Alistair MacLean: San Andreas

‘Sit down, sit down,’ Bowen said. He sighed. ‘Archie, we have a saboteur aboard.’

‘Have we now.’ He raised eyebrows, no startled oaths from the Bo’sun, not ever. ‘And what has he been up to, Captain?’

Bowen told him what he had been up to and said: ‘Can you make any more of it than I can, which is zero?’

‘If you can’t, Captain, I can’t.’ The regard in which the Captain held the Bo’sun was wholly reciprocated. ‘He doesn’t want to sink the ship, not with him aboard and the water temperature below freezing. He doesn’t want to stop the ship—there’s half a dozen ways a clever man could do that. I’m thinking myself that all he wanted to do is to douse the lights which—at night-time, anyway—identify us as a hospital ship.’

‘And why would he want to do that, Archie?’ It was part of their unspoken understanding that the Captain always called him ‘Bo’sun’ except when they were alone.

‘Well.’ The Bo’sun pondered. ‘You know I’m not a Highlander or a Western Islander so I can’t claim to be fey or have the second sight.’ There was just the faintest suggestion of an amalgam of disapproval and superiority in the Bo’sun’s voice but the Captain refrained from smiling: essentially, he knew, Shetlanders did not regard themselves as Scots and restricted their primary allegiance to the Shetlands. ‘But like yourself, Captain, I have a nose for trouble and I can’t say I’m very much liking what I can smell. Half an hour—well, maybe forty minutes—anybody will be able to see that we are a hospital ship.’ He paused and looked at the Captain with what might possibly have been a hint of surprise which was the nearest the Bo’sun ever came to registering emotion. ‘I can’t imagine why but I have the feeling that someone is going to have a go at us before dawn. At dawn, most likely.’

‘I can’t imagine why either, Archie, but I have the same feeling myself. Alert the crew, will you? Ready for emergency stations. Spread the word that there’s an illegal electrician in our midst.’

The Bo’sun smiled. ‘So that they can keep an eye on each other. I don’t think, Captain, that we’ll find the man among the crew. They’ve been with us for a long time now.’

‘I hope not and I think not. That’s to say, I’d like to think not. But it was someone who knew his way around. Their wages are not exactly on a princely scale. You’d be surprised what a bag of gold can do to a man’s loyalty.’

‘After twenty-five years at sea, there isn’t a great deal that can surprise me. Those survivors we took off that tanker last night—well, I wouldn’t care to call any of them my blood-brother.’

‘Come, come, Bo’sun, a little of the spirit of Christian charity, if you please. It was a Greek tanker—Greece is supposed to be an ally, if you remember—and the crew would be Greek. Well, Greek, Cypriot, Lebanese, Hottentot if you like. Can’t expect them all to look like Shetlanders. I didn’t see any of them carrying a pot of gold.’

‘No. But some of them—the uninjured ones, I mean—were carrying suitcases.’

‘And some of them were carrying overcoats and at least three of them were wearing ties. And why not? The Argos spent six hours there wallowing around after being mined: time and enough for anyone to pack his worldly possessions or such few possessions as Greek seamen appear to have. It would be a bit much I think, Archie, to expect a crippled Greek tanker in the Barents Sea to have aboard a crewman with a bag of gold who just happened to be a trained saboteur.’

‘Aye, it’s not a combination that one would expect to find every day. Do we alert the hospital?’

‘Yes. What’s the latest down there?’ The Bo’sun invariably knew the state of everything aboard the San Andreas whether it concerned his department or not.

‘Dr Singh and Dr Sinclair have just finished operating. One man with a broken pelvis, the other with extensive burns. They’re in the recovery room now and should be okay. Nurse Magnusson is with them.’

‘My word, Archie, you do appear to be singularly well-informed.’

‘Nurse Magnusson is a Shetlander,’ the Bo’sun said, as if that explained everything. ‘Seven patients in Ward A, not fit to be moved. Worst is the Chief Officer of the Argos , but not in danger, Janet says.’

‘Janet?’

‘Nurse Magnusson.’ The Bo’sun was a difficult man to put off his stride. ‘Ten in recuperating Ward B. The Argos survivors are in the bunks on the port side.’

‘I’ll go down there now. Go and alert the crew. When you’ve finished, come along to the sick-bay—and bring a couple of your men with you.’

‘Sick-bay?’ The Bo’sun regarded the deckhead. ‘You’d better not let Sister Morrison hear you call it that.’

Bowen smiled. ‘Ah, the formidable Sister Morrison. All right, hospital. Twenty sick men down there. Not to mention sisters, nurses and ward orderlies who—’

‘And doctors.’

‘And doctors who have never heard a shot fired in their lives. A close eye, Archie.’

‘You are expecting the worst, Captain?’

‘I am not,’ Bowen said heavily, ‘expecting the best.’

The hospital area of the San Andreas was remarkably airy and roomy, remarkably but not surprisingly, for the San Andreas was primarily a hospital and not a ship and well over half of the lower deck space had been given over to its medical facilities. The breaching of watertight bulkheads—a hospital ship, theoretically, did not require watertight bulkheads—increased both the sense and the actuality of the spaciousness. The area was taken up by two wards, an operating theatre, recovery room, medical store, dispensary, galley—quite separate from and independent of the crew’s galley—cabins for the medical staff, two messes—one for the staff, the other for recuperating patients—and a small lounge. It was towards the last of these that Captain Bowen now made his way.

He found three people there, having tea: Dr Singh, Dr Sinclair and Sister Morrison. Dr Singh was an amiable man of ‘Pakistan’ descent, middle-aged and wearing a pince-nez—he was one of the few people who looked perfectly at home with such glasses. He was a qualified and competent surgeon who disliked being called ‘Mister’. Dr Sinclair, sandy-haired and every bit as amiable as his colleague, was twenty-six years old and had quit in his second year as an intern in a big teaching hospital to volunteer for service in the Merchant Navy. Nobody could ever have accused Sister Morrison of being amiable: about the same age as Sinclair, she had auburn hair, big brown eyes and a generous mouth, all three of which accorded ill with her habitually prim expression, the steel-rimmed glasses which she occasionally affected and a faint but unmistakable aura of aristocratic hauteur. Captain Bowen wondered what she looked like when she smiled: he wondered if she ever smiled.

He explained, briefly, why he had come. Their reactions were predictable. Sister Morrison pursed her lips, Dr Sinclair raised his eyebrows and Dr Singh, half-smiling, said: ‘Dear me, dear me. Saboteur or saboteurs, spy or spies aboard a British vessel. Quite unthinkable.’ He meditated briefly. ‘But then, not everybody aboard is strictly British. I’m not, for one.’

‘Your passport says you are.’ Bowen smiled. ‘As you were operating in the theatre at the time that our saboteur was operating elsewhere that automatically removes you from the list of potential suspects. Unfortunately, we don’t have a list of suspects, potential or otherwise. We do indeed, Dr Singh, have a fair number of people who were not born in Britain. We have two Indians—lascars—two Goanese, two Singhalese, two Poles, a Puerto Rican, a Southern Irishman and, for some odd reason, an Italian who, as an official enemy, ought to be a prisoner-of-war or in an internment camp somewhere. And, of course, the survivors of the Argos are non-British to a man.’