The Lost Flying Boat (10 page)

In my section was the graduated receiver scale and homely façade of the robust Marconi TR-1154/55. I drew my fingers over the multi-coloured transmitter clickstops and pressed the encased bakelite morse key. There was space to stand up and swing my arms, and with little movement get a view of Appleyard going back to shore on the pinnace to fetch last minute necessities from Shottermill on the quay. The sun already warmed the flying boat, and a gentle rocking under foot made the craft less formidable.

The sickness passed. The outside was a picture to be looked at from this convenient vehicle making its way over the water surface of the earth. ‘Plenty of room to work in, eh?' Nash spoke as if he had been responsible for the design. ‘What do you think of the old cloud-lorry?'

‘People must have felt good producing a plane like this.' I mentioned loyalty and co-operation, not to say patriotism, and even a kind of love necessary to get such a huge aerodynamic construction assembled from scratch. Almost like building a cathedral. The workers must have felt pride when they saw it newly finished.

He was laughing. ‘Pride? Loyalty? Most of them wanted to earn as much as they could in the shortest possible time while doing as little work as possible as slowly as they could get away with – though I suppose it wasn't that slow if they got a bonus on top of their pay-packets.'

A flying boat is built by people who guide each strut, float, stringer, tailplane, aileron and leading edge into place, I said. The anatomical diagram is adhered to as a blueprint for every component from a tiny screw to the whole engine. After launching, the flying boat retains the touch of human hands. Even if few felt that they were creating a work of beauty, it justified what I was trying to say – which Nash admitted might be true enough.

Salt water cradled the hull, reflecting an underwing float beyond each outer engine. Extended wings mirrored a shimmering charmed image below, both entities joined by the umbilical surface where one ended and the other began. Though anything utilitarian need not be beautiful, beauty must have its use, and of all man-made artefacts I grew in the next few days to feel that the flying boat was one of his most graceful endeavours, a spiritual extension with a practical purpose.

The sea is its resting place, and when the hull pushes against water during take-off, driven by the engines' powerful thrust, or first glances the surface of the sea when coming down, designed to alight at a landing speed of less than a hundred miles an hour, it will gracefully meet its natural plain, but in an agitated sea the thin hull can be broken, and take the flying boat to disaster.

Where we were going, no marked area or man-designed breakwater would protect us. A cape might give shelter from prevailing winds and undue current, but guarantees of a safe anchorage were few. Our chart delineated the coastline but told little of the interior except that mountains and glaciers almost filled it. A flying boat was the only aircraft which could visit that tortuous terrain. To put a landplane down, Bennett explained, would be like trying to do so in upper Norway; but for a flying boat to alight in a fjord with two or three sharp bends was, for the sort of flying he knew about, a piece of cake.

I sat at my radio desk and took the List of Radio Signals out of my briefcase. There were no fixed stations where we were going, nothing but a few ships perhaps on the great circle route between South Africa and Australia. I stacked the Wireless Operator's Handbook, a copy of the Weather Message Decode Book, the standard Wireless Equipment on Aircraft, and a folded tracing of the Admiralty Chart.

Rose's larger collection of printed matter – Sight Reduction Tables, Sight Log Book, Star Almanac, Star Atlas, and the Antarctic Pilot which contained a description of the Kerguelen Islands – found a place in his desk, on top of which he spread the Mercator chart which he had patiently constructed at the Driftwood Hotel. Then came his Dalton computer, a bubble sextant, a marine sextant, a stop watch, a chronometer, and an astro compass for finding true north no matter what the magnetic variation, providing the sun was visible. The reliance placed on the heavenly bodies to guide us to our destination was almost total, and I could only hope that cloud cover would not fox us for the whole trip.

Wilcox in his office, facing the panel of knobs and levers, was simulating a pre-flight check – we would not take off till the morning – while Nash and his gunners were getting in the drogues and upping anchor before closing the hatch for our trip around the roadstead. Bennett started the port inner, and I fixed on my headset, hearing him over the intercom: ‘Taxi-ing. Stand by.'

‘OK this side,' Nash said.

‘Try your wireless, Sparks, but disconnect the antennae.'

I listened out on 500 kc/s and, hearing nothing, tapped Ks for ten seconds. The morse thumped loudly through the phones, its rhythm tingling both eardrums while my feet kept time. The gear functioned, all knobs set, dials and needles back in action. I reconnected the aerial and listened to ships calling the local coast station.

The boat was turning, four engines going. Once we were in the air and hundreds of miles out over the ocean, who would we contact in an emergency? The wireless was, after engines and airframe, our lifeline. On medium wave, where there was reasonable hope that a ship would hear, the range by morse might be something like three hundred miles, assuming whoever was listening had a good receiver, and that the ether was free from interference. Short wave was a different matter. Provided the correct wavelength was chosen, my patter could be audible for up to several thousand miles, but might not be picked up if the operator wasn't specifically tuned in. No station, either near or distant, had been advised to listen for my signals, and without prearranged schedules worked on short wave anything was possible and little was feasible.

But I would listen, and beam my direction-finding loop on any ship's message in case it contained his latitude and longitude, which would help our navigation should sun or stars not shine. Such a bearing might be useful in assessing our most probable position, but few ships would be in the area, and radio functioned best when close to shipping routes and coastal stations. I would also intercept met. information from any source concerning the South Indian Ocean. Even if for areas hundreds of miles away, they could be evaluated, providing we deduced the direction of the weather, though by heading towards a climatically unpredictable part of the world the results would be dubious.

As the flying boat turned, I left my radio to look out of a porthole. The water was calm. Then I saw that the gull Nash had shot at must have fallen wounded, and then died, for it floated like a scrap of grey cloth under the wingtip. I regretted that the bird had been so wantonly used for target practice.

19

Bennett's humour was always based on the scent of danger. The smile was youthful, even boyish, and his grey eyes lightened. His face, before he spoke, indicated a pleasant person, and the only time he seemed halfway human was when he was at one with his crew. But so far there was little of that informal wartime ‘Hi-di-hi!' answered by a ‘Ho-di-ho!' instead of a salute. Perhaps the crew hadn't been long enough reunited, nor yet faced danger. An easygoing relationship had to be earned.

He stood by the flight deck ladder and addressed us as if we were a bomber crew about to set off for Germany. The wall maps were lacking, but these our memories supplied. ‘Some of you know more than others about this operation. A few may have put two and two together already – to make sixes and sevens. Well, you can forget all that, and listen to the pukka gen.

‘We take off in the morning, and that's official. There'll be no last night ashore. I don't want to lose you, especially after what you're going to hear. Our reason for going to the Kerguelen Islands is to recover a ton of gold coins deposited by a German submarine at the end of the war. They thought it a good hiding place, until such time as they could recover it. A supply ship or raider must have refuelled the sub which, having concealed its load on the island, never got back to base, but was sunk by a flying boat. The captain of the submarine was the only survivor, and I took the map and notes concerning the gold after we picked him up from the sea. He died, and went overboard. You all know this except Adcock, though none of you realized what I took from the dying captain.

‘Some of you have been worried about whether we can ship enough fuel to reach the islands. We can, so forget it. And as for getting back, a steamer called the
Difda,
of some six hundred tons, will supply us with enough fuel to fly out. You may ask: why doesn't the same steamer recover the gold instead of us? Speed, is the answer. And secrecy. We can be away quickly, and take the goods to market before any other interested party will even know it's gone. In a week's time your valuable services should no longer be required – and we are carrying supplies to last a fortnight.

‘The Kerguelen Islands lie on the Antarctic Convergence, where the northward moving cold water sinks below the warmer, which means uncertainty of weather. But we're going at the best time of the year, and there are sheltered places where we can get down without trouble. The nearest fjord to the gold is sufficiently sheltered to hide the
Aldebaran
like a fly in a jar of blackcurrant jam. The snowline lies at about 1500 feet. In January there's fog on one or two days, and the air temperature is between forty and fifty – bloody cold at night, but we have plenty of equipment for that.'

He rolled white paper around one of his fragile cigars more, I thought, to help put on the expression of boredom he by no means felt, and also in order to discourage questions. ‘Getting there is the most difficult part, but Rose is familiar with the navigational problems, and Adcock will do his stuff with thermionic valves and bits of wire when it comes to making contact with the refuelling ship. The islands are uninhabited, though the French have talked of setting up a scientific station – a fair way from where we'll be dropping anchor. We've got to get the gold out now because it may be more difficult later.'

He went into his stateroom, and there was a lowered atmosphere among us. What had started as a job had become an adventure with too many imponderables. We were going to a place of which there were no adequate maps, and no radio aids, nor even, as far as we knew, any other human beings. The only ships would be whaling vessels, said Nash, which were as rare in any case as spots on a film star's face. If we alighted in that desolation of glaciers and could not get off again, food supplies would be of prime importance. I felt wary, and daunted. ‘I'm getting cold feet,' said Armatage, as we moved back to the galley.

‘You'll be lucky if that's all you get,' Appleyard said in his quiet manner.

‘A touch of the old L of M F?' Nash said. ‘It'll pass. It always did. And if it doesn't, what's death? Just another blackout after a party.' The primus stoves were lit, and Nash rolled up his sleeves to produce mugs of soup, followed by bacon, omelettes and potatoes that Appleyard had peeled. There was plenty of bread, and during the meal a pot of water was boiled for tea. Armatage scraped his leftovers into a bucket: ‘I wonder what we've let ourselves in for?'

‘Stop binding,' said Nash. ‘You're getting on people's nerves.'

I felt that one or two of us would like to back out, though we succeeded in hiding our misgivings. Slip through the hatch and swim. Drown if you must, rather than go on. Don't, I told myself. We are committed, cocooned in lassitude. I fought paralysis by disputing its effect, point by point as if I were a lawyer rather than a radio operator. But the pall would not go away. I chatted with Nash, however, in as cheerful a mood as I was ever in.

20

When going to see his mother, Bennett would nurse his cigar for twenty-five miles of the road. She was turning senile, and called him by his father's name. He stepped on that one: a monolithic skipper of the skies who believes in the future can't afford such memories when boning up for a long stint over the ocean. A two-and-a-half-thousand mile track from all shipping routes could, by an error of one degree on either side, miss the island entirely, in spite of its size, and cause the flying boat to crash through lack of fuel, or loom around the Antarctic for eternity like a ghostly ship of old.

‘Unless we get good astro fixes,' he told Nash, who saw no reason not to pass on such details which gratuitously came his way, ‘we're heading for a watery grave. A cold one. If we can't get angles on the stars, we'll have to fly low to calculate drift readings for dead reckoning. We'll get a little help from the radio. But nothing is as certain as the stars.'

He sweated, at the risk, shaking more at such slender chances than he ever had flying through Trojan walls of flak towards Essen or Berlin. They'd ship enough fuel, but too much circling to find the bay and they might run out. Impossible to row those last few miles. He erased the figures and worked them through again. When did not success depend on navigation? Rose was the best, a shining asset to this shower of a crew. If God looks kindly down, we'll be rich. If he doesn't, it's Job's boils for the lot of us, and cold water for our coffin.

He felt the shock of the optimist who realizes that he has so far survived only by luck. But he did not then become pessimistic. The efficacy of calculations may not always reassure, but they held back mortal damage. Faith in mechanical reliability kept hope in an airtight capsule, like the vacuum of a barometer which enables the needle to show height above the earth when air acts on it. Years of operational flying shifted pessimism sufficiently for him to watch the smoke from his cigar roll over his coloured map of the southern hemisphere.

A Mercator sheet of the South West Approaches would have been overprinted with the purple and green and blue mesh of the Loran grid, which made pinpointing a piece of cake, so that the spot in the north Atlantic where the sub had gone down was fixed for ever to within a mile or two. We would be safer if we had at least Consol to help, Nash my boy, but only the busy parts of the world are covered. Down here you have to pray to the heavenly bodies.