Hammond Innes - High Stand

‘Then he may be too late.’ Miriam’s voice was strangely calm. ‘In which case Tom’s death …’ I detected a tremor then. ‘Isn’t there an airbase somewhere you can contact on VHP?’ But even as she said it she seemed to realize the impracticability of it — ‘No, of course … So we just wait.’

‘Yes,’ I said, wishing I had been able to get their position, or even a rough indication of it. Waiting is bad enough, but when you don’t know how long you’ve got to wait… ‘They won’t be long,’ I added, but she knew very well I was only saying that to bolster her courage, and mine too. Voices on the deck of the tug then, one of them cursing the cook for not having served steak for breakfast. ‘Bacon, sausages and mash — there’s better’n that served in the bloody army now.’

I crawled back in amongst the logs, cursing the man for drawing attention to the emptiness of my stomach. I had had nothing now for twenty-four hours and would have willingly settled for bangers and mash, or anything else I was offered. Other voices emerged from the tug’s bows, and then suddenly they were all over the after end of the barge, doing something to the upper layer of logs — what, I couldn’t gather. All I knew was that they seemed to be working their way downwards and there was a lot of straining and cursing. Soon feet came into view, boots braced on the steel rungs and sawdust raining down. A muttered curse and more straining. Something had been hammered in too tight. ‘Look at my bloody nails!’

What the hell were they up to? And then, when I saw a boot feeling for the rung right opposite where I lay, I thought it would only be minutes before they discovered us. But that was as low as they came, and after another ten minutes or so they all retreated on deck, the job, whatever it was, apparently done.

We had half an hour of quiet after that, and then somebody shouted, ‘Coming in through the entrance now.’ Soon the steady thump-thump of a single screw sounded through the metal hull of the barge.

After that everything became very confused. There was a sense of unreality almost, as though it was some radio play I was listening to, for there was nothing to see, only sounds, and these to be interpreted as best I could. As a result, I don’t think I was at all scared, my mind being concentrated in my ears, my imagination totally engrossed in trying to convert sounds into visual activity.

The tug’s engines started up. That was the first thing. I heard its hull scraping along the side of the barge as it-moved away, and then, after a little while, there were voices calling, different voices speaking some sort of Spanish patois, the sound of mooring lines hitting the deck, fenders rubbing and squeaking along the port side as the hull of the barge was thrust sideways, a violent movement that ground our plates against the rock. We were made fast to the new arrival, and as soon as that was done and the movement had subsided there were men all over us.

What they were doing I couldn’t make out, but they seemed concentrated at the for’ard and after ends of the barge and their movements suggested they were taking cargo on board. But where they were putting it I had no idea. It certainly didn’t come down past the ends of the logs where we were concealed. If it had, we should certainly have been discovered. As it was, I never saw any more of the men working above me than the occasional foot placed on the rung immediately outside my lair, and then only when they started hammering. It sounded like wood on wood, as though periodically one of them took up a mallet and started beating at a log.

The loading and periodical hammering went on for pre cisely twenty-seven minutes. I timed it, thinking perhaps it might be important to know how long it took to load the cargo. And all the time they were talking, a mixture of English and Spanish that at times was about as incomprehensible as pidgin English. Once I heard what sounded like an Irishman say, ‘Jeez, you’d never think there was that many junkies, would you now? Do you think they cleared this lot with St Peter?’ And they laughed.

That was the only time any of them referred to the cargo and the only clue I got from listening to their talk. But at least it confirmed what the Hallidays had been saying — this really was a drug run. At no time did I hear anything that indicated what they were doing with the stuff and I could only presume that it was in very durable bags that were being tamped into the interstices between the logs.

As soon as they had finished loading, the lines were let go and the vessel moved away, out into the open water between the islands, the thump of its screw gradually fading. By then the tug was backing up to us, the thresh of water from its stern getting louder, then dying away as men at the for’ard end of the barge made the towing hawser fast. A shout of ‘Let go ashore!’ then ‘Take her away’ was followed by renewed threshing that faded until the hawser was taut and the barge plucked sideways, juddering and scraping itself against rock.

The sound diminished, then ceased abruptly, and after a moment we could hear the swish and gurgle of water against the hull. We were under way, the tow’s next stop Seattle, unless Cornish had read between the lines of my message and had understood what I had been trying to tell him. I wasn’t at all certain he had, also I didn’t know how far away he had been. The range for VHP can be very variable, dependent on the terrain and the conditions, and the fact that his voice had sounded so faint that I could hardly decipher what he had been saying did not necessarily mean that he was outside the normal limits of very high frequency transmission.

He was, in fact, over forty miles away, just to the south of Hannah Rocks and heading east for the Alexandra Passage inside Egg Island in an effort to pick up the Indian fisherman who kept coming on the air to say he was lost somewhere in the region of Smith Sound. They had continued to search for him after I had radioed in, for forty miles to the south of us conditions were very different: the wind had dropped and with it the temperature. They were in thick fog, and with the entrance to Smith Sound littered with rocks and shoals they were concerned for the Indian’s safety.

There was, of course, a good deal of speculation in the cutter’s wheelhouse about the identity of the Kluane and whether there was a fish storage vessel of that name waiting to receive a large haul that was being kept frozen. Only gradually did the truth sink in as they argued about it, remembering how I had talked of Ice Cold as a mine and Edmundson had confirmed it as being in the Kluane. But they still didn’t see how I or Tom Halliday could be calling in on the VHP distress channel.

In court, Captain Cornish would read aloud the excerpt from his log recording the message I had transmitted. The time of that message, and the time entry recording his abandonment of the search for the lost fisherman and his alteration of course for Spider Island, would show a lapse of 181/2 minutes. That was the length of time they had spent discussing it before finally reaching the decision to abandon the Indian and alter course, and they had only made that decision because of the Mate’s insistence that I was the only person to whom he had mentioned the Kelsey’s navigation of the Spider in at least six months and that he had specifically referred to the cutter’s stern being made fast to a red cedar which was half-dead and had an eagle’s nest in the upper branches.

However, having made the decision to head north, Captain Cornish in his testimony declared that the more he thought about it, and about the failure of the customs operation when he had been taking Edmundson up to the Cascades, the more he began to appreciate the urgency. His log showed that he was proceeding north at maximum revs and, allowing for favourable tide, was making just on 20 knots over the ground.