Endangered Species (16 page)

The girl interpreter had remained until last. Although Stevenson had asked her to, he had not expected to be obeyed so punctiliously. For a moment he caught his balance, swaying with the motion of the junk. She was dead in the water, lolling dangerously at the end of each roll and only her internal subdivision, a feature introduced to boat-building by the Chinese in the middle ages of European history, prevented the free-surface effect capsizing her.

He caught the painter Braddock threw him and took a turn round the junk's mast.

The girl observed him. Her small moon-face was framed by her tangled, shoulder-length hair. She had more prominent cheekbones than he had first observed, and her tiredness shadowed her beauty.

He tried to smile reassuringly. ‘You go now,' he said, waving at the boat bumping alongside and noticing, for the first time, how they had sprung the gunwale capping in two places.

‘What you do?'

‘I search,' he said vaguely, not certain what was expected of him.

‘All go,' the girl said. ‘I wait, like you say.'

‘Okay,' Stevenson said, a hint of impatience in his voice as his men grew restive.

‘Dat fucking t'ing'll sink in a minute if youse don't get a shift on, Sec,' said Pritchard, voicing the opinion of all the boat's crew.

‘We're making water ourselves, Alex,' added the Fourth Engineer.

‘You go,' Stevenson almost shouted at the girl. There were tears in her eyes and she swayed with exhaustion. Instinctively he put out a hand and grabbed her arm.
Steadying her he was aware of the thinness of her, of her dry, exposed skin, her lacklustre hair.

‘She's at the end of her tether,' he said, passing her over to the boat's crew who lifted her aboard with a rough tenderness and set her gently on a thwart.

Stevenson slipped below. The junk's hull consisted of three compartments. Forward, a small space had once provided accommodation for the junk's crew, abaft which was a cargo hold containing pieces of wood with which, Stevenson supposed, the boat people had built makeshift sleeping quarters. Both of these were half-full of dangerously slopping water on which assorted filth slowly revolved, evidence of the ingress of water. The air was thick with the sickly sweet smell of urine.

He made his way aft, and dodged through the hut-like wheelhouse which also contained an old propane stove. Muck and debris were littered everywhere. He ducked inside, past a leaking bilge pump which showed signs of recent use, and lowered himself into the space below, a dark and foul engine compartment awash with oil bilge water. The junk was filling fast, though void of humanity. Stevenson turned to leave when something bright caught his eye. It was partly concealed under a wooden box. He bent and picked it up. Without knowing precisely how it worked, he guessed its function.

It was an empty ammunition clip for an automatic weapon. The neatly dovetailed box it had been shoved under was an ammunition box. Someone he had just put aboard the
Matthew Flinders
was armed.

Captain Mackinnon waited, anxious and impatient, a churning sensation of extreme discomfort in the pit of his stomach. He felt a repugnance for the responsibility he had assumed. As Stevenson leaped into the motor lifeboat and it cast off from the junk, he knew his problems were only just beginning.

‘Sorry to bother you just now, sir . . .'

‘What is it?'

Almost apologetically Sparks handed him a message neatly written on Eastern Steam's own signal paper.

‘Another typhoon warning, sir.'

Mackinnon grunted irritably, going into the chart-room and reaching for the general chart of the North West Pacific. He remembered the purpose for which he had come on the bridge six hours earlier. It was too late to reprimand Taylor; the man was showing signs of stress and it would do no good now, when more pressing matters demanded his own attention. Besides, the Third Mate had done pretty well in trying to assist the boat people aboard, even though their first attempt, for which he held himself responsible, had ended in failure. Mackinnon sighed and bent over the chart, reaching for his reading glasses.

Christ, he felt tired.

Plotting the reported position of the storm's centre, Captain Mackinnon did not see Stevenson bring that last boat load of castaways back to the ship.

With her engines stopped, the
Matthew Flinders
lay beam on to the wind and sea, rolling so heavily that it proved beyond the capabilities of the boat's tired crew to grab the wildly swinging falls with their heavy blocks and catch them under the steel hooks in the bow and stern.

Braddock succeeded in hooking on the bow, but the boat fell into the trough of a sea and the boat's bow was jerked high in the air, jolting the occupants violently. The next moment the ship rolled over on top of them, the falls hung slack and the un-moused block dropped from the hook and swung dangerously past the already injured Braddock's skull.

Alongside them the
Matthew Flinders
's shell plating went up and down with the relative motion and rapidity of a lift shaft viewed from an erratic and runaway lift. It was clear to Stevenson that they had pushed their luck beyond the point of safe return.

‘Chuck the boarding ladder over!' he roared at Rawlings, whose slackly handsome face wore an unfamiliar expression of real concern as he leaned over the boat-deck fishplates high above him.

The Mate acquiesced immediately. The coiled rope ladder, intended for evacuation, was flung out from the boat-deck looking like a weapon of repulse, but it uncoiled harmlessly as it descended and, with a snaking rattle against the ship's topsides, hung invitingly besides them.

‘Astern a touch, Tony,' Stevenson ordered, trying to keep the boat somewhere laterally close to the bottom of the rope ladder, the lower rungs of which alternately dipped into the water then shot several yards above their heads, catching with a momentary explosion of splinters between the shell plating and the boat's damaged gunwale.

‘Jesus Christ . . .' someone muttered, wondering who was to be the first.

‘I think one of us had better lead,' Stevenson began when the girl, waiting for the boat to rise and the ship to lean over them, made a sudden grab for the ladder.

Stevenson watched with anxiety as she scrambled upwards, out of reach of the rearing boat. Already figures appeared at the main-deck rail to help her inboard and, as soon as she was clear, others quickly followed her example. Somehow the information that this was their final chance transmitted itself to the last of the refugees. It seemed, too, this final boatload consisted of the fittest and most able. Stevenson wondered if any of them had concealed arms about their persons. It was a stupid, suspicious thought, for they wore only the thin, sun-bleached cotton rags they stood up in. He hoped the weapons had been dropped overboard from the junk.

The Fourth Engineer deftly threw the boat's engine in and out of gear, ahead and astern, to keep the bottom of the rope ladder as near steady as he could. One by one the refugees clawed their way up the ship's side, until only the boat's crew remained.

‘Up you go, Brad.'

Stevenson saw the Able Seaman's bloody finger for the first time, saw him wince as he clung to the ladder and began his hurried ascent. Pritchard followed.

‘You too, Tony.'

Stevenson waited for the Fourth's feet to clear, then he too left the boat. Its engine chugged in neutral as it bumped against the ship's side. Almost at the rail, Stevenson looked down. From this height it seemed a relatively simple matter to hook on those blocks and save it. He hesitated, half-minded to go back and do the job by himself.

‘Get inboard, Alex!' he heard Rawlings bellow from the deck above. ‘Leave the bloody boat!'

He clambered over the rail, accepting a helping hand from the Bosun.

‘The wind's piping,' the Bosun said by way of a compliment. ‘She'll not be needing a motorboat in the scrapyard.'

Taylor, who had been watching, reported the boat's loss to Mackinnon and the Captain returned to the starboard bridge-wing in time to see the motor lifeboat drop slowly down the ship's side and disappear under the curve of the quarter.

The loss of the boat increased his isolation and anxiety. In all his years as Mate and Master he had husbanded the owner's property as though it had been his own, a prudent, careful and responsible man in a position of trust. Considerations of scrapyard redundancy never entered his head. As the boat drifted out of his sight he felt carried back to an earlier time, a time when the loss of a boat was inconsequential, when the ocean was dotted with abandoned boats and the wreckage of broken hulls. The sensation of
déjà vu
was almost overwhelming and with it came the inevitability of cyclical crisis, of a second testing being upon him when he was bereft of the resilience and assumed immortality of youth . . .

‘They couldn't hook on, sir,' Taylor was saying.

Mackinnon raised his eyes to the horizon. The weather continued to deteriorate and the ship could no longer be left to roll at the mercy of the increasingly heavy sea. As if synchronising with his thoughts a wave broke against the weather side of the
Matthew Flinders
. The whole ship shook from the gigantic blow. Mackinnon and Taylor spun round as a huge column of white water, the dissipated mass of the thwarted wave, rose high above them. It was instantly demolished, torn downwind to scour their faces like shot-blasting. Both men lowered their heads, then Mackinnon, spluttering with the cold shock of the spray, revived.

‘Ring on half-speed, mister!' he ordered and Taylor
responded, glad to be active again. ‘Hard a-port!' Mackinnon made for the wheelhouse door to stand behind Macgregor as the Able Seaman brought the ship head to wind. ‘Midships and steady,' he ordered, adding to Taylor with an uncharacteristic clue as to his mental state, ‘Keep her so, mister, while we sort ourselves out.'

Mackinnon desperately needed time to give his full consideration to the problem of the typhoon, a problem that the sighting of the boat people had compelled him to shelve for a fateful five hours. Yet even now he could not entirely dispel the image of the boat drifting astern under the quarter. He recalled the junk they had nearly run down on the
James Cook
, and how he had craned to see it clear of the stern's overhang.

Satisfied he had settled the
Matthew Flinders
on a comfortable course that effectively hove the ship to, he strode out on to the port bridge-wing and raised his glasses to stare astern. The boat bobbed white in their wake. To starboard the junk had vanished.

‘She's gone, sir,' a voice said and he lowered his glasses to find Stevenson beside him, wet and shivering, his teeth chattering. ‘We were just in time. She was filling fast. They must have been pumping all the time.'

‘You did very well, Mr Stevenson.'

‘I'm afraid there's something else, sir.'

Afterwards, several of the
Matthew Flinders
's crew remarked that Rawlings had surprised them. The Mate's talent for organisation had possibly been spurred by Mackinnon's recent admonition, or perhaps, like many a man promoted slowly and gradually losing drive and ambition in an uninspiring world, he simply rose to the occasion, revealing talents they had never known he possessed.

Between them Rawlings and Freddie Thorpe, the Chief Steward, had marshalled the women and children into the
officers' smoke-room, the men into the saloon. The injured woman, her legs still bound in the rag tourniquets applied in the junk, had been given a shot of morphine sulphate from the drugs chest.

Rawlings, who periodically eased the restriction of the cinctures to allow blood flow to inhibit mortification of her ragged flesh, considered some form of operation would have to be performed if she was to live. Armed with a rough list of the rescued, he climbed to the bridge to make his report.

Captain Mackinnon was not there. Having hauled the ship head to sea and hove-to, he had left the bridge to Taylor and Macgregor and gone down to his cabin with Stevenson. Rawlings retraced his steps to the boat-deck and knocked on the open cabin door.

‘Come in, mister,' Mackinnon said and Rawlings stepped inside. ‘The Second Mate has something to tell us. We're going to have to search every one of them.'

‘Why, for Chrissake?' asked Rawlings. The Second Mate told of the ammunition clip he had discovered.

‘That's wonderful,' Rawlings muttered with dismal emphasis.

‘I'm putting the pistol back in the safe,' said Mackinnon. ‘It's all we've got if things get rough, but I don't want it flashed around and rousing anyone's suspicions. Everything will probably pass off all right. They're exhausted and should be relieved we've rescued them, but' – he paused to let his words sink in – ‘in case there are problems about landing them and so on, this is the combination number.' He bent to his desk and scribbled a few digits down on two scraps of paper handing one to each of the officers. ‘We don't know what's going to happen, so you two learn it and if you think circumstances demand a shooter and I'm not available . . . well, you know how to get hold of it. Okay?'