Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

‘We’ll be hove-to before the day is out,’ Holtz said gloomily. ‘It’s not so good down below when she’s hove-to.’

I didn’t think it would be much better up top. I could remember how I’d felt last time I’d been hove-to in one of these ships. We had been off South Uist then, and I’d been sick as hell. I hoped I wasn’t going to be sick this time. An LCT is very different from a sailing boat. It never conforms to the wave pattern.

We were already slamming heavily by the time I started my tour of inspection. Down on the tank deck I found the coxs’n already tightening up on the securing chains of the first Haulpak. We were about a quarter of an hour checking the other three; then we came to the trucks, and I glanced up at the bridge. I could just see the top of the helmsman’s head, nobody else. ‘I’ll look after these,’ I told Teopas. ‘You check the bow doors and ramp.’ It meant he would have to go up to the catwalk and through past the workbench to the platform above the cross-members. As soon as he had vanished from sight, I unfastened the back of the starb’d truck. The movement up here in the bows was very violent, and as I clambered in with the bag of tools, the slam of the bows plunging into a breaking wave pitched me against the first of the crates. It took me a moment to recover myself, and then, as I was searching the bag for a cold chisel and hammer, my ankle was gripped. I turned to find Teopas staring up at me angrily. ‘ Ol bilong mi pipal .’ He was shouting to make himself heard above the noise of the sea. ‘What you doing there?’

For a moment I considered trying to persuade him to help me, but the dangerously hostile look in his eye made me think better of it. ‘Just checking to see that the crates haven’t shifted.’ But he had seen the hammer in my hand, and he didn’t believe me.

‘You come down. Nobody go inside truck. Kepten’s orders.’

I jumped down, landing heavily on the deck beside him. ‘They seem okay,’ I said. ‘I told you to check the bow doors.’

He reached into the truck for the tools and then fastened the canvas back of it. ‘First we check the trucks. Then we check the doors, ugh? Together.’ The deep guttural voice was solid and unyielding, and I turned away, uncomfortably aware that this was a man of considerable authority in his own world.

‘Well, let’s get on with it.’ I felt I had lost face, and my voice sounded peevish. Perhaps it was the movement, the constant slamming. By the time we had finished I was suffering from nausea and a feeling of lassitude.

I got used to it, of course, but the constant plunging and twisting, the bracing of muscles against the staggering shock of breaking waves was very exhausting. There was no let-up in the tension, even when I was flat on my back in my bunk, and though we were never actually hove-to, I was conscious all the time that we were steaming close to the limit for an old vessel of this type.

The gale lasted a full two days, something I had never experienced during my National Service, and when the wind finally died, it left us wallowing in an uncomfortable swell, no slamming, but the movement equally trying. One thing I remembered afterwards — the appearance of McAvoy on the bridge. It was in the early hours of the second day. I was on watch, and he was suddenly there beside me. He didn’t say anything; he just stood there, his face very pale, his eyes staring wildly. He stood there for a long time, quite silent, staring into the black darkness out of which the brilliant phosphorescence of broken wave tops rushed at us. God knows what he saw out there, but something, some haunting product of his drunken imagination.

‘What is it?’ I asked, unable to stand it any longer. ‘What are you staring at?’

He turned then, facing me reluctantly, his features crumpled by the intensity of the emotions that gripped him. He mumbled something, gripping hold of my arm, but the sound of his voice was lost in the crash of a wave. The shock of it flung us against the front of the wheelhouse. Involuntarily I ducked as spray spattered the portholes like flung pebbles, and when I had recovered myself, he was gone, leaving me with the odd feeling that his presence there had been nothing more than a ghostly apparition. I was thinking about him all the rest of that watch, and it was during those black lonely hours that I began to understand the depth of the man’s attachment, the terrible burden he carried in his heart, living all the time in the past. I was certain that what he had seen out there was the corpse of an old man alone in a canoe.

I was on duty every four hours during the gale, sharing the watches with Holland. He wouldn’t trust Luke to know when to heave to. In the end I was too tired to keep anything down, living on coffee and falling into my bunk dead to the world the instant my watch ended. Sometimes Luke was in the wheelhouse with me, but he didn’t talk much, and I was only vaguely conscious of his presence. And Perenna. She’d stand there for hours on end during the day, staring dumbly ahead as though searching the grey line of the dipping horizon for the imagined outline of Bougainville. But everything was so chaotic, a vague blur of sleeplessness and tumbling waves, that I don’t remember whether we said anything to each other.

And when it was finally over, it took time for body and mind to adjust, muscles still tensing for the slams that no longer came, eyes bleared and heavy with sleeplessness. We were all of us exhausted. That afternoon the sun came out and I was able to get a fix. Within an hour the clouds were lying in a cottonwool pile to the north of us and we were steaming in a bright blue world, blue sea, blue sky, the surface of the water oily calm, and it was suddenly hot.

Perenna was in the wheelhouse then, looking fresh and bronzed in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. She came over to the chart table, leaned her bare arms on it and watched as I entered up our position. It put us at least 20 miles to the west of our dead reckoning and 30 miles ahead of it. We were getting very close to the Louisiade Archipelago now. She reached for the dividers and measured off the distance to Bougainville. ‘About three hundred miles to go,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘So this is our last night at sea.’

‘Not quite. There’ll be another night as we work our way up the coast to Buka.’ I had forgotten all about those damned cases. ‘Better leave it till then.’ I pushed my hand up over my eyes and through my hair. I was too tired to care.

‘No. We must do it tonight.’ Even whispering, her voice was implacably determined. ‘Tonight, while everybody’s still exhausted.’ And she added urgently, ‘I must know.’

‘Tonight,’ I said, ‘all that matters is getting safely round the end of the Louisiades.’

‘He’s been worrying about that all morning.’ She ran the point of the dividers along the 300-mile outline of the archipelago. ‘Do you think that’s where my Great-uncle Carlos went down?’ She was tapping gently with the dividers, leaning forward and staring at the chart, and for no apparent reason I was suddenly reminded of McAvoy. Perhaps it was the Holland Trader he had seen out there in the luminous break of the waves, and not Colonel Holland at all. ‘Tonight,’ she said. ‘It must be tonight.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ I said. ‘Leave it till we’re off the coast of Bougainville. Tonight we’ve more immediate problems.’

She put her hand on my arm, gripping it urgently. ‘Please. This is our best chance. Jona comes off watch at midnight. You’ll be alone then.’

‘He won’t leave the bridge, not until we’re past the Louisiades.’

‘And that will be when?’

I pointed to the eastern tip of the archipelago. ‘Rossel Island is nearly three thousand feet high. We should pick that up on radar within the next four hours.’ I glanced at the bulkhead clock. ‘That means we’ll clear Cape Deliverance around o-two-hundred.’