The Lost Flying Boat (2 page)

I remembered leaving the cigarette case and lighter in Bennett's room and, thought and action being for once the same thing, went to the door and knocked. Shottermill opened it. ‘Who the hell's that?' the Skipper shouted.

‘The wireless operator. I left my cigarettes and lighter.'

Shottermill looked as if he wanted to knock me down. His eyes showed that he was terrifically angry about something, but he was also the sort of man who, once he hesitated, was lost. I pushed by when Bennett called that I should come in and find the bloody things.

During the day his hotel suite was noisy because main-street traffic rattled under the windows. But much of the time he was out making arrangements for the trip – though I imagined something more important than such affairs had brought Shottermill to see him now.

Shottermill grinned as I looked around the room. ‘Perhaps it's under the table.' He was trying to rile Bennett more than me, though I couldn't fathom the reason. ‘I don't see why you want a wireless operator.'

The chart on the table curled at one corner, and I saw my belongings half obscured, though did not go to them. Bennett gripped the bridge of his nose as if trying to think his way out of a puzzle. Pressing at that spot brought back the pain of the bone being broken at boxing, which minimized his irritation. ‘The supply ship will have a wireless operator, and I'll have one as well. I'm not crossing so much water without all the aids I can lay my hands on. There's no air-sea rescue if we get into trouble.'

‘I just wondered what use he'd be.' Shottermill occupied an armchair, and pulled the whisky towards him but didn't pour. I amused myself by thinking that if I weren't too tired I would go outside and let down the tyres of his car. Bennett controlled his irritation: ‘When I think of what you'll get out of the deal, he's cheap at the price. We all are, in fact.'

I was glad to hear it, and wondered how high Shottermill was in the scheme of the expedition, rightly supposing it was he who had sold Bennett the box of ancient and worm-eaten cigars.

‘Fair enough, Captain,' he said. ‘I only wanted to know.'

‘We're here to talk about supplies.' Bennett nodded towards my lighter and told me to get it. ‘All other arrangements were settled in London.'

Judging by Shottermill's frown and broad uplifted hand I was to hear nothing of any importance, though my suspicions began from that moment, the worst being that Bennett did not have any. Whoever supposed that a wireless operator on such a trip was superfluous could not in his heart wish the expedition success. There were certain things he did not want me to hear, or messages to send, or vital contacts to make. Because as yet I knew almost nothing, these reflections fell into a vacuum, but I was to remember them.

I scooped up my stuff and went, hearing them arguing even from as far away as the stairs which led to the third floor – at which I gathered that someone had helped himself to Bennett's whisky without permission.

4

Of all the things dead and living, only God has no name, but the newly discovered is immediately delineated on becoming known. A name, a number, or a callsign identifies. A boat, plane or even a motor car is given a name because until then it doesn't properly belong. When possession is nine tenths of the law, a name puts a stamp of ownership on it. Possessions come by easily are named so that they are not blithely lost.

Everything has a name. From the door of my radio hut in Malaya I watched a C-47 Dakota come in to land. I had given bearings on the long haul from Burma, so took an interest in its safe arrival. Through Barr and Stroud binoculars I saw, as it turned into the dispersal point by the ramshackle control tower, stencilled letters on its fuselage which said
Sheffield Star.

The aircraft had a name, and also a call sign, the letters of which rarely made word-sense – though there were exceptions. To while away the time at the Driftwood Hotel I thumbed through the book of radio navigation aids and picked out three- and four-letter callsigns which made a word in themselves, hoping that a wireless operator sending morse from the coast station at Nordeich DAN did not sit in a lion's den. Neither could it be supposed that the operator at Cape Lookout NAN was a woman, or that some stray Scotsman was employed at Nagoya JOCK, or that the radio officer on the Estonian icebreaker ESAU despised his birthright. At Skagerrak SAM was not necessarily established as a prophet, though still sending morse when Oulu signed OFF. Maybe signals transmitted VIA Adelaide were relayed with VIM by Melbourne and picked up by a VIP at Perth. In France one could have FUN at Lorient, but find it cold enough to wear FUR at Rochefort, though it might be better to go to Madagascar and keep FIT at Tulear.

Perhaps a long association with the letters and rhythms of morse created a tandem proclivity to verbal dexterity. Perhaps not. But I remembered that anyone sending morse on our Malayan network whom we could not identify was called OOJERKERPIV, a nonsense word signifying (to us) ‘unknown'. Some operator might be clacking two bits of wire together above the jungles of Indo-China, or doing the same from a mangrove swamp by the mouth of a Borneo river. Most attempts to make an OOJERKERPIV admit his identity failed because he had no business being on an official frequency. Occasionally the squelch of dots and dashes came from an aircraft too far away to make contact, so that on getting close he was no longer an OOJERKERPIV but had a callsign and a right to be there.

No contact could be confirmed unless the formality of identification had taken place. Duty as well as courtesy meant that you obeyed the rules. An exchange of identity and signals strengths, of where coming and where going, and of latitude and longitude should the aircraft, for reasons known only unto God, suddenly plunge into the sea, were given with as much alacrity as those messages flashed between ships that pass in the middle of the ocean.

An OOJERKERPIV was not therefore regarded in friendly fashion. One wanted him to transfer his interfering pip-squeak morse elsewhere. But sitting in my hut beyond the runway, earphones on so that the rest of the world was shut out, I was one day called by an aircraft which identified itself by the actual name OOJERKERPIV. I could hardly believe it, but made contact nevertheless. On mentioning this to a fellow operator he said I should stop being a bloody liar, but when he saw details timed to the minute and neatly written in the logbook, each bearing sent to the plane underlined by the usual steel straightedge, he admitted I was right.

The full OOJERKERPIV came out as a kind of Hansardian shorthand by giving only the five letters OJKPV, which belonged to a Belgian aircraft taking people to Australia, and was indeed conceded to be a manifestation of at least one OOJERKERPIV that had plagued us for so long.

Through the same Barr and Stroud field glasses I saw the word ALDEBARAN painted on the side of the flying boat which was to take us to the Kerguelen Islands, its huge bulk with high wings set on flickering wavelets in the harbour. The word matched the boat, Aldebaran being a prime star of the navigators, meaning The Follower, which fitted because every member of the crew, even Bennett, would be one when the time came.

The name was everything, though we were not to know at the time just how totally this was so. The
Aldebaran
slurped at her moorings as we waited for the pinnace to take us aboard, not yet to begin our journey but to overlook the equipment and stow provisions in their places. The stilled propellers of her four engines faced us across the water, the stately prow rising in the wind-flayed bay. In a slow motion nodding to the rhythm of its sea-dance it seemed she assented to whatever we needed of her. According to the name,
Aldebaran
would go wherever coaxed, powered by any reasonable force.

The last three letters of the callsign PZX were most relevant to our navigator, for they denoted the points of the spherical triangle in the navigation training manuals, whose solution was necessary if the stars were to give our geographical position.

Thus in cabbalistic fashion I picked the letters of our callsign over and over, eager to find significance, until the meaning I imparted had more symbolic truth than I supposed.

5

As I lay on my charpoy after meeting Shottermill I heard the long-and-short blast of a middle-distance motor horn inadvertently signal the letter N, which told me the driver's name was Noah. Alphabetical dots and dashes had been pressed into my brain like voracious ticks never to be removed, and ever since that time I have picked stray messages from every noise. Three long retorts by the vehicle presumably avoided indicated O for Obadiah, while erratic bumps in the plumbing behind my bed suggested nothing more than the presence of an elusive OOJERKERPIV.

Sounds had no secrets from me. I was keen to the faintest sign while tuned to a wireless, but deaf to the rest of the world. Living indifferently, I listened in daylight to signals from half the earth that was dark, and then in the dark heard messages from the other half where it was light. My faculties functioned because the heavenly envelope stayed constant, the same constellations fixed in their places when the clouds lifted, brought back by the revolutions of the earth.

In Malaya my direction-finding radio hut was far from the control tower, and several miles north of the camp. I would sit at my illuminated table with the doors wide open, one hand on the morse key and the other at the dials. If no aircraft were flying I might be reading a magazine, or sitting at ease with a mug of tea which caused sweat to saturate the waistband of my khaki drill trousers.

Or I would tilt the chair, earphones around my neck, and stare at the wall. Within moments I was beyond noise and seeing into space, at a point without coordinates of either sense or geography, so that I was out of myself and floating through vivid archipelagos of green, tucked into an elbow of the Heaviside Layer, feelings gone and never to return. Then, at the faintest initial squeak of my callsign's first letter, earphones were on and fingers at the key while the other hand did a square search for a pencil and smoothed the page of the logbook. In switching so quickly from one state to the other I felt controlled by forces other than those which were a fundamental part of me. The transfer from stark duty to transcendental wool-gathering and back again could happen several times in a night. The mechanism of coming and going was not deliberate, and not always desired, but seemed to take place as the spirit required, perhaps as an escape from the weight of listening and a craving to see how far into the other world I could go without being unable to come back.

When terrorists began murdering planters and anyone in British uniform, I closed the doors and used one light over the set so that any bandit in the trees four hundred yards away would have nothing on which to beam his gun. Sometimes I would turn all lights off, load my rifle, and set out against orders to patrol between the hut and the trees. When a man moved across my track I was unwilling to award him time or warning in a game of him and me. Without calling out I saw him edge towards the wall of trees. He was full in my sights, and for a second, which was a long time, I wondered whether or not to fire. I tightened the sling against my shoulder to steady the aim, and squeezed the trigger. There was no question of not doing so. On hearing the noise, which must have carried for miles, a jeep load of soldiers came racing across the runway.

Earphones on, I said I'd heard nothing because of atmospherics. ‘Listen,' I said, ‘can you hear anything through that?' When daylight came there was no sign of a body, but there was blood on the grass.

The rifle was taken away so that the terrorists could not capture it after killing me. An army patrol would call every couple of hours to see that I was safe, but the possibility of being shot without a gun in my hands was a nightmare. A sergeant at the armoury liked his booze, and on passing him a bottle of Scotch he promised to see what could be done.

‘Anything that will fire,' I said. ‘Even a blunderbuss.'

‘That's not very neat.' His gnarled fingers stroked the bottle. ‘You want something neat, on your job, something very neat, Tosh.'

I still wasn't happy, but there was a chance that with a loaded revolver I would be in a better mood to recognize happiness if it came my way. The Smith and Wesson lay by the graduated scale of the goniometer. Both doors opened showed east and west. If Chang the Hatchet Man came from north or south I wouldn't hear. You can't have everything. Daylight made me safe. Visibility is thine, said the Lord. But night was on their side, and I itched at the dials, out of contact by earphones that locked my senses into the stratosphere. The signals officer said we could operate from the camp, safe within its perimeter. No, I said, I liked being on my own, and would let no one rob me of being afraid.

I shut a flap of each door so that it would be difficult to tell whether I was in or out, then plugged in the loudspeaker so that from a distance I would hear any morse calling me. A scarf of sweat criss-crossed my back. Sharp patterns of equatorial stars decorated the outer envelope of the earth, but I needed only a hundred yards to be in elephant grass and beyond the glow I was assumed to inhabit.

The ground was my ally, and time on my side. The realization that they also can be deceived who have been in the country all their lives gave me confidence. I would not be picked off like a pig in a
kampong,
or cut to bits one night after I had nodded into an impossibly expensive dream.

With a bayonet in one hand and a revolver in the other, I crouched and waited. The cough of water buffalo, bullfrog noises scraping the sky, and the comforting thump of surf half a mile away were pushed into the background. But my crude ambush would deceive nobody. I went into a potent daydream of the night, under a half moon threatening to light up fronds of grass that rendered my body ambiguous in the scrubby landscape. Part of every hour I waited to kill whoever might be creeping up to kill me, my senses synchronized to the extent that they pushed out anxiety and brought happiness.