The Lost Flying Boat (11 page)

We saw them struggling in the oil, Nash said, as we were about to set course for home: ‘No hope, poor bastards.' If their gunners had been better we'd have been the ones to drink oily water. ‘I feel like raking 'em, Skipper. They do it to our chaps.' Between thought and word was no space to Nash, but the route from word to deed followed zig-zags.

Bennett knew his chief gunner's malady: ‘Have a piss, and forget it.' The turret full to starboard, Nash machined it back so that he could let Appleyard in. A steep bank to port rolled him over as Bennett, circling for another look, remembered his brother who died in India when his stringbag crashed. Too unorthodox for words: ‘We zap the gollies up the Khyber Pass, and when you press the gunbutton your old orange-box goes backwards!' So he carried out the Prunish lark of picking up prisoners when you weren't even supposed to go down for your own pals. The skipper's intentions, said Nash, became your own.

They were on the skids, like landing in a channel of rocks, halfway into the wind, bumping before able to turn. One survivor was the captain, wounded and full of oil. The copilot flew while Bennett looked them over, and Nash stood guard. The captain's green face was only alive at the eyes. ‘We should make him eat that Iron Cross, and see if he can shit it out.'

‘I don't think he's in much of a state to do either.' Bennett pulled at a string around the man's neck. He cut off the celluloid packet and put it into his jacket, while Nash took a revolver and a bundle of wet cigars from the second survivor.

A pattern emerges after a number of considered decisions. Having carried out an action which is divorced from all sensible rules, a split appeared in Bennett's life, and he knew that it began while reading the U-boat commander's papers standing by the toilet of the flying boat. They gave details for latitude and longitude, bearings and distances. There were sketches of bays and hills. The positions were precise to a fraction of a second, and must have been worked out by theodolite. He had heard of the islands, a complication of bays, rocky peninsulas, fjords and glaciers.

The U-boat captain may have been on the active service side of middle age, but he died an old man. Without benefit of the Book, Nash delivered him and his companion to the deep. Back to the Waterland, said Rose. And Bennett's log did not record either the taking or the demise of their prisoners.

An inner voice insisted that he get as many of his old crew as possible to come on the expedition. The muster roll, more complete than expected, lacked only a wireless operator, and even he had been easy to find: ‘I heard this chap whistling morse in a pub, and knew I'd got my man,' he said to Nash.

The voice talked against the power of rain, louder when his lips didn't move and the words turned inwards, and he heard the water no more. He was only really alone when he sensed his inner voice clearly. Even footsteps on the creaking floor as he walked from the chart-covered table to the door and back again did not break the sentences that came against him like files of soldiers storming a building. He had called the nucleus of his crew together because a scratch-gang of all-comers taken from any quarter would not have been reliable. He could not have created a team in the time available. On the other hand, the chances of success being about even, it would have been kinder to let any but members of his old crew take part. If without them there was no hope of success, to have them was halfway to murder. He was using them for his own ends, though by employing them he was putting more money in their way than they could earn anywhere in the same length of time. Those who invested the money would also benefit, and though Bennett knew he was not worthy of his crew's devotion, such people deserved it even less. He felt tainted by the issue.

Black market money floating about after the war was ready for investment in such projects. He had his proof, and they believed him. He went around clubs and hotels where food was served that he had not seen in a decade. Banquets with good wine and big cigars. He broached his scheme, promised evidence, and they listened. His eloquence turned into sharp business talk. Though he accepted their food and wine he wanted to wipe them from the face of the earth. His hesitation was their safety. Those who would have felt no such uncertainty were dead. Either that, or they would have been glad to see that the good life goes on, and take part in it.

When Harker-Rowe gave him the nod, he knew that his worries were about to begin. The gesture marked another stage in life. There were periods when he couldn't sleep. During the war sleep had been available the moment he returned from a raid. He almost fell into oblivion during tedious debriefings. Four hours of rest performed a miracle. Dreams, like the cities he had flown to, were wiped out and ploughed with salt. The day before was scorched from memory. Tomorrow never came. It was always today. Sleep was so close to the surface that he could stand up in his subconscious and not drown. But below that, the space was without limit. He called it sleep, which seemed, on waking, to be something you went into and came out of at the flick of a switch.

When there was a memory which sleep could not erase, the ease of sleep abandoned you. No way of winning it back. The innocent person slept like a baby – so it was said. Others did so who were unable to admit that they were anything but innocent. Lacking the moral sophistication to understand that they were not innocents made them more depraved than those who knew very well why they were guilty. The crime that had initiated the expedition was such that it could not be condoned. The action had come out of a centre whose evil he had never suspected. Erupting flames had been impossible to beat back, short of burning both hands to ash.

His hair had changed colour, but such iron-grey, when he visited business offices to arrange finance for his venture, had shown him as someone in whom they could have confidence. What he told them went across as honest and feasible. Once the gold was secure in the hold of the flying boat they knew it would not disappear into the bank vaults of Panama or Zurich. His half share would make him a rich man. Trust in him was firm, but even if it were not, his wife and children would guarantee a safe return. If the flying boat's engines failed on the way back, and Bennett's crew found the grave they dreaded, would Harker-Rowe and his consortium think he had followed some preconceived dead-reckoning plan and made a break with the known world? If he did not allow for the equally complete vanishing of his wife and children, might they not see his disappearance as merely an effective way of getting the final divorce from family life that every married man dreams about? It would be no more cruel than the way in which he had first come by his knowledge of the treasure, or than the steps he had taken to ensure that only he should know of it.

A conscience was not the worst problem. The crime might not have been as final and efficient as he had assumed. A supply ship must have refuelled the submarine close to the island before the trip back to Germany could be attempted. Though not knowing exactly what the submarine had carried, perhaps the ship's captain took the tale to the known world, so that the secret of the golden hoard was in someone's brain and yet to be acted on.

‘What reasons do you have,' Harker-Rowe asked, ‘for thinking the stuffs still there?'

Two men with bowler hats, rolled umbrellas, pink faces and impeccable accents were also at the meeting, go-betweens whose sense of humour was limited to the fact that they only laughed with Harker-Rowe. Because neither smoked, Bennett did not trust them. He said there had been one submarine. Not only had the captain of the U-boat and the other survivor separately informed him, but it was also written into the documents he produced. There could be no doubt. How do you know the gold was ever put there? Even Bennett laughed.

But he hated their guts. ‘How do
you
know,' he smiled, ‘that I'm not a confidence trickster of the most blue-eyed cunning? Not playing a hoax for money, you understand, because money would mean nothing to the kind of super con-trick which I'm trying to swing, which is to get my hands on the controls of a flying boat and hear the voices of my old crew over the intercom for the last time, because the doctor said I had cancer of the liver and only six months to live, and that before I die I want to go on the longest trip, from Cape Town to Singapore via the Kerguelen Islands and Freemantle, all at your expense, one last adventure before the disease gets such a grip that I can do nothing except drag myself into bed and die. I want to hear those four engines and see the endless sea from the flight deck at eighteen thousand feet. That's the reason I cooked up this cock-and-bull yarn, so that you would charitably – although unknowingly – supply the finance.'

He almost wished it were true. He would then have felt better when they stopped laughing. Humour had to be on their terms or not at all. Their pink skins gave an ugly tinge to such regular yet chinless features. ‘Perhaps you'll now be good enough to sit down and tell me what you've heard,' Bennett said from his armchair. ‘I want all the information, otherwise the expedition will be called off.'

‘I don't sit,' Harker-Rowe smiled. ‘Do too much of it in my life.' Neither did his bowler-hatted guards. One stood at the door and the other concealed himself by the window, observing the street so as not to be seen – as if, Bennett thought, he had been an instructor in street-fighting during the war.

‘If you don't,' Bennett said, ‘I'll pull out. The crew will understand.'

The pattern was too late to dismember. Harker-Rowe leaned by the shelf and, looking at himself in the mirror, ceased to smile. ‘We've done our investigations. A minesweeper was bought from the Argentine navy three weeks ago, but you've a head start because it'll take at least a month to get seaworthy. Their first stop is Madagascar. We know about them, but they don't know about us. You can't help but get there first, with your flying boat.'

‘Are you certain they aren't aware of us?'

‘They knew there was a submarine, but assume it was destroyed with no survivors. They may wonder. I credit them with that. But they're quite happy to believe the best. Like everyone else. Though not us.'

‘Madagascar's a good jumping-off place,' Bennett said. ‘So why didn't we think of that?'

‘We did,' Harker-Rowe said. ‘But your story about an exploration company looks good, and it'll be easier for us to make arrangements for you in South Africa. You do your work, and we'll do ours.'

They showed an iron grip in protecting their investment, watching too closely for him to feel secure. Once the gold was on board, the danger would be mortal. Only in flying over the sea would he and his crew be safe. He would land where they would not be waiting for him. If he could get safely to the huge Pacific, the flying boat could land anywhere.

‘One more thing,' Harker-Rowe said.

He reminded Bennett of a group captain who had come from the Air Ministry to go over the details of a spectacular raid, which would have been written up in the official history if it hadn't gone wrong.

‘For a crew you'll need a navigator, an engineer, a wireless operator and your old gunner, Nash. That's five. But take the extra gunners. If there's trouble, you'll be glad of them.'

‘It's flying that counts in this job. Nothing else.'

‘We think you may want more safeguards,' the man by the window said.

Bennett hadn't come to be lectured by such a pinhead. ‘I know what I need,' he said sharply. ‘I'm the captain of this flying boat.'

‘But I'm chartering, with a half share in the gold,' Harker-Rowe said. ‘If it'll make you any happier, choose the gunners from your old crew. Appleyard, Bull and Armatage were in that list you showed.'

There was no way out. Bennett assumed they had already been approached, and suborned. They would watch our flight crew – and the gold once it was on board. He would take them. A certain amount of digging and carrying would be necessary when they reached the island.

‘We knew you'd see reason,' Harker-Rowe said.

But did it make sense? He sweated too much to sleep, but losing such weight made him look fitter and more efficient. Having surrounded himself with so many uncertainties in order to find a way out of a labyrinth, he had reached the stage of wisdom which, such as it was, indicated that they only ceased to matter when you stopped thinking and started to act.

21

We talked in the galley about being able to swim, and Rose with his scar in shadow said he'd never had the ability. At thirty, he was too old to learn.

‘Too lazy to want to,' Wilcox put in.

Nash had done too much messing about in boats to think of swimming. ‘I don't even like to walk more than I've got to. Walking makes my feet sore, and swimming would make my arms ache.'

‘I tried it once,' Wilcox said, ‘and started to sink before I could find out whether my arms ached or not. My father yanked me from a premature death by drowning. He was too scared to teach me again.'

Bull grinned at the memory of a few strokes with an inner-tube around his chest, but the valve opened and he saved his life by a panic-stricken dog-paddle to the bar of the swimming bath, a near-miss he had no wish to repeat. In spite of the dim light I saw his face turn pale. Appleyard confessed that his ambition was to be able to swim. He loved seeing people do the breast stroke, especially champions at the cinema.

‘Like Esther Williams?' said Bull. ‘I'd like to swim up her.'

‘It looks so effortless.' Because Appleyard knew it wasn't, he got excited at the memory: ‘To make your way through the water must give you a real sensation.' He was sure it did. Anyone who said otherwise should creep back into his hole and die like a liar. He had in fact been able to swim. ‘You won't believe it.' He sounded as if he didn't know whether to laugh or cry. ‘Perhaps it was only a few yards, so that with practice I'd get better at distance. And I would have. Once you swim you can go on for ever, providing the sea isn't rough or cold.'