Geoffrey Jenkins - Scend of the Sea

‘At a guess I'd say the scientific equipment Walvis Bay is carrying is worth more than the ship itself,' I said. The type of apparatus we've aboard for observing the new weather satellite has never been taken to sea before, and we'll have to treat it like Dresden china. We spent our days in the Southern Ocean having litters of kittens over the radar scanner, which also wasn't designed to take the sort of beating the Southern Ocean hands out. These grabs and corers in themselves are worth thousands. You'd better come below and have your beer before you put more ideas into the crew.'

Alistair sprawled himself again in my chair. ‘I reckon I'm in the wrong game. Fancy just cruising around taking a few barometer readings or plucking bits of mud from the sea-bottom I A few weather buoys would put you chaps out of business.'

Alistair's jibes were sour. I remembered her admiration for my way-out job. It came home to me then that I would be away from her for two months at least. How trite then would sound my account of my sterile reconnaissance of the Bashee and the Waratah's graveyard!

'My mission isn't the kind of scientific ivory tower you seem to think,' I retorted. ‘What I find could determine the whole course of the offshore oil-drilling programme. I've got to drive a cross-section investigation through three of the mightiest current systems in the world — the Agulhas, the West Wind Drift and the Benguela — and each one is going to throw its particular brand of toughness at my ship..

'Boy, there's no doubt you're sold!'

"Listen,' I said. 'I see the storms born in the Southern Ocean. You couldn't fly your Buccaneer without the information I send back.’

'You're so involved, you don't see the sea for the plankton,' Alistair mocked. 'Come and do a pubcrawl with me. Get it out of your system.'

He didn't wait for my 'no' but stood up and went to the two photographs on the bulkhead. She had also stood there and looked.

'You want to get rid of these!' he said. 'Why don't you hang up a picture of Touleier coming in to win? Haven' you got a girl to remember down there in your God-forsaken Antarctic? Why fiddle around with these old dead 'uns?'

I have a picture of a girl standing there, I thought to myself, I shall always remember her.

'They're a reminder,' I replied. 'They're history; reality. I haven't your Air Force attitude. If I saw my best pal crash in flames, I wouldn't go and buy a beer in the mess for him as you do. You don't admit the brutal facts. I do.'

'Some buy it, some don't,' he said. 'It's your skill, and what's not written — your luck. You can't escape it.' 'Is that why the Viscount went into the drink?' 'Listen, Ian, you belong to the sea. As your brother, I can tell you to stick there. You don't know flying men. Dad was a flyer. He knew the risks-he'd been through them all. War. Peace. One night three years ago, flying a straightforward run with nothing but a bit of wind, he bought it. That's the way it happens in the air. I don't believe he had a heart attack at the controls. Don't try and work it all into a neat pattern, or whatever you're trying to tell me. We don't, and we are the blokes who fly. Dad was old for a pilot, but he was still good. But the air doesn't want old men. You've heard of the Old Man of the Sea, but wouldn't it be bloody silly to say, the Old Man of the Air? Why, then, hang up this picture of the Old Ship of the Sea? No one will ever know what happened to the Waratah. They've all tried for sixty years; you'll beat your brains out against the wall if you go on. Leave it the way it is. Same with the Viscount. Take down these damn things and let's have something else in their place.'

Alistair's appraisal was like a bucket of cold water. It could not, however, have been hers, I told myself quickly, for there had been that immediate rapport between us over the very object Alistair derided so.

I grinned. 'That's quite a speech for-you. Have another beer.'

'Sorry I blew my top,' he apologized. 'Yes, I will. But you-somehow you seem to have got yourself in a corner and all this chatter about weather and oceans seems to be only a way of keeping you there.'

Alistair's outburst showed me how deeply the Waratah had eaten into me. The red light was showing, clear. If I did not beat the Waratah, the Waratah would beat me.

I went for more beer. Alistair was facing the Waratah photograph when I returned.

'I feel like shaking this can and squirting it all over it,' he said angrily.

Ididn't — want to sharpen the mental image Alistair seemed to have of me over the ship, so I said with studied casualness, ‘I came past the place where she sank on my way here.'

I misjudged how deeply he felt about my involvement in the mystery.

'Why?' he demanded. 'Why? Why? Why? You can't.. he fumbled for words '. . make the sea give up its dead. Why try and make it? Take a look at it clinically, brutally. What would you actually find if by some chance you happened on the remains of the Waratah or the Gemsbok. A lot of stripped skeletons — what the sharks left, and it wouldn't be a pretty sight. Think of it like that. Leave it alone. Don't go messing around!'

Something, somewhere, was beginning to take shape in my mind. Seen as Alistair saw it, my preoccupation with the Waratah was sheer morbidity; with her …

'There was less than nothing all the way up the Pondoland coast. Just a calm sea, a couple of tankers. Nothing more,' I replied.

Alistair clasped the beer mug in his strong, square hands. His words came tumbling out. 'It took about a million Rand to train me as a Buccaneer pilot. That's what they say in the Air Force, anyway. A whole round million. What is this ship of yours worth-fifty, maybe a hundred thousand? I'm worth ten times as much at least, without my plane, which is worth another million. The money's there, that's what I'm saying. If they'd really wanted to, they could have spent ten times the value of your ship looking for the Gemsbok or Waratah. But they didn't want to, once the immediate search was over. Why should you? What do you think you can achieve in a shoe-string little outfit where all the latest electronic devices failed? They had the Navy and everything from Search and Rescue out looking after Dad's plane went in. They found nothing. Sweet nothing.'

I think it was Alistair's bandying of those enormous figures which triggered to a conscious purpose the idea which was starting to form in my mind. I had heard the oilmen toss such figures around in describing their floating platforms in the same way a Hollywood producer boasts about his multi-million-dollar supercolossal film. I had used the argument myself in persuading obtuse officials about the need for the weather ship … oil. My function at sea was to protect the floating oil rigs in advance by acute observation of sea and weather in the Southern Ocean, and soon those rigs would be moving round the coast to drill off Pondoland. The mere fact that part of my mission after leaving Durban was to sample the ocean bottom all the way down the Agulhas Bank off Pondoland showed how little was known about it. What better key to their safety than a series of sterile tabulations, day after day, week after week, would be-specific knowledge of what had sunk the Waratah ! If I could find out what extraordinary conjunction of sea, gale and ocean-bottom contour had sent a brand-new 10,000-ton liner to the bottom without trace, it could provide a triumphant short-cut to knowledge for the oil rigs' safety and at the same time lay the mystery which had tantalized three continents for over half a century! I knew that a front was approaching the Cape, but its severity was completely unknown, since my own weather ship was not on station to forecast. Within forty-eight hours I would be at sea in the area where the Waratah had vanished, and what looked to be a promising similarity of weather — although it was impossible to judge at this stage more than vaguely-would hit the Pondoland coast, the Bashee Mouth at the same time …