Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

Alistair was eyeing me curiously. 'Look,' he said impatiently, 'if you were in my squadron I'd ground you for a psycho check. Every time the Waratah is mentioned …'

I decided to drop it. But I could not forget her, standing by those self-same photographs.

'Forget it,' I grinned. 'You send me your pin-ups and whatever else you think fit for my mental health, and I'll promise you I'll hang 'em up. But you still haven't told me what really brings you to Durban beyond that wonderful cover-up phrase-manoeuvres.'

Alistair seemed relieved. 'Very hush-hush.' He grinned a little. 'Bet you have only the fishes to confide in, anyway. My squadron is to make a surprise test of the air defences of every big port along the coast to see how alert they are to an attack from the sea. Russian penetration into the Indian Ocean and all that, you know. The Buccaneer is primarily a carrier aircraft, and it's built to fly under the conventional radar screens. So we're going to operate out to sea, as if the attack was carrier-based, and then come in low. See if Durban, Port Elizabeth and East London are awake to a surprise attack.'

'East London?'

Alistair eyed me sharply. 'What about East London?’

'Is that your particular target?'

'Oddly enough, it is. How did you guess?'

I could have said, Bruce Fairlie and his airliner. Douglas Fairlie and his Waratah — the Red Rose of the Sea, he had called her affectionately, since she was named after the national emblem of New South Wales, the waratah flower — that is why I knew. I deliberately shook the shadows out of my mind. I had made my decision. The Waratah and her fate would serve me, serve the oil rigs. I would break her hold on me by wringing from the sea the secret of her fate …

I laughed. 'Good. Because that's just where I shall be, round about the same time.'

'What do you mean?'

‘I sail tomorrow; you're due at East London the night after. I'll loaf a bit down the coast doing a little sea-bottom sampling so that I can be off East London when you come in for the attack. You can wave me goodbye for my voyage.'

Alistair got up and slapped me affectionately. 'Dammit, that's just what I will do. Beat up this bloody little tin can before it gets beaten up by the sea! You've got some odd ideas at times, Ian, but I like the idea of this one! Let's make this a nice friendly, brotherly meeting.'

'It'll be dark.. ’ I began.

Alistair laughed. 'I'll give you my ETA for the attack, and you can be in position between the Bashee Mouth and East London. You can put on the ship's lights, and I'll risk the plane's when I spot Walvis Bay. Then we'll know it's each other, huh?'

'I'll tell you what,' I added, ‘I’ll have all the lights on and in addition the floodlight aft near the radiosonde hut. Then you won't mistake Walvis Bay for any other shipping-and there's plenty up and down the coast.'

‘I’ll come in for the attack at zero feet over the sea,' Alistair went on excitedly, like a schoolboy out on a lark. 'That's what my height has to be so that the radar won't pick me up. I'll come in from the north-east, and we'll be far enough out to sea so that the defences won't see 'em. You can also serve a useful function by providing me with a datum point for the attack-I'll know exactly where I am when I pass over you. My instruments are set on the sea, you understand, so as to keep as low as possible.'

Alistair's warmth and easy, extrovert manner turned us into a couple of boys plotting details of a raid into an apple orchard. We threw at one another speeds, positions, plots, times.

'Nothing like a spot of Fairlie attack co-operation, eh?' grinned Alistair.

I was glad I had suggested the rendezvous. I was getting as big a kick out of it as Alistair. The Waratah and the impending storm seemed very far away.

Alistair turned to go. He jammed on his cap at a rakish angle, and then strutted mockingly back to the photograph of the Waratah.

He threw a sham salute and made a noise with his lips like a beer can hissing.

'Hail and farewell, you bloody Red Rose of the Sea,' he jibed.

'A ship without a soul.'

The words took on in my brain the rhythmic thump, break and swish of the seas as they crashed against the bow of Walvis Bay, not coming aboard yet, but with a strange quality of menace-of growing menace-as they raced in from the south-west. I had cut the sea-bottom sampling operation an hour previously because of the increasing motion of the ship, and I didn't like the colour of the sky in the same quarter. Nor did I like the unnaturally high barometer. Usually, a south-westerly buster is preceded by a high barometer, then suddenly it goes down like a lift and, almost without warning, a gale is plucking like a thousand devils at one's ship and the sea. It was after midday and my rendezvous with Alistair was still a good six hours away, there would be no official weather warning to shipping (if it was to come) for another hour yet. As I stood on the bridge trying to size up the coming blow, the counter-combination of sea-strike and screw-thrust took on a beat which found expression in the words-as one frames phrases to the rhythm of a train's wheels — that turned round in my mind.

'A ship — without — a soul.'

Those were the words of some forgotten shipmaster, a phlegmatic, matter-of-fact man of the sea and of action, not given to extra-sensory things, when he first saw the

Waratah on her maiden voyage in Australia. His own ship had been lying alongside a wharf in Melbourne and the brand-new Waratah had berthed alongside. In the tradition of the sea, and with some curiosity for the crack new ship of the Blue Anchor Line, he had gone to pay his respects to Captain Ilbery. Standing by the wharf, looking at the new liner, this captain had suddenly found himself awed. There was something about the new vessel which lay beyond his extensive knowledge of the sea and ships. ‘A ship — without — a soul.'

Now, off the Pondoland coast, the words the captain had uttered to himself as he waited to go aboard the Waratah for a friendly noonday drink and chat thumped in my head to the measure of the gathering storm. I had sailed from Durban as I had arranged so light-heartedly with Alistair — as the Waratah had sailed — the previous evening. On her last fateful departure from Durban the passengers had entertained their friends aboard, the band had played, the ribbons had flown, and the farewells had been said-the last farewells in and to this world. By contrast, Walvis Bay had had only the Director of the Marine Institute to wave her goodbye, and she had slipped a hawser or two and slid silently out to sea. I had travelled at reduced speed down the coast, using the bottom-sampler as a pretext, in order to rendezvous, in the early evening about seven o'clock, with Alistair's Buccaneer between the Bashee Mouth and East London.

What would the weather do?

I handed the bridge over to young Smit and went to my cabin, which was also the chart-room. Pinned to my table was not the chart she had been at such pains to bring me, but my own, with its complex lines and figures. For a moment I stood looking at them; within hours, would that ominous sea and sky in the south-west put them to a fiery test?

During the long watches when the weather ship had been on station in the Southern Ocean, I had plotted, on the basis of all the information I could gather, the exact course of the Waratah after she left Durban on that winter's evening of late July 1909. Side by side with her course, I had traced the nearly coincidental course of the Clan Macintyre, the last ship to speak to the Waratah a few hours before she vanished. Gridded above the two main courses I had added the tracks of the three British cruisers which had searched for her in the days immediately after her disappearance, and had struck far south-eastwards of the Cape in a competent square search on the assumption that she had broken down and been carried away towards Antarctica by the great Agulhas Current. Naval ratings had manned special crow's nests by day, and by night searchlights had swept the seas for the missing liner. I had also added the position of a liner called the Guelph off East London. On the night of the Waratah's disappearance this ship had received a garbled Morse lamp message which ended with the letters 't-a-h'. The identity of the ship which sent the message — known to be a big, fully-lighted liner on correct course for Cape Town-was never established. I had filled in, too, the track of the special search ship Sabine, a merchantman captained by a Royal Navy officer, which, after the fruitless search by the three cruisers, made a 14,000-mile, 88-day voyage through the seas and islands of Antarctica. She found — nothing. Fifteen steamers and two windjammers had been at sea between Durban and Cape Town when the Waratah vanished; their contribution to the mystery I had added in graphic form — courses, wind, storm. My father's projected track as he had flown southwards from Durban over the sea towards East London, ending at the approaches to the port, was precisely drawn in.