Endangered Species (26 page)

Having lost over half its ships to the enemy, as a temporary stop-gap until new tonnage had replaced these the Eastern Steam Navigation Company took over vessels surplus to the Ministry of War Transport's requirements. Along with most major British liner operators their fleet spawned numerous ‘standard-ships': United-States-built ‘Sams' and ‘Victories', British and Canadian ‘Forts' and ‘Parks'.

Eastern Steam renamed the
Fort Mackinac
the
George Bass
and as such, in the spring of 1951, she had passed through the Kiel canal on passage to MÃ¥lmo and Turku-Abo. It was a gloomy voyage and no one was looking forward to the Baltic. It was not only the ice, for to the south of them most of the former Reich and the countries of eastern Europe lay under the heel of Stalin's Russia, while the unknown vastness of their quondam ally, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself, lay beyond the sunrise.

The mood had been set during the canal transit between Brunsbüttel and Kiel. The enforced contemplation of Germany had awoken old emotions and their departure from the former
Kriegsmarine
base with its mixture of ruination and rebuilding had been complicated by the presence of an ice-pilot.

The man's appearance was so much that of the expected stereotype that it was almost impossible to take him seriously. Tall and thin, of an indeterminate age with prematurely greying blond hair under his white-covered cap, he wore a black leather coat and calf gloves. Only a red scarf wound round his neck stopped him looking like the archetypical Nazi bully then currently causing the laughter of relief in British cinemas. Tolerated for his expertise on the
George Bass
's bridge, he became a figure of fun, for neither Second Officer Mackinnon nor Captain McGrath wanted to enquire into his past; it would have made any kind of professional relationship impossible. Only the
George
Bass
's Chief Engineer, Mr King, was unable to conceal his true feelings.

‘The arrogant bastard,' Mr King would say with compelling intensity, ‘he'd never
dare
wear a white-covered cap if he hadn't been in command, and the only thing a Kraut of
that
age could have commanded is a U-boat.'

He said this with such conviction nobody considered the possibility of the ice-pilot having commanded a minesweeper. For the apprentices, boys who had not been at sea during the war, their figure of fun turned into an object of sinister curiosity (though still to be aped).

Although Mr King was not alone aboard the
George Bass
in having been torpedoed, nor in taking to an open boat several hundred miles north of the Arctic circle, he was unique in having been witness to an atrocity.

Alone, after being separated from any consorts of a convoy bound for Murmansk by a northerly gale, his ship, the
Henry Hudson
, was torpedoed and sunk with her load of tanks and chemicals bound for the Red Army.

In the half-light of the Arctic winter day, the blown-out gale was succeeded by a freezing mist out of which ghosted the sinister shape of the U-boat which had sunk them. Figures could be seen on her conning tower and she had stopped between the two lifeboats. Several of her hands had run down on to her casing and fished about in the water. They recovered a lifebuoy bearing the legend:
Henry Hudson – Liverpool
. An officer had called down asking which boat contained the ship's Master. The Captain had held his silence and no one had betrayed him, for the masters of some British ships had been taken prisoners alone, as living trophies. The German officer had repeated the question, with the same result. The U-boat's commander, distinguishable in the gloom by his privileged white cap cover, had given an order. Off the casing by now, the hands gathered swiftly about the conning tower machine gun. A few rounds stuttered and flashed, ripping into the
boat on the far side of the U-boat. A moment later the barrel lengthened, then foreshortened as it swung towards King's boat. A frantic scrabbling at the oars was swiftly terminated. Mr King was knocked to the bottom boards as an oarsmen cannoned into him from the impact of the bullets.

When King struggled up again, the grey shape had vanished in the mist. He could hear the noise of its surface diesel engine for a long time. By true nightfall he was the only man left alive, for the last of the wounded had succumbed to loss of blood, or the cold.

Mr King was picked up by the corvette
Nemesia
sixteen hours later. That much his shipmates knew; it was in incontrovertible print, part of the company's history, though Mr King himself never spoke of it. They did not know they were to witness the delayed finale.

The ice in the Baltic was thick that spring, a northerly gale packing it southwards and impeding the progress of the
George Bass
through the Fehmarn Belt.

‘It is better we wait,
Kapitan
,' the pilot advised McGrath, ‘these wartime ships, zey are not so strong, no?'

For two days they drifted slowly off the Lolland coast, engines stopped, waiting for the wind to change.

This enforced inactivity compelled the
George Bass
's Master to offer a little hospitality to his guest. The ice-pilot said he preferred
schnapps
, but under the circumstances Scotch would do. This condescending attitude was characteristic of the man, and prevailed as several pegs of whisky were downed in McGrath's cabin below the bridge. After a while Mr King loomed in the doorway seeking enlightenment as to how long the weather was likely to delay them. The barbed remark was addressed more to the ice-pilot, as the Captain well knew, being himself an easygoing and tolerant man well-used to his Chief Engineer's embitterment. Chiefy King, as everyone in Eastern Steam knew, had had a bad war.

The ice-pilot shrugged with massive condescension. ‘Ach,
the Chief Engineer comes mit de questions,
ja
? Always the engineers ask questions impossible to answer. You are too long working mit the logical things in life, my friend.'

King turned a glance of withering contempt at this insolence, but accepted a glass of Scotch from the Captain.

‘How you English say? Cheers,
ja
?'

King remained stonily silent, raising his glass to McGrath in appreciation. The Captain, slightly amused, watched the two of them.

‘You remember too much the war, eh? When we seamens all do our job. Dat is right,
ja, kapitan
?'

‘Sure.'

‘Now we have all to be together, soon we fight the Russians, eh? Then you will need our help.' The ice-pilot smiled confidently. ‘The Russians, they build many submarines, eh? You British will need good help of Willi—' and here he tapped his leather breast, and roared with laughter.

‘You were in submarines?' the Chief asked in a choked voice, speaking directly to the German for the first time.

The ice-pilot's face was whisky-flushed. ‘Sure, Chief. I do my job, like you,
ja
? You were in dis company's ships?'

King nodded, his eyes noticing the ice-pilot's left hand, unconsciously lying a-top the white-covered cap on the settee beside him. Picking up the whisky bottle King filled the German's glass. ‘Yes.'

‘I have sinked one of dis company's ships, you know,' the ice-pilot said solemnly. ‘Very sad, very good ship, maybe 'bout ten t'ousand tons,
ja
. Good ship . . . good people, but—' he shrugged again – ‘
c'est la guerre, n'est-ce pas
?'

Captain McGrath shifted uneasily in his chair as King leant forward, his face a mask of anticipation.

‘And you were Captain of a U-boat, weren't you?'

The German patted the white-covered cap. ‘
Ja
.'

‘Do you know the name of this ship you sunk?'

The ice-pilot's ruddy face cracked in a wide, boyish grin.
‘
Ja, ja
, I know, sure.
Henry Hudson
'bout ten t'ousand ton . . .'

But King was no longer listening, he had slammed down his glass and walked from the cabin. McGrath refilled the ice-pilot's glass.

‘He had a bad time in the war, Pilot.'

‘Sure, sure. We all have a bad time.'

They lay stopped all day. After his dinner the half-drunk German fell asleep in the small cabin set aside for his use. As the sun set, the bridge was left to Mackinnon, an apprentice and a lookout. They would not move until the wind shifted and a south-westerly was forecast for the morning. In the approaches to MÃ¥lmo an ice-breaker was busy and Captain McGrath was confident in making port the following midnight.

But during the evening Mr King entered the ice-pilot's cabin with a heavy fire axe. He struck the German's head repeatedly until the man's skull was unrecognisable and the screams had gurgled into silence. Second Officer Mackinnon was the first on the scene.

The
Matthew Flinders
lay a-hull for the remainder of the night. Below, in the engine-room, George Reed and his men carefully bled the main fuel lines of air, closed off the empty diesel tank and then, with infinite patience and considerable difficulty, man-handled six forty-gallon steel drums out of the shaft tunnel. Rigging up a plastic pipe, they hand-pumped this small, reserve quantity of gas oil (actually kept for the emergency fuel pump, the lifeboat engine and two portable salvage pumps) into a header tank ready to restart the main engine. It was dawn before they had pressed up the main service tanks with ordinary fuel oil and an exhausted Reed climbed wearily to the bridge to report.

He found Stevenson up there with the Captain. Able Seaman Pritchard had made a pot of tea and Reed clung to the engine-room telegraph and gratefully accepted a mug.

‘You've got half a dozen starts left if ah put her over to fuel oil reet after she fires this time, Captain.'

‘Let's hope that's enough, Mr Reed,' Mackinnon said, heaving his bulk out of the corner.

They stared from the windows as the light grew, luxuriating in the warm sweetness of the tea like voluptuaries. Despite the angle of loll they had not rolled excessively during the last few hours and Reed remarked on this unexpected phenomenon, though he had to shout to do so.

‘It's ironic, George,' Mackinnon bellowed back, ‘but the sea has actually reduced in height as the wind has increased in strength. It no longer peaks and breaks, d'you see, lad? The wind won't let it, slices it off, smashes each wave to smithereens as it rises.

‘Out there' – Mackinnon waved his hand forward where the outline of the heeling masts and sampson posts of the
Matthew Flinders
were dark diagonals in a grey blue – ‘the air is no longer breathable. It's filled with salt spray. You could not stand it on your skin. It would burn you . . .'

And Reed gazed through the armoured glass as the light grew and looked upon a world that was full of the great roaring rush of air and sea co-mingled, a confusion in nature itself, back eddies of which flurried in through the smashed side window and the open doors of the exposed bridge wings.

He turned to Mackinnon, his face a boyish mixture of wonder and relief, for the ship seemed perfectly safe; battered, but safe. He had known in his heart of hearts she would be! This was the twentieth century and she was built for the trade. Yet the faces in the wheelhouse looked strangely sober, and it was odd that Captain Mackinnon had taken this trouble to explain to him.

‘We're not out of the wood yet, George. Oh, she's comfortable enough at the moment, but we've been making leeway like a train for hours, beam on and dead before the wind . . .'

‘I don't understand.'

‘We're in the dangerous zone. We're going to need that engine of yours. We're being blown directly into the vortex.'

Mackinnon shouted the short, staccato sentences. Reed caught the look in Alex Stevenson's eyes and felt the flutter of real fear in his gut. He turned away and stared out at the impenetrable, spume-laden air, the very essence of the
taifun
, the ‘great wind' of the China Seas.

Then he turned and went below.

With the growing light Captain Mackinnon felt an increasing strength. So strong is the body's metabolism that even after a sleepless night in which the only rest had been momentary catnaps, in which tired muscles had adjusted constantly to support its weight on the heaving deck, and its ravaged organs had resisted the onslaught of the whisky, it reacted to the dawn of the new day.

For Mackinnon's conscious self this revival came with copious yawnings and a gritty irritation behind hot eyeballs which sizzled in the sockets of his skull. But, just as he had dutifully encouraged George Reed, his body clock now roused his own combative spirit.

Not that he actually felt better, far from it. Despite the tea he was still thirsty, he realised, and stiff as a board, but his mind sloughed off the metaphysical preoccupations of the night. The contact with Reed and the real world of immobilised engines had merely engendered a helplessness; the depressing knowledge that without the beating of her diesel heart, the ship was a hulk, a derelict, like the junk. And from somewhere down below the ominous thump of loose cargo sent a periodic tremor through the ship.

Suppose they could not get the engine going again? Reed would return to the bridge and report his failure, looking to Mackinnon to tell them what, in the last resort, they should do.

What
could
they do?

Mackinnon knew that, in the days of sail, even a dismasted ship was capable of being restored to basic movement by a jury rig. Even when her holds were awash she might be pumped, because her company could use the basic resources they found to hand.

Nor had the situation become entirely irredeemable in a steam or motor ship until recently. Mackinnon had heard of a case where an enterprising master had rigged wires from sampson post to sampson post, down both sides of the ship, each with running blocks controlled by ropes. Between pairs of these blocks he had stretched hatch tarpaulins as rough, trimmable sails, and the ship had made port, or at least within hail of a tug or two.