Atlantic Fury (27 page)

It was just after six-fifteen when they boarded the tug. The warps were let go immediately and he steamed out into the Sound of Harris, heading west. We were then experiencing the lull Cliff had forecast. It was so still in the hut that I went out to see what was wrong. After hours of battering the sudden quiet seemed unnatural. Darkness was closing down on Laerg, the clouds low overhead and hanging motionless. I could see the outline of Sgeir Mhor, the sloping spine of Keava disappearing into the blanket of the overcast, but they were dim, blurred shapes. The air was heavy with humidity, and not a breath of wind.

I got a torch and signalled towards Sgeir Mhor. But there was no answering flash. It meant nothing for it was unlikely that any of the survivors had got ashore with a torch. I tried to contact Base, but there was other traffic – Rafferty talking to the destroyer, to the tug, finally to Coastal Command. And then the destroyer to me: ETA Laerg 01.25 hours. Would I please stand by the radio as from 01.00. Base came through immediately afterwards: The tug's ETA would be about 04.30 dependent on conditions. I was requested to keep radio watch from four-thirty onwards. Roger. I had six hours in which to get some rest. I arranged with Cooper for a hot meal at one o'clock, set the alarm, undressed and tumbled into bed.

I must have recovered some of my energy, for it wasn't the alarm that woke me. I reached out and switched on the light. A mouse was sitting up by the edge of my empty plate, sitting on its haunches on the bedside table cleaning its whiskers with its fore-paws. It was one of the breed peculiar to Laerg, a throw-back to pre-glacial life, to before the last Ice Age that covered the British Isles anything up to ten thousand years ago. It was larger than the ordinary British field-mouse, its ears were bigger, its hind-legs longer and the tail was as long as its body; the brown of its coat had a distinctly reddish tinge brightening to dull orange on the under-belly. It sat quite still, two shiny black pin-head eyes staring at me. It seemed possessed of curiosity rather than fear, and after a moment it resumed its toilet, cleaning its whiskers with little stroking movements of its paws. The time was eleven minutes past midnight. The wind was back, beating round the corners of the hut in a steady roar that drowned the sound of the generator. And behind the wind was another, more sinister sound – one that I hadn't heard for some time; the crash and suck of waves breaking on the beach. I thought it was this sound rather than the mouse that had woken me.

There was something about that little morsel of animal life that was infinitely comforting; a sign perhaps of the indestructibility of life. The mouse in that moment meant a lot to me and I lay there watching it until it had finished its toilet and quietly disappeared. Then I got up and dressed and went to the door of the hut. It was a black night, the two lights Cooper had left on in the camp shining in isolation. The wind was from the south, about force 7. The waves, coming straight into the bay, broke with an earth-shaking thud. The sound of the surf was louder than the wind, and as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I could see the ghostly glimmer of white water ringing the beach; just the glimmer of it, nothing else. It was a wild, ugly night, the air much warmer so that I thought I could smell rain again, the warm front moving in.

At one o'clock I contacted the destroyer. She had Laerg clear on the radar at thirteen miles range. ETA approximately, one-thirty. Alf Cooper appeared at my side, a khaki gnome, his head encased in a woollen balaclava. ‘Grub up.' He put the tray down on the table beside the radio – a Thermos flask of oxtail soup and two mess tins full of corned beef and potato hash all steaming hot. ‘A night for the flippin' bears, ain't it. 'Ibernation, that's my idea o' paradise this time of the year. You reck'n that destroyer'll be able to do any good?'

‘No,' I said.

He nodded, sucking at his soup. ‘That's wot I fort. Ruddy waves must be breaking right over the poor bastards.' I asked him about the men from the helicopter. ‘Sleepin' their ruddy heads orf,' he said. ‘Orl right for them. They got full bellies. Me, I'm fair famished.' He reached for one of the mess tins. ‘'Ope yer don't mind bully. Easy ter make, yer see. Fillin' too.'

At one-thirty we went out of the hut and stood in the teeth of the wind staring into the black darkness that hid Sgeir Mhor. It was drizzling, a wet, driving mist. Suddenly light blazed, the pencil stab of a searchlight that threw the blurred shape of Sgeir Mhor into black relief. It probed the mist, producing strange halos of light in the damp air. A gun flashed, a small sound against the thunder of breaking waves. The overcast glimmered with light as the star shell burst. It was a minute or two before it floated clear of the clouds over Keava; for a moment the bay and the surrounding rocks were bathed in its incandescent glare. It was an unearthly sight; the waves marching into the bay, building up till their tops curled and broke, roaring up the beach in a welter of foam, and all around the horseshoe curve of breaking water, the rocks standing piled in ghostly brilliance. Rock and cliff and sodden grass slope all looked more hellish in that macabre light. I saw the spume of waves breaking over the lower bastions of Sgeir Mhor. Then the flare touched the sea and was instantly extinguished, and after that the night was blacker, more frightening than before.

A signal lamp stabbed its pin-point of light just beyond the tip of Sgeir Mhor:
Help arriving first light. Stick it out four more hours and
… That was all I read for the destroyer was steaming slowly westward and the stab of her signal lamp was obscured by the rocks. The searchlight probed again, searching the far side of the rock promontory as though trying to count the survivors. And then that too went out and after that there was nothing but the pitch-black night.

I re-set the alarm and lay down again on Pinney's bed, not bothering this time to undress. Time passed slowly and I couldn't sleep. The mouse came back. I could hear its claws scratching at the aluminium of the mess tins, but I didn't switch the light on. I lay there with my eyes closed waiting for the alarm, thinking of those men out on the rocks drenched by the mist and the spray, wondering whether it would be possible to get them off.

At four-thirty I was at the radio and the tug came through prompt on schedule, my brother's voice requesting information about sea and landing conditions. I was able to tell him that the wind was now west of south. But it had also increased in strength. It was definitely blowing a gale now and it was raining heavily. However, if the wind veered further, as seemed likely, there was a chance that a landing could be made in the western curve of the bay, close under Keava where there would be some shelter. ‘
Okay
,' he said. ‘
We'll recce the lee side of Sgeir Mhor first and if that's no good, we'll anchor and attempt to make the beach on inflatable rafts
.'

It was still dark when they came into the bay and all I saw of the tug was the two steaming lights, one above the other, swinging and dipping. She came right into the bay, almost to the break of the waves, and then the lights moved apart and the distance between them increased as she turned westward. The green of her starboard navigation lights showed for a while, still half-obscured by rain. And then that vanished, together with the steaming lights, and I caught glimpses of her stern lights as she browsed along the western arm of the bay, the will-o'-the-wisp bounced from wave-top to wave-top. A searchlight stabbed a brilliant beam, iridescent with moisture, and the rocks of Sgeir Mhor showed ghostly grey across tumbled acres of sea; columns of spray like ostrich feather plumes waved behind it, sinking and rising with the surge of the Atlantic.

Dawn came slowly and with reluctance, a sheathed pallor stealing into the curve below the encircling hills. The tug lay close under Keava, just clear of the narrow, surf-filled gut that separated it from Sgeir Mhor. She didn't anchor, but stayed head-to-wind under power, and they came ashore in rubber dinghies where the surf was least.

I was coming along the foreshore when my brother staggered dripping out of the suck of the waves, dragging a rubber dinghy after him. He was dressed like the others in a frogman's suit and I can see him still, standing there in that twilit world that was the dawn, finned feet straddled at the surf's edge, not looking at that moment at his companions, but staring up at the cloud-hidden heights. There was a stillness about him, an immobility – he seemed for an instant petrified, a part of the landscape, his body turned to stone, statuesque like a rock.

Then the others piled in through the surf and he was a man again, moving to help them, going back into the waves to pull two more rubber dinghies ashore.

I met them on the beach. ‘Thank God you made it,' I yelled to him above the wind.

He stared at me. His face looked haggard, his eyes wild. I swear he didn't recognise me.

‘Iain. Are you all right, Iain?'

For a moment his face stayed blank. Then his eyes snapped. ‘Ross.' He glanced quickly at Field standing at the surf's edge. Then he came towards me, gripped my shoulder. ‘The name's Braddock, damn you,' he hissed, his fingers digging a warning into my flesh. His mouth had hardened and his eyes blazed black. He'd have seen me dead and drowned before he'd have admitted to his real name.

Field wiped a smear of phlegm from below his nose. ‘We saw several men clinging to the rocks.' His eyes looked dead and tired, bloodshot with the salt. ‘Where are the parachutes – the live-saving gear you dropped?' Braddock asked.

‘Up there.' Field nodded to the heights of Keava, the long slope leading to the spine.

‘Yes, up there,' I agreed. But the rain-dimmed dawn showed nothing on the slopes – only the clouds writhing in white pillars.

Their clothes, tied in plastic bundles in the dinghies, were safe and dry. They changed in the bird-oil stench of an old cleit, and then we climbed, strung out across the slopes, climbed until we met the clouds, gasping wet air. The daylight had strengthened by then and ragged gaps in the overcast showed the slopes of Keava bare to its spine and to the cliffs beyond. The parachutes had gone. Some time during the night, I suppose, a gust had filled the nylon canopies and carried them over the top and far out into the sea beyond.

Braddock shook Field's arm. ‘Are you sure that's where you dropped them?'

Field nodded.

‘Then they're gone.'

Field's face was set in a wooden look as he agreed they'd gone. Up there in the wind and the driving clouds, with the thunder of the waves breaking at the foot of the cliffs, he and I, we could both recall the solitary parachute lifting and sailing out into the Atlantic. ‘Wasted. All wasted.' There were tears in his eyes, but it may have been the wind.

‘Okay. Well, there's only one way to get a line across.'

Field nodded absently.

‘We'll have to take it ourselves. Swim it across the gut, and then climb with it.'

Easy to say; not so easy to do. The drop from the Butt of Keava was possible, the 350-foot cliff went down in a series of ledges. It was the gut between and the sheer cliff beyond. The gut was 50 yards at its narrowest and the seas were breaking there in a welter of foam; the cliffs of Sgeir Mhor were black volcanic gabbro, hard as granite, smooth and unbroken for long stretches.

‘Well?' Braddock stared at Field. ‘I swim it, you climb it, eh?' And his face cracked in a grin. It was a dare. This was the sort of thing he loved – physical action spiced with danger. And if the other man cracked … Poor Field's face was ashen, his eyes staring at the smooth black panels of wet rock beyond the maelstrom of the chasm.

I think my brother had watched quite a few men crack. I don't say it gave him pleasure, but it may well have been something he needed, a bolster to his own morale. His world had always been a physical one. Mentally and emotionally he was something of a child; or that was how he had often seemed to me; which was why, I suppose, our relationship, so inimical at times, had been at others so strangely close; we had each supplied what the other lacked.

Now, he didn't hesitate. He didn't even watch for Field's reaction. He caught the man's fear at a glance and overlaid it with his own determination, the quick positiveness of his orders. He led us pell-mell back down the slope, back to the beach and the dinghies laden with rope and all the things he'd feared they might need. And then, in his frogman's kit again, up the sloping shoulders of the rocks to the wet thunder of the surf breaking through the gut.

The sergeant and I, with two men, were ordered to the top of the cliff with one end of the nylon climbing rope. Down at the bottom he and Field, together with Lieutenant Phipps and the two other men, manoeuvred one of the rubber dinghies.

Flat on my stomach at the cliff's edge I watched Iain working his way along the ledges westward through the gut. He was alone and his thick, powerful body in its black rubber suit looked like a seal's as it flattened itself against the rocks to meet each wave as it broke foaming across the ledges – a baby seal from that height, the rope around his waist and trailing white behind him like an umbilical cord. And then from the farthest point west that he could fight his way, he suddenly stood on a sheer-edged shelf of rock and dived.

He dived into the back-surge of a big wave and went deep, his fins beating furiously, drumming at the surf. It looked so easy. One moment he was diving and the next he had bobbed up on the back of a breaker on the far side, a black head with black arms paddling. A quick look round, then down again as the next comber broke, and as it spent its energy, he rode its back on to a long, sloped ledge, and pulled himself up.

Now, with the dawn light stronger, I could see two figures prone among the rocks on the far side, peering down. I thought I recognised Wentworth, but I couldn't be sure. The face was a dim blur in the rain and the flying spray.

Iain was clear of the water now, clear of the surge of even the biggest waves, curled up at the farthest end of that sloped ledge and pulling on the rope. Below me I saw Field hesitate. The rope came taut on the rush of a wave. The rubber dinghy shifted on the rocks. And then it was in the water, and he was in it, head down, hands gripping the gunnels as it was pulled across. Once I thought he was lost. The dinghy reared on a curling crest, turned half over it as it broke. But then it righted itself, lifted on the backwash from the far side, and in one buoyant rush came to rest on the ledge where Iain crouched.