything rash
.'

But she didn't accept that. ‘
Daddy and Mike – they're both made the same way. You know that. They've both
…' She hesitated, adding, ‘
He'll jump whatever the conditions
.' And then on a different note:
‘Is it true Mr Ross is one of the survivors? Major Rafferty said something about …'

‘
I'm just speaking to him now
.' And then I heard him say, ‘
Marjorie!
' his voice sharp and angry. She must have grabbed hold of the phone for her voice was suddenly clear and very close to me, trembling uncontrollably so that I caught her mood, the desperate urgency of her fear. She might have been there in the hut with me. ‘
Mr Ross. Help me
–
please. Mike mustn't jump. Do you hear? You've radio. You can contact the plane
.' And then, almost with a sob: ‘
No, let me finish
.' But he'd got the phone away from her. ‘
Ross? I'll call you back at fourteen hundred hours
.' There was a click, and after that silence.

Fellowes took off from Stornoway at 13.40 hours. Conditions had improved slightly with the wind easterly about 30 knots. The overcast, however, had come down again and there were rain squalls. They were in cloud before they'd reached 1,000 feet and they had to climb to more than 6,000 before they were above it. Field was in the co-pilot's seat; Ferguson, the sergeant and the two men back in the fuselage. The plane was an old Consul, the metal of the wings burnished bright by hail and rain, by subjection over many years to the abrasive forces of the elements. They flew for almost forty minutes in watery sunlight across a flat cotton-wool plain of cloud. Airspeed 120, the altimeter steady at 6.5 and towards the end, the pilot searching for an orographical cloud, a bulge in the overcast that would pin-point the position of Laerg. But there was no orographical cloud and at 14.20 they started down through the overcast.

Fellowes' dead reckoning was based on course and speed. He had corrected for drift, but he had no means of telling whether the wind had remained constant and he was doing his sums the way the early fliers did them, his navigational aids on his knee. And all the time he was having to fly his plane in strong winds. He had spoken to me on the radio. But I couldn't even make a guess at the wind speed, for it was broken by Tarsaval and Malesgair and came down from the direction of the Saddle in violent eddies. All I could tell him was that the ceiling was under a thousand. Creag Dubh was just over the thousand and Creag Dubh was blanketed.

Coming down like that through thick cloud couldn't have been very pleasant. Field told me later that he didn't dare look at the altimeter after it had unwound to two thousand. He would like to have been able to shut his eyes, but he couldn't; they remained fixed on the grey void ahead, his body tense and strained forward against the safety belt. The engines made hardly a sound, just a gentle whispering, the wing-tips fluttering in moments of turbulence. Fellowes, too, was strained forward, eyes peering through the windshield. They were both of them waiting for that sudden darkening in the opaque film ahead that would mean hard rock and the end. Theoretically, Fellowes had overshot by five miles and was coming down over empty, unobstructed sea. But he couldn't be certain. Tarsaval was 1,456 feet high.

Five minutes – one of the longest five minutes of his life, Field said. Finally, he tore his eyes away from the empty windshield and glanced at the altimeter. Eight hundred feet. The cloud darkened imperceptibly. His eyes, with nothing substantial to focus on, were playing tricks. He was on the high slopes of a great mountain again, the cloud swirling about him. And then suddenly there was a pattern – streaks of black and white, long foaming lines coming up towards them. The sea, and the long march of the waves had their tops torn from them by the wind.

The aircraft banked sharply, the wing-tip seeming almost to touch the crest of a roller that reared up, curling and then breaking in a great surge of thrusting water. They straightened out, skimming the surface, the black curtain of a rain squall ahead. Bank again to skirt it and then momentarily blinded as water beat against the windshield, driven by the force of the wind into long rivulets that were never still. And on the other side of the squall a dark wall coming to meet them, towering cliffs of black rock sliding back from the starboard wing, the glimpse of two stacs, their tops hidden in cloud. Fladday. Course 280° then and Shelter Bay opening out ahead. Fellowes came right into it, flying at just over 500 feet, and when he turned the wind caught him and flung him like a wounded gull across the top of Sgeir Mhor.