Endangered Species (13 page)

‘Chief's asking what's going on, sir,' he said, a sheepish grin of reaction on his face.

‘Tell him a slant-eyed bastard has just peppered his bloody funnel and dropped a—'

But he got no further, for the Pilot shouted, ‘Hard-a-starboard,' and the Quartermaster spun the wheel ineffectually.

‘She no steer,
Tze-foo
, he said, and with a barely perceptible movement in the deck under their feet, the
James Cook
ran aground.

‘Jesus Christ!' blasphemed Captain Hooper, slapping his forehead and advancing on the wheelhouse with a malignant stare at the Quartermaster. ‘I fucking knew it.'

‘She no steer proper fashion,
Tze-Foo
,' the Chinaman hissed desperately at Mackinnon. ‘I speak before.'

‘Telemotor pipes damaged by the bomb blast, sir,' Mackinnon said.

Hooper stopped in the doorway. ‘Bad luck, Mr Mackinnon, bad luck, damn it,' he said, intoning a favourite formula for misadventure. He turned away, shaking his head and raising his binoculars after their late assailant. ‘Bloody bad luck . . .'

The retiring aircraft droned away, its shape gradually merging with its trail of exhaust smoke until that, too, became a smudge in the haze above the distant horizon.

Smoke began to uncoil from the forward contactor house. For half an hour the screw thrashed astern in a welter of churning mud and water while forward hose parties mustered and extinguished the blaze. The junk they had so nearly run down passed them, the four generations composing her crew grinning at the
James Cook
from her deck.

It was six hours before the tugs, two from Shanghai and one from Holt's Wharf at Pootung, succeeded in plucking the
James Cook
off the mud and into deep water, allowing her to resume her passage to Shanghai under tow.

As she slid free Mackinnon heard Hooper, a man who made an affectation of superstition, grumbling irrelevantly to the Pilot: ‘It's bad enough
ju-ju
for a company to name their ships after men, but most of Eastern Steam's heroes came to a sticky end.'

‘You'll have a job using such a justification for a grounding, Captain,' replied the Pilot, laughing now that the Garden Reach and the tall buildings of the International Settlement came into view. ‘You'll be all right if you note protest on arrival at Shanghai. That bastard,' he added with
a jerk of his head at the sky, ‘was probably supposed to be beating up the Reds beyond Woosung.'

‘Well he's cost me an
ex-gratia
payment plus towage to the buoys, damn him.'

‘Oh, a little
cumshaw
will eradicate the worry over repercussions locally, Captain. The tug skippers are flexible men.'

Nothing was ever made of the incident outside the board minutes of the Eastern Steam Navigation Company. Relatives at home learned only through the letters of the ship's company how a British merchant ship had been bombed and strafed by a lone fighter-bomber of Chiang Kai-shek's demoralised air force. The British papers were full of a more newsworthy story of the China coast, a story about the escape of a Royal Naval sloop, HMS
Amethyst
, from under the guns of the Communist Chinese and down the Yangtse Kiang. Beyond the Yangtse bar Admiral Brind waited for the
Amethyst
to rejoin the fleet while less than a hundred miles away the
James Cook
lay at her buoy off the Bund and her Master cursed his luck . . .

Mackinnon woke from his dream in a sweat. It had all come vividly back to him so that he could still hear Hooper's ridiculous, superstitious claim, a claim he continued to press as the real reason for the calamity with a persistence persuasive enough to make his officers doubt he was in full control of his mental faculties. For them the official indifference and public ignorance of what had occurred merely fuelled a bitterness engendered during the war and increasingly endemic among them.

Staring into the darkness Mackinnon knew his own resentment, born in those days and simmering in his brain while he slept, had cooked up the dream from his memory. He sighed and rolled over. It would be over soon and there was consolation of a kind for him, at least. It was a pity for Stevenson and the others, of course, but times had never been easy for fools who went to sea for a living.

To compound Taylor's dereliction and further lull Mackinnon and his officers into a false sense of security, the presence of the Philippine archipelago to windward acted like a great breakwater to the South China Sea, preventing that natural harbinger of bad weather, a heavy swell, from alerting them to approaching danger until only hours before the first onslaught of the wind.

Mackinnon noticed it first, fourteen hours after they had received the second storm warning, a low ground swell which rolled the
Matthew Flinders
in a lazy motion. It was already late morning, and he was pacing the forward boat-deck, glancing up at the overcast sky and entertaining doubts as to their sighting the sun at noon.

He went on to the bridge, acknowledged Taylor's report about the overcast and remarked on the swell.

‘Yes, sir,' was Taylor's non-committal response. Mackinnon thought he looked strained and tense.

‘You all right, Mr Taylor?' he asked gruffly. ‘You look a trifle under the weather.'

‘I'm fine, sir,' Taylor said hastily, almost visibly pulling himself together. ‘I don't think we're even going to get an ex-meridian,' he added, changing the subject.

‘No,' Mackinnon agreed, turning his attention back to the navigation of his ship. The ex-meridian, an observation of the sun close to its midday culmination, could be corrected to obtain a latitude. It was not an absolutely accurate method, but, if based on good dead reckoning, was of substantial value. ‘Nevertheless,' he went on, hefting his sextant, ‘we'll hang on for a while.'

The radio-room telephone rang and Taylor answered it.

‘Link call coming in from Hong Kong,' Sparks told Taylor. ‘Tell the Old Man, will you, Chas? We're turn four, so it may be a while yet.'

‘Okay.' Taylor hung up and returned to the Captain on
the starboard bridge-wing. Stevenson and Rawlings had made their dutiful appearance, both with their sextants.

‘More in hope than anger, I think, sir,' said Rawlings pulling a face at the cloud cover. Mackinnon grunted.

‘There's a link call coming in, sir,' announced Taylor, joining the knot of waiting officers. ‘Sparks says we're turn four and it may be some time.'

Mackinnon stared through his sextant in a vain attempt to sight the pale, obscured disc of the sun as it promised to make a fleeting appearance. He thought of the telex from Dent's; it was not surprising the company should supplement it with further instructions now the ship was approaching Hong Kong.

‘Dentco, I suppose,' ruminated Rawlings, echoing Mackinnon's thoughts.

‘On a Sunday?' queried Stevenson. ‘Modern management will be out to play.'

Mackinnon had forgotten what day of the week it was. Stevenson's perceptive remark, in tune with the bitter aftertaste of his dream, lodged in his mind a disquieting conviction the incoming call was both personal and significant. He remembered another such, long ago, when he received the first intimation his baby daughter was ill. He wondered how long the three other ships included in the radio station's traffic list would take with their own calls.

‘Eight bells, sir,' Taylor reported as the mystic hour of noon came and went, and the sun stayed behind the thickening veil of stratocumulus.

‘Nothing today, gentlemen,' said Mackinnon. ‘It'll have to be dead reckoning.' They trooped into the chart-room to mark up the ship's position and then dispersed. At the time, no one realised just how prophetic Captain Mackinnon's remark had been.

The Captain was leaving the bridge bound for the saloon and lunch when Sparks phoned from the radio-room.

‘Our turn next,' he said and Mackinnon hurried aft,
grabbing at an awning spar stanchion on his way as the
Matthew Flinders
leaned to a particularly heavy roll.

‘I think it's a personal call, sir,' said Sparks, holding out the handset as Mackinnon entered the radio-room. The Captain's heart thumped with irrational foreboding. He took the handset.

‘Hong Kong Radio, this is
Matthew Flinders
– Golf, Oscar, Kilo, Echo. All attention. Over.'

The deadpan tone of the operator sounded in his ear. ‘Golf, Oscar, Kilo, Echo, I have a call for you from the UK. Stand by . . .'

Mackinnon waited and then Shelagh's voice had replaced the operator's.

‘Hullo . . . ?'

‘Shelagh!' he broke in, not wanting to put her to the embarrassment of the formalities of radio-speak. Sparks retreated discreetly. ‘Darling, it's wonderful to hear your voice. How are you?'

‘I'm fine, John, fine. Where are you?'

‘I'll be in Hong Kong about midnight the day after tomorrow.' The ship rolled heavily again and he found he had to brace himself against the radio-room desk. ‘Maybe a bit later. I think we've a blow coming on. I'm not too sure when I'll get away, though. They're selling the old hooker to the Chinese. Over.'

‘I've got a surprise for you, John. I'm coming out; flying Cathay Pacific tomorrow night . . . Over.'

‘What? Darling . . .' Captain Mackinnon's eye fell on the neatly clipped wad of pink message forms hung on the hook under the stencilled label: WEATHER. Something very primitive stirred in his stomach.

‘Johnnie? Did you hear? I'm flying out to meet you in Hong Kong. Over.'

‘Yes, yes, I hear you, Shelagh, that's wonderful news. Over.'

‘You don't sound very pleased . . .'

There was something wrong, something appallingly, dreadfully wrong, though he could not be certain . . . And then he realized it was the proximity of the position written on the storm warning in Sparks's neat hand with the noon position he had just had entered in the deck log. The figures were still fresh in his mind. Instantly he knew a mistake had been made in plotting the typhoon's centre; knew, too, why the swell was building with such rapidity and why an instinctive uncertainty had been clamouring for his full attention. Christ Almighty, he even knew the dream had been a premonition!

Mackinnon experienced a wave of nausea and in mute rebuke the
Matthew Flinders
rolled with a ponderous reminder of what was to come. In a few hours the
taifun
, the great wind, the hurricane of the China Sea, would be upon them. While he had been worrying about boat people and the disquieting inconvenience of their meeting, fate had been storing up the oldest of challenges to meet man on the sea, a great storm . . . He concluded the telephone conversation with an almost heartless brusqueness.

Somebody – he looked at the received time of the warning and realised it had been Taylor – had made a mistake, but Mackinnon sought true guilt nowhere other than in himself. He felt old and beaten. He eased himself into Sparks's chair and caught his breath. It was the last quarter of the twentieth century; he had information technology at his fingertips even on an ancient ship like the
Matthew Flinders
. There was no possible excuse for being caught out . . .

Had he been a younger man he would have welcomed the challenge, perhaps even gone in search of it, but now, within days of the end of his last voyage, it was simply not
fair
.

The unworthy petulance of the thought stirred him. Sparks was coughing pointedly at the radio-room door.

‘Everything all right, sir?' Mackinnon remembered the content of the link call. A few minutes ago he had been talking to Shelagh in distant England. She was coming out to
meet him and the marvel of the thing struck him at the same instant as Sparks recalled him to the present. He stood up and faced the radio officer.

‘Well, yes and no, Sparks,' he said. ‘The missus is flying to Hong Kong to keep an eye on me, but first I think this typhoon is going to give us a bit of a dusting.'

The banality of the exchange steadied him. Perhaps it was Sparks's quite unconscious deference, perhaps merely his own automatic assumption of responsibility, but he felt the sensation of fear recede.

‘Typhoon David,' Sparks said casually. ‘Yes, it looks as if it might be getting a bit close.' Both men braced themselves against another heavy lurch of the ship. ‘And feels it.'

‘Why the hell,' said Mackinnon as he made to leave, ‘do they give the bloody things male names nowadays?'

‘It's called progress, sir. In the name of sexual equality.'

But for Mackinnon it held a hint of superstition. He thought of Captain Hooper and his rabbit's foot as he made his way back to the bridge. Out on the boat-deck he was aware the wind was increasing in force. White horses already dotted the sea and, although no more than a strong breeze at the moment, the wind had an edge to it. He looked up; the cloud base was lower than when he had searched for the sun at noon.