The Strode Venturer (31 page)

“He’ll be all right,” Fields said quickly. He hadn’t dared risk a doctor. “Some bad liquor he was given, that’s all.”

“Too much of it more likely,” I said angrily. “And no food. He doesn’t look after himself.” I wondered if I dared call a doctor. If Deacon was whipped into hospital and the
Strode Venturer
sailed he’d be no good to me. “Get him up to his old cabin,” I said. “And see that the portholes are open. He needs air.”

I went in search of Simpkin then. The agent ought to be able to produce a doctor who would do what was necessary and keep his mouth shut. Out on the deck again I found the winches silent, the crew sweating at the hatch covers. Loading seemed to have finished, one of the lighters already pulling away from the ship’s side. There was no sign of Simpkin. I went up to the bridge. It was empty—the chart-room, too. And then I heard the sound of a voice coming from behind a door marked “W. R. Weston, Wireless Operator.” I pushed through it and the voice was the voice of a B.B.C. announcer. The wireless operator was sitting in
his shirt sleeves, a glass of beer at his elbow,
a
small, pale man with tired eyes and a sallow skin. Simpkin was leaning against the white-painted wall behind him, smoking a cigarette. He tapped the wireless operator on the shoulder. “Commander Bailey,” he said.

Weston looked up at me, at the same time reaching out long, tobacco-stained fingers to the control panel in front of him. The announcer’s voice faded and the wireless operator said, “I have a cable for you.” And he passed me a typed sheet. It was from Ida.
This morning Dick was instructed to post notices to Strode Orient shareholders giving statutory three weeks’ notice of extraordinary general meeting. You have until July
24. So that was the reason George Strode had been so co-operative. I folded it and put it away in my pocket. “When is the
Strode Venturer
due to sail?” I asked Simpkin.

“To-morrow morning.”

“You’ve finished loading. Why not to-night?”

Simpkin hesitated. “I suppose it could be arranged. She’s due to take on fuel at 2130 hours. If you like I’ll try and arrange for you to sail direct from the bunkering wharf.”

He got us away just before midnight and by then I knew what was wrong with Deacon. It wasn’t just alcohol. He had picked up some sort of
a
virus and his liver, weakened by bad liquor, had temporarily packed up. “If it wasn’t that he has the constitution of a bloody ox,” the doctor said, “I’d have him into hospital right away.” He was an oil company doctor, a florid, big-boned Scot who looked after the tanker crews as well as the refinery personnel. He understood men like Deacon. “See that you have some Scotch on board,” he advised as I saw him to the gangway. “Simple food, of course, but ye canna change a man’s basic diet just because he’s been pumped full of antibiotics.” He thought Deacon would be conscious within twenty-four hours and might have enough energy to start working on my problem in two to three days’ time. “But go easy,” he said. “By rights I should have moved him ashore. I’m taking
a
chance and I’ve only done it because of what you’ve told me.” He wished
me luck and left me with a list of instructions and a whole bagful of pills.

I had the Chinese steward sit up with him all night, but Deacon never stirred, and when I saw him in the morning the only change was that his face seemed to have more colour beneath the black stubble of his growing beard and his breathing was stronger and more regular. He was no longer in a coma, but in a deep, drugged sleep. I sat with him for a time, listening to the steady juddering sound of the ship’s engines, the swish of the bow wave through the open porthole. I felt relaxed now, the worries of the last few days set aside by the deep satisfaction I always felt at being at sea.

I must have dozed off for I suddenly woke to find the first officer in the cabin. He was hovering over me and there was something in the expression of his eyes that I didn’t like. “Everything all right, Mr. Fields?” It was noon and he’d just come off watch.

“What you doing here?” he asked. “You waiting to interrogate him?” And he added, “Can’t you realize he’s sick? He oughter be in hospital.”

“In that case,” I said, “Captain Jones would have sailed as master of the
Strode Venturer
.” I got to my feet. “Come up to the chartroom,” I told him. “If you don’t want me to worry Deacon with my questions then the remedy is in your hands.”

“How do you mean?” He was suddenly suspicious, his eyes uneasy, shifting round the cabin as though for a way of escaping me.

“You tell me where that island really is and I won’t have to sit here waiting for Deacon to surface.”

“I don’t know where it is.” His voice had changed to that familiar, affronted whine. “I told you before. Strode hid the ship’s sextants. It was he who directed the courses and plotted them, and he wouldn’t let anyone near him while he was doing it.”

“And you never managed to get even a glimpse of it over his shoulder?”

“Yes, but it didn’t help. There was nothing marked on the chart. He was using a Baker plotting sheet, you see.”

“But you must know what course you were on when you sailed from Addu Atoll.”

“The usual one. You’ll find that in the log. And then after dark we turned south. After that I lost track, for he kept on changing the course. He changed the helmsmen, too. Sometimes he’d clear the bridge and steer the ship himself.”

“What about Deacon—where was he?” The pale eyes slid away from me. “In his cabin?”

“No, he came up to the bridge every now and then, same as he always did.” And he added belligerently, “No reason why he should change his habits just because one of the Strodes was on board.”

“You mean he was drunk?”

“No, he wasn’t drunk. You couldn’t ever accuse him of being drunk, not when we were at sea. But the captain doesn’t have to be on the bridge all the time.”

I looked at Deacon, lying there, his thick, hairy arms black against the sheets, his eyes closed and his forehead like a great bald dome shining with sweat. Was it really there, the information I wanted, locked behind the gleaming bone? It was hard to believe after what Fields had told me, and my hopes fading, I turned towards the door. “I’d like to see the ship’s log,” I said, and I took him, protesting, up to the chartroom.

But the log didn’t help. Thursday, March 28: Anchor up at 1356: steamed out of Addu Atoll by the Kudu Kanda Channel, log streamed at the outer buoy 1507; course 350°, wind NW 7-10 knots, sea calm, visibility five miles approx., haze. At 1630 hours, having cleared Hittadu, which juts some ten miles to the north, course had been altered to 298°. This was the course for Aden. But at 1920 there had been a further alteration of course—this time on to 160°. “It was dark then, I suppose?”

Fields nodded. “He didn’t want the R.A.F. to know he’d
turned south. At least, I presume it was that. We were about twenty miles off the island, but he still had the navigation lights switched off.”

“And Deacon agreed to that?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know. All I know,” he added venomously, “was that from then on Strode gave orders around the ship as though he were the captain, not Deacon.”

At 2300 hours the course had still been 160°, but when I turned the page the continuity was gone. Several pages had been torn from the log and the next entry was dated Sunday, 14th April. It simply recorded that the
Strode Venturer
had dropped anchor off Gan at 1715 hours. Thereafter the ship’s log gave absolutely no indication of where the vessel had been during that crucial fortnight, 29th March to 13th April. And chart No. 748b, which covers the whole northern half of the Indian Ocean, was equally unhelpful. It was grubby, drink-stained and obviously a veteran of many voyages from Singapore to Gan and Gan to Aden, but there was no trace of any pencil markings below 0° 42′ South, which is the latitude of the southern end of Addu Atoll.

“Is there any other chart he could have used?” But Fields shook his head and when I checked the
Catalogue of Admiralty Charts
, which he produced from a drawer full of Admiralty publications, it confirmed that there was only this one small-scale chart covering the whole enormous area from the African coast right across to Indonesia. Looking at it in detail with the aid of the chartroom magnifying glass, and in particular the area to the south and east of Addu Atoll and the Chagos Archipelago, I couldn’t help thinking that an international survey was long overdue. The paucity of soundings demonstrated all too clearly how little attention hydrographers had paid to the Indian Ocean.

With both log and chart barren of any information as to courses steered I could hardly blame Fields for his failure to help me. However, I did get something out of the hour I spent with him, a clear and surprisingly vivid account of that first expedition to the island. They had sighted it late
in the afternoon. “Just a line against the westering sun,” he described it, and the line so thin that at first they had thought it some local squall ruffling the oily swell. It was only gradually, as they steamed steadily towards it, that they had realized it was not the darkening effect of waves but the low-lying shore of an island. “Like a coral reef, like an atoll,” he said. “But as we got nearer we knew it couldn’t be an atoll. Least, it wasn’t like the atolls of the Maldives. The sun was setting then, the usual tropical blaze, and this filthy island floating there, black and bare like somebody had just raked it out of the fire. There wasn’t nothing growing on it—nothing at all. Just a bit of the sea bed.”

“You were approaching from the east then?”

He nodded. “I can remember the course—so can Deacon, I expect. It was two-seven-o degrees near as makes no odds. But that won’t tell you anything. We’d been on all sorts of courses, just about boxing the compass day after day for almost five days, searching all the time.” They had had the echo-sounder on, of course, but the ocean depth was too great for it to record anything until they were within two miles of the island, and then suddenly it was reading around 150 fathoms. They went in very slowly, feeling their way, with the water shoaling all the time. They had anchored about a mile off in seventy fathoms. “We couldn’t see very much of the island then. The sun had set right behind it, but what we could see it looked a hell of a place, and there was a strange smell about it. Strode had one of the crew plumb the bottom with the lead and the tallow arming came up covered with a lot of black grit as though we were sitting on a bed of cinders.”

“Was there any volcanic debris floating around?” I asked. “Pumice, anything like that?”

But he shook his head. There had been no indication at all of volcanic activity and in the morning they had steamed round the island, finally moving the ship into a bay on the western side, leading with the boats and anchoring about two cables off-shore in sixty-four feet. They had worked like blacks all that day and most of the next ferrying boatloads
of ore nodules out to the ship until they had the after-hold half-full of the stuff and then they had sailed.

“What day was that, do you remember?” I asked him.

He thought for a moment. “April ninth, I think.” He nodded. “Yes, it must have been the ninth ’cause I remember it was the night of the seventh we’d first sighted it.” And they had been back at Gan the evening of the 13th. Four days’ steaming at, say, ten knots. That would be just over 900 miles. “Did you return to Addu Atoll direct—the same course all the time?” But I knew Peter wouldn’t have done that. “I don’t know what course we steered,” Fields said. “Nor does anyone, not even Deacon. For the first twenty-four hours after we left Strode wouldn’t allow anyone in the wheelhouse. He steered the ship himself.”

“Right through the twenty-four hours?”

“Right through the night and all the next day.”

“You had the stars,” I said. “And the sun during the day. You must have some idea what point of the compass you were steaming.”

His eyes shifted uneasily. “Why should I worry what direction we were steaming? We were getting away from that hell-hole of an island. That’s all I cared about. And if one of the directors wants to keep the course secret, it’s no concern of mine. Let him get on with it, that’s what I thought.”

“You weren’t curious?”

“No, I was bloody tired, sick to death of the whole mucking expedition. I’d had a basinful of it, driving those Chinese to quarry the stuff out with picks and shovels, load it into the boats and then get it off-loaded on to the ship. You try filling half a hold with dirty muck like that under a blazing tropical sun. You’d be tired by the end of it. I was just glad I didn’t have to stand any watches. I had a few drinks and took to my sack.”

“And Deacon—was he drinking with you?”

His eyes shifted nervously, staring at the sea beyond the chartroom window. “What if he was? Strode taking over
his ship like that, what the hell else was there for him to do?”

So they’d both of them stumbled into their bunks with a skinful of liquor and not a care in the world. I began to doubt whether Deacon would be able to give me any more information than Fields had given me. But at least I had something. I knew the outer limit of the island’s distance from Gan was about 900 miles. “How was we to know the position of that bloody island was going to be important?” The whine was back in his voice.

“No, you weren’t to know,” I said. I had got a pair of compasses out of the chart table drawer and was marking a circle in on the chart with a radius of 900 miles from Addu Atoll. The next thing was to interview Brady, the chief engineer.

I saw him after lunch, a thick-set, paunchy little man with red-rimmed eyes whose breath smelt of stale whisky. Yes, they had been short of fuel. In fact, he had raised the matter with Deacon and also with Strode at the time the ship had been turned south in the night past Addu Atoll. They had been due to bunker at Aden and as a result had fuel for rather less than 3,000 miles at normal speed. Normal speed was a little over nine knots.

“And economical speed?” I asked him.

The economical speed was nearer seven knots. He had raised the question of fuel again only the day before they had sighted the island. There was then no question of being able to reach Aden; the danger facing them was that they wouldn’t have enough fuel to get back to Addu Atoll. “Did you discuss the fuel situation with Mr. Strode at all before you sailed from the island?” I asked.