San Andreas

All three were hauled inboard. The young, bareheaded man who had been supported by the man with the grey stocking hat was unconscious, not dead. He had every reason, the Bo’sun thought, to be unconscious: there was a great swelling bruise still oozing blood just above the right temple. The third man—it seemed most incongruous in the circumstances—wore the peaked braided cap of a naval commander. The cap was completely saturated. The Bo’sun made to remove it, then changed his mind when he saw the blood at the back of the cap: the cap was probably stuck to his head. The commander was quite conscious, he had courteously thanked the Bo’sun for being pulled out of the sea: but his eyes were vacant, glazed and sightless. McKinnon passed a hand before his eyes, but there was no reaction: for the moment, at any rate, the commander was quite blind.

Although he knew he was wasting his time, the Bo’sun headed towards the fourth man in the water but he backed off when he was still five yards away. Although his face was deep in the water he hadn’t died from drowning but from freezing: he wasn’t wearing a wet suit. The Bo’sun turned the lifeboat back to the San Andreas and touched the commander gently on the shoulder.

‘How do you feel, Commander Warrington?’

‘What? How do I feel? How do you know I’m Commander Warrington?’

‘You’re still wearing your cap, sir.’ The Commander made as if to touch the peak of his cap but the Bo’sun restrained him. ‘Leave it, sir. You’ve cut your head and your hat’s sticking to it. We’ll have you in hospital inside fifteen minutes. Plenty of doctors and nurses there for that sort of thing, sir.’

‘Hospital.’ Warrington shook his head as if trying to clear it. ‘Ah, of course. The San Andreas. You must be from her.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m the Bo’sun.’

‘What happened, Bo’sun? The Andover, I mean.’ Warrington touched the side of his head. ‘I’m a bit foggy up here.’

‘No bloody wonder. Three torpedoes, sir, almost simultaneously. You must have been blown off the bridge, or fell off it, or most likely been washed off it when your ship went down. She was on her beam ends then, sir, and it took only just over twenty seconds.’

‘How many of us—well, how many have you found?’

‘Just three, sir. I’m sorry.’

‘God above. Just three. Are you sure, Bo’sun?’

‘I’m afraid I’m quite sure, sir.’

‘My yeoman of signals—’

‘I’m here, sir.’

‘Ah. Hedges. Thank heavens for that. Who’s the third?’

‘Navigating officer, sir. He’s taken a pretty nasty clout on the head.’

‘And the First Lieutenant?’ Hedges didn’t answer, he had his head buried in his hands and was shaking it from side to side.

‘I’m afraid Hedges is a bit upset, Commander. Was the First Lieutenant wearing a red kapok jacket?’ Warrington nodded. ‘Then we found him, sir. I’m afraid he just froze to death.’

‘He would, wouldn’t he? Freeze to death, I mean.’ Warrington smiled faintly. ‘Always used to laugh at us and our wet suits. Carried a rabbit’s foot around with him and used to say that was all the wet suit he’d ever need.’

Dr Singh was the first man to meet the Bo’sun when he stepped out of the lifeboat. Patterson was with him, as were two orderlies and two stokers. The Bo’sun looked at the stokers and wondered briefly what they were doing on deck, but only very briefly: they were almost certainly doing a seaman’s job because there were very few seamen left to do it. Ferguson and his two fellow seamen had been in the for’ard fire-control party and might well be the only three left: all the other seamen had been in the superstructure at the time of the attack.

‘Five,’ Dr Singh said. ‘Just five. From the frigate and the plane, just five.’

‘Yes, Doctor. And even they had the devil’s own luck. Three of them are pretty wobbly. Commander looks all right but I think he’s in the worst condition. He seems to have gone blind and the back of his head has been damaged. There’s a connection, isn’t there, Doctor?’

‘Oh dear. Yes, there’s a connection. We’ll do what we can.’

Patterson said: ‘A moment, Bo’sun, if you will.’ He walked to one side and McKinnon followed him. They were half way towards the twisted superstructure when Patterson stopped.

‘As bad as that is it, sir?’ the Bo’sun said. ‘No eavesdroppers. I mean, we have to trust someone.’

‘I suppose.’ Patterson looked and sounded tired. ‘But damned few. Not after what I’ve seen inside that superstructure. Not after one or two things I’ve found out. First things first. The hull is still structurally sound. No leaks. I didn’t think there would be. We’re fixing up a temporary rudder control in the engine-room: we’ll probably be able to reconnect to the bridge which is the least damaged part of the superstructure. There was a small fire in the crew’s mess, but we got that under control.’ He nodded to the sadly twisted mass of metal ahead of them. ‘Let’s pray for calm weather to come. Jamieson says the structural supports are so weakened that the whole lot is liable to go over the side if we hit heavy seas. Would you like to go inside?’

‘Like? Not like. But I have to.’ The Bo’sun hesitated, reluctant to hear the answer to the question he had to ask. ‘What’s the score so far, sir?’

‘Up to now we’ve come across thirteen dead.’ He grimaced. ‘And bits and pieces. I’ve decided to leave them where they were meantime. There may be more people left alive.’

‘More? You have found some?’

‘Five. They’re in a pretty bad way, some of them. They’re in the hospital.’ He led the way inside the twisted entrance at the after end of the superstructure. ‘There are two oxy-acetylene teams in there. It’s slow work. No fallen beams, no wreckage as such, just twisted and buckled doors. Some of them, of course—the doors, I mean—were just blown off. Like this one here.’

‘The cold room. Well, at least there would have been nobody in there. But there were three weeks’ supply of beef, all kinds of meat, fish and other perishables in there: in a couple of days’ time we’ll have to start heaving them over the side.’ They moved slowly along the passageway. ‘Cool room intact, sir, although I don’t suppose a steady diet of fruit and veg. will have much appeal. Oh God!’

The Bo’sun stared into the galley which lay across the passage from the cool room. The surfaces of the cooking stoves were at a peculiar angle, but all the cupboards and the two work tables were intact. But what had caught the Bo’sun’s horrified attention was not the furniture but the two men who lay spreadeagled on the floor. They seemed unharmed except for a little trickle of blood from the ears and noses.

‘Netley and Spicer,’ the Bo’sun whispered. ‘They don’t seem—they’re dead?’

‘Concussion. Instantaneous,’ Patterson said.

The Bo’sun shook his head and moved on.

‘Tinned food store,’ he said. ‘Intact. It would be. And the liquor store here, not a can dented or a bottle broken.’ He paused. ‘With your permission, sir, I think this is a very good time to breach the liquor store. A hefty tot of rum all round—or at least for the men working in here. Pretty grim work and it’s the custom in the Royal Navy when there’s grim work to be done.’

Patterson smiled slightly, a smile that did not touch the eyes. ‘I didn’t know you were in the Royal Navy, Bo’sun.’

‘Twelve years. For my sins.’

‘An excellent idea,’ Patterson said. ‘I’ll be your first customer.’ They made their way up a twisted but still serviceable companionway to the next deck, the Bo’sun with a bottle of rum and half a dozen mugs strung on a wire in the other. This was the crew accommodation deck and it was not a pretty sight. The passageway had a distinct S-bend to it, the deck was warped so that it formed a series of undulations. At the for’ard end of the passageway, two oxy-acetylene teams were at work, each attacking a buckled door. In the short space between the head of the companionway and where the men were working were eight doors, four of them hanging drunkenly on their hinges, four that had been cut open by torches: seven of those had been occupied, and the occupants were still there, twelve of them in all. In the eighth cabin they found Dr Sinclair, stooping over and administering a morphine injection to a prone but fully conscious patient, a consciousness that was testified to by the fact that he was addressing nobody in particular in an unprintable monologue.

The Bo’sun said: ‘How do you feel, Chips?’ Chips was Rafferty, the ship’s carpenter.

‘I’m dying.’ He caught sight of the rum bottle in the Bo’sun’s hand and his stricken expression vanished. ‘But I could make a rapid recovery—’

‘This man is not dying,’ Dr Sinclair said. ‘He has a simple fracture of the tibia, that’s all. No rum—morphine and alcohol make for bad bedfellows. Later.’ He straightened and tried to smile. ‘But I could do with a tot, if you would, Bo’sun—a generous one. I feel in need of it.’ With his strained face and pale complexion he unquestionably looked in need of it: nothing in Dr Sinclair’s brief medical experience had even remotely begun to prepare him for the experience he was undergoing. The Bo’sun poured him the requisite generous measure, did the same for Patterson and himself, then passed the bottle and mugs to the men with the torches and the two ward orderlies who were standing unhappily by, strapped stretcher at the ready: they looked in no better case than Dr Sinclair but cheered up noticeably at the sight of the rum.

The deck above held the officers’ accommodation. It too, had been heavily damaged, but not so devastatingly so as the deck below. Patterson stopped at the first cabin they came to: its door had been blown inwards and the contents of the cabin looked as if a maniac had been let loose there with a sledgehammer. The Bo’sun knew it was Chief Patterson’s cabin.

The Bo’sun said, ‘I don’t much care for being in an engine-room, sir, but there are times when it has its advantages.’ He looked at the empty and almost as badly damaged Second Engineer’s cabin opposite. ‘At least Ralson is not here. Where is he, sir?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘He’s dead,’ the Bo’sun repeated slowly.

‘When the bombs struck he was still in the sea-men’s toilet fixing that short-circuit.’

‘I’m most damnably sorry, sir.’ He knew that Ralson had been Patterson’s only close friend aboard the ship.

‘Yes,’ Patterson said vaguely. ‘He had a young wife and two kids—babies, really.’