San Andreas. Alistair MacLean
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degrees of frost—and the wind held steady at twenty knots.
‘Who can be sure, sir? But I really don’t think so. Even one of those Heinkel torpedo-bombers could have finished us off if they had had a mind to. Come to that, the Condor could have done the same thing.’
‘It did pretty well as it was, if you ask me.’
‘Not nearly as well as it could have done. I know that a Condor normally carries 250-kilo bombs—that’s about 550 lbs. A stick of those bombs—say three or four—would have sent us to the bottom. Even two might have been enough—they’d have certainly blown the superstructure out of existence, not just crippled it.’
‘The Royal Navy again, is that it, Bo’sun?’
‘I know explosives, sir. Those bombs couldn’t have been any more than fifty kilos each. Don’t you think, sir, that we might have some interesting questions to ask that Condor captain when he regains consciousness?’
‘In the hope of getting some interesting answers, is that it? Including the answer to the question why he bombed a hospital ship in the first place.’
‘Well, yes, perhaps.’
‘What do you mean—perhaps?’
‘There’s just a chance—a faint one, I admit—that he didn’t know he was bombing a hospital ship.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Bo’sun. Of course he knew he was attacking a hospital ship. How big does a red cross have to be before you see it?’
‘I’m not trying to make any excuses for him, sir.’ There was a touch of asperity in McKinnon’s voice and Patterson frowned, not at the Bo’sun but because it was most unlike the Bo’sun to adopt such a tone without reason. ‘It was still only half-dawn, sir. Looking down, things look much darker than they do at sea level. You’ve only got to go up to a crow’s nest to appreciate that.’ As Patterson had never been in a crow’s nest in his life he probably fell ill-equipped to comment on the Bo’sun’s observation. ‘As he was approaching from dead astern he couldn’t possibly have seen the markings on the ship’s sides and as he was flying very low he couldn’t have seen the red cross on the foredeck—the superstructure would have blocked off his view.’
‘That still leaves the red cross on the afterdeck. Even though it might have been only half light, he must have seen that.’
‘Not with the amount of smoke you were putting up under full power.’
‘There’s that. There is a possibility.’ He was unconvinced and watched with some impatience as the Bo’sun spun the now useless wheel and examined the binnacle compass and the standby compass, now smashed beyond any hope of repair.
‘Do we have to remain up here?’ Patterson said. ‘There’s nothing we can do here at the moment and I’m freezing to death. I suggest the Captain’s cabin.’
‘I was about to suggest the same, sir.’
The temperature in the cabin was no more than freezing point, but that was considerably warmer than it had been on the bridge and, more importantly, there was no wind there. Patterson went straight to the liquor cabinet and extracted a bottle of Scotch.
‘If you can do it I can do it. We’ll explain to the Captain later. I don’t really like rum and I need it.’
‘A specific against pneumonia?’
‘Something like that. You will join me?’
‘Yes, sir. The cold doesn’t worry me but I think I’m going to need it in the next hour or so. Do you think the steering can be fixed, sir?’
‘It’s possible. Have to be a jury job. I’ll get Jamieson on to it.’
‘It’s not terribly important. I know all the phones are out but it shouldn’t take too long to reconnect them and you’re fixing up a temporary rudder control in the engine-room. Same with the electrics—it won’t take long to run a few rubber cables here and there. But we can’t start on any of those things until we get this area—well, cleared.’
Patterson lowered the contents of his glass by half. ‘You can’t run the San Andreas from the bridge. Two minutes up there was enough for me. Fifteen minutes and anyone would be frozen to death.’
‘You can’t run it from any other place. Cold is the problem, I agree. So we’ll board it up. Plenty of plywood in the carpenter’s shop.’
‘You can’t see through plywood.’
‘Could always pop our heads through the wing doors from time to time, but that won’t be necessary. We’ll let some windows into the plywood.’
‘Fine, fine,’ Patterson said. The Scotch had apparently restored his circulation. ‘All we need is a glazier and some windows and we haven’t got either.’
‘A glazier we don’t need. We don’t need to have cut glass or fitted windows. You must have rolls and rolls of insulating tape in your electrical department.’
‘I’ve got a hundred miles of it and I still don’t have any windows.’
‘Windows we won’t need. Glass, that’s all. I know where the best glass is—and plate glass at that. The tops of all those lovely trolleys and trays in the hospital.’
‘Ah! I do believe you have it, Bo’sun.’
‘Yes, sir. I suppose Sister Morrison will let you have them.’
Patterson smiled one of his rare smiles. ‘I believe I’m the officer commanding, however temporary.’
‘Indeed, sir. Just don’t let me be around when you put her into irons. Those are all small things. There are three matters that give a bit more concern. First, the radio is just a heap of scrap metal. We can’t contact anyone and no one can contact us. Secondly, the compasses are useless. I know you had a gyro installed, but it never worked, did it? But worst of all is the problem of navigation.’
‘Navigation? Navigation! How can that be a problem?’
‘If you want to get from A to B, it’s the biggest problem of all. We have—we had—four navigating officers aboard this ship. Two of those are dead and the other two are swathed in bandages—in your own words, like Egyptian mummies. Commander Warrington could have navigated, I know, but he’s blind and from the look in Dr Singh’s eyes I should think the blindness is permanent.’ The Bo’sun paused for a moment, then shook his head. ‘And just to make our cup overflowing, sir, we have the Andover’s navigating officer aboard and he’s either concussed or in some sort of coma, we’ll have to ask Dr Singh. If a poker-player got dealt this kind of hand of cards, he’d shoot himself. Four navigating officers who can’t see and if you can’t see you can’t navigate. That’s why the loss of the radio is so damned unfortunate. There must be a British warship within a hundred or two miles which could have lent us a navigating officer. Can you navigate, sir?’
‘Me? Navigate?’ Patterson seemed positively affronted. ‘I’m an engineer officer. But you, McKinnon: you’re a seaman—and twelve years in the Royal Navy.’
‘It doesn’t matter if I had been a hundred years in the Royal Navy, sir. I still can’t navigate. I was a Torpedo Petty Officer. If you want to fire a torpedo, drop a depth charge, blow up a mine or do some elementary electrics, I’m your man. But I’d barely recognize a sextant if I saw one. Such things as sunsights, moonsights—if there is such a thing—and starsights are just words to me. I’ve also heard of words like deviation and variation and declination and I know more about Greek than I do about those.
‘We do have a little hand-held compass aboard the motor lifeboat, the one I took out today, but that’s useless. It’s a magnetic compass, of course, and that’s useless because I do know the magnetic north pole is nowhere near the geographical north pole: I believe it’s about a thousand miles away from it. Canada, Baffin Island or some such place.