Storm Warning

‘Those islands south of Uist are a graveyard,’ Jago went on. ‘Everywhere you look on the damned chart it says Heavy Breakers or Dangerous Seas. One hazard after another.’

Jansen unfolded a yellow oilskin tobacco pouch, produced a pipe and started to fill it, leaning against the door. ‘I was talking to some fishermen in Mallaig before we left. They were telling me that sometimes the weather out there is so bad, Fhada’s cut off for weeks at a time.’

‘The worst weather in the world when those Atlantic storms start moving in,’ Jago said. ‘God knows what it must be like in winter.’

‘Then what in the hell is Admiral Reeve doing in a place like that?’

‘Search me. I didn’t even know he was up here till I was told to pick up that dispatch for him in Mallaig and deliver it. Last I heard of him was D-day. He was deputy director of operations for Naval Intelligence and got himself a free trip on the Norwegian destroyer Svenner that was sunk by three Möwe-class torpedo boats. He lost his right eye and they tell me his left arm’s only good for show.’

‘A hell of a man,’ Jansen said. ‘He got out of Corregidor after MacArthur left. Sailed a lugger nearly six hundred miles to Cagayan and came out on one of the last planes. As I remember, he went down in a destroyer at Midway, was taken aboard the Yorktown and ended up in the water again.’

‘Careful, Jansen. Your enthusiasm is showing and I didn’t think that was possible where top brass was concerned.’

‘But this isn’t just another admiral we’re talking about, Lieutenant. He’s responsible for an excellent history of naval warfare and probably the best biography of John Paul Jones in print. Good God, sir, the man can actually read and write.’ Jansen put a match to the bowl of his pipe and added out of the side of his mouth, ‘Quite an accomplishment for any naval officer, as the Lieutenant will be the first to agree?’

‘Jansen’, Jago said. ‘Get the hell out of here.’

Jansen withdrew and Jago swung round to find Petersen grinning hugely. ‘Go on, you too! I’ll take over.’

‘Sure thing, Lieutenant.’

Petersen went out and Jago reached for another cigarette. His fingers had stopped trembling. Rain spattered against the window as the MGB lifted over another wave and it came to him, with a kind of wonder, that he was actually enjoying himself, in spite of the aching back, the constant fatigue that must be taking years off his life.

Harry Jago was twenty-five and looked ten years older, even on a good day, which was hardly surprising when one considered his war record.

He’d dropped out of Yale in March 1941 to join the navy and was assigned to PT boats, joining Squadron Two in time for the Solomons’ campaign. The battle for Guadalcanal lasted six months. Jago went in at one end a crisp, clean nineteen-year-old ensign and emerged a lieutenant, junior grade, with a Navy Cross and two boats shot from under him.

Afterwards Squadron Two was recommissioned and sent to England at the urgent request of the Office of Strategic Services to land and pick up American agents on the French coast. Again Jago survived, this time the Channel, the constant head-on clashes with German E-boats out of Cherbourg. He even survived the hell of Omaha beach on D-day.

His luck finally ran out on 28 June, when E-boats attacked a convoy of American landing craft waiting in Lyme Bay to cross the Channel. Jago arrived with dispatches from Portsmouth to find himself facing six of the best that the Kriegsmarine could supply. In a memorable ten-minute engagement, he sank one, damaged another, lost five of his crew and ended up in the water with shrapnel in his left thigh, the right cheek laid open to the bone.

When he finally came out of hospital in August they gave him what was left of his old crew, nine of them, and a new job: the rest that he so badly needed, playing postman in the Hebrides to the various American and British weather stations and similar establishments in the islands in a pre-war MGB, courtesy of the Royal Navy, that started to shake herself to pieces if he attempted to take her above twenty knots. Some previous owner had painted the legend Dead End underneath the bridge rail, a sentiment capable of several interpretations.

Just for a month or two, the squadron commander had told Jago. Look on it as akind of holiday. I mean to say, nothing ever happens up there, Harry.

Jago grinned in spite of himself and, as a rain squall hurled itself against the window, increased speed, the wheel kicking in his hands. The sea was his life now. Meat and drink to him, more important than any woman. It was the circumstance of war which had given him this, but the war wouldn’t last forever.

He said softly, ‘What in the hell am I going to do when it’s all over?’

There were times when Rear Admiral Carey Reeve definitely wondered what life was all about. Times when the vacuum of his days seemed unbearable and the island that he loved with such a deep and unswerving passion, a prison.

On such occasions he usually made for the same spot, a hill called in the Gaelic DunBhuide, the Yellow Fort, above Telegraph Bay on the south-west tip of Fhada, and so named because of an abortive attempt to set up a Marconi station at the turn of the century. The bay lay at the bottom of four-hundred-foot cliffs, a strip of white sand slipping into grey water with Labrador almost three thousand miles away to the west and nothing in between.

The path below was no place for the fainthearted, zigzagging across the face of the granite cliffs, splashed with lime, seabirds crying, wheeling in great clouds, razorbills, shags, gulls, shear-waters and gannets – gannets everywhere. He considered it all morosely for a while through his one good eye, then turned to survey the rest of the island.

The ground sloped steeply to the southwest. On the other side of the point from Telegraph were South Inlet and the lifeboat station, the boathouse, its slipway and Murdoch Macleod’s cottage, nothing more. On his left was the rest of the island. A scattering of crofts, mostly ruined, peat bog, sheep grazing the sparse turf, the whole crossed by the twin lines of the narrow-gauge railway track running north-west to Mary’s Town.

Reeve took an old brass telescope from his pocket and focused it on the lifeboat station. No sign of life. Murdoch would probably be working on that damned boat of his, but the kettle would be gently steaming on the hob above the peat fire and a mug of hot tea generously laced with illegal whisky of Murdoch’s own distilling would not come amiss on such a morning.

The admiral replaced the telescope in his pocket and started down the slope as rain drove across the island in a grey curtain.

There was no sign of Murdoch when he went into the boathouse by the small rear door. The forty-one-foot Watson-type motor lifeboat, Morag Sinclair, waited in her carriage at the head of the slipway. She was trim and beautiful in her blue and white paint, showing every sign of the care Murdoch lavished on her. Reeve ran a hand along her counter with a conscious pleasure.

Behind him the door swung open in a flurry of rain and a soft Highland voice said, ‘I was in the outhouse, stacking peat.’

Reeve turned to find Murdoch standing in the doorway and in the same moment an enormous Irish wolfhound squeezed past him and bore down on the admiral.

His hand fastened on the beast’s ginger ruff. ‘Rory, you old devil. I might have known.’ He glanced up at Murdoch. ‘Mrs Sinclair’s been looking for him this morning. Went missing last night.’

‘I intended bringing him in myself later,’ Murdoch said. ‘Are you in health, Admiral?’

He was himself seventy years old, of immense stature, dressed in thigh boots and guernsey sweater, his eyes grey water over stone, his face seamed and shaped by a lifetime of the sea.

‘Murdoch,’ Admiral Reeve said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying precisely nothing?’

‘So it’s that kind of a morning?’ Murdoch wiped peat from his hands on to his thighs and produced his tobacco pouch. ‘Will you take tea with me, Admiral?’ he enquired with grave Highland courtesy.

‘And a little something extra?’ Reeve suggested hopefully.

‘Uisgebeatha?’ Murdoch said in Gaelic. ‘The water of life. Why not indeed, for it is life you need this morning, I am thinking.’ He smiled gravely. ‘I’ll be ten minutes. Time for you to take a turn along the shore with the hound to blow the cobwebs away.’

The mouth of the inlet was a maelstrom of white water, waves smashing in across the reef beyond with a thunderous roaring, hurling spray a hundred feet into the air.

Reeve trudged along in the wolfhound’s wake at the water’s edge, thinking about Murdoch Macleod. Thirty-two years coxswain of the Fhada lifeboat, legend in his own time – during which he had been awarded the BEM by old King George and five silver and two gold medals for gallantry in sea rescue by the Lifeboat Institution. He had retired in 1938, when his son Donald had taken over as coxswain in his place, and had returned a year later when Donald was called to active service with the Royal Naval Reserve. A remarkable man by any standards.

The wolfhound was barking furiously. Reeve looked up across the great bank of sand that was known as Traig Mhoire – Mary’s Strand. A man in a yellow lifejacket lay face-down on the shore twenty yards away, water slopping over him as one wave crashed in after another.

The admiral ran forward, dropped to one knee and turned him over, with some difficulty for his left arm was virtually useless now. He was quite dead, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, in denim overalls, eyes closed as if in sleep, fair hair plastered to his skull, not a mark on him.

Reeve started to search the body. There was a leather wallet in the left breast pocket. As he opened it, Murdoch arrived on the run, dropping on his knees beside him.

‘Came to see what was keeping you.’ He touched the pale face with the back of his hand.

‘How long?’ Reeve asked.

‘Ten or twelve hours, no more. Who was he?’

‘Off a German U-boat from the look of those overalls.’ Reeve opened the wallet and examined the contents. There was a photo of a young girl, a couple of letters and a leave pass so soaked in sea water that it started to fall to pieces as he opened it gingerly.

‘A wee lad, that’s all,’ Murdoch said. ‘Couldn’t they do better than schoolboys?’

‘Probably as short of men by now as the rest of us,’ Reeve told him. ‘His name was Hans Bleichrodt and he celebrated his eighteenth birthday while on leave in Brunswick three weeks ago. He was Funkgefreiter, telegraphist to you, on U743.’ He replaced the papers in the wallet. ‘If she bought it this morning, we might get more like this coming in for the rest of the week.’

‘You could be right,’ Murdoch crouched down and, with an easy strength that never ceased to amaze Reeve, hoisted the body over one shoulder. ‘Better get him into Mary’s Town then, Admiral.’

Reeve nodded. ‘Yes, my house will do. Mrs Sinclair can see him this afternoon and sign the death certificate. We’ll bury him tomorrow.’

‘I am thinking that the kirk might be more fitting.’