‘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. Anyway, in the latitudes we’re in now the magnetic pole is more west than north.’ The Bo’sun sipped some Scotch and looked at Patterson over the rim of his glass. ‘Chief Patterson, we’re lost.’
‘Job’s comforter.’ Patterson stared moodily at his glass, then said without much hope: ‘Wouldn’t it be possible to get the sun at noon? That way we’d know where the south was.’
‘The way the weather is shaping up we won’t be able to see the sun at noon. Anyway, what’s noon, sun-time – it’s certainly not twelve o’clock on our watches? Supposing we were in the middle of the Atlantic, where we might as well be, and knew where south was, would that help us find Aberdeen, which is where I believe we are going? The chronometer, incidentally, is kaput, which doesn’t matter at all – I still wouldn’t be able to relate the chronometer to longitude. And even if we did get a bearing on due south, it’s dark up here twenty hours out of the twenty-four and the auto-pilot is as wrecked as everything else on the bridge. We wouldn’t, of course, be going around in circles, the hand compass would stop us from doing that, but we still wouldn’t know in what direction we were heading.’
‘If I want to find some optimism, Bo’sun, I’ll know where not to look. Would it help at all if we knew approximately where we were?’
‘It would help, but all we know, approximately, is that we’re somewhere north or north-west of Norway. Anywhere, say, in twenty thousand square miles of sea. There .• are only two possibilities, sir. The Captain and Chief Officer must have known where we were. If they’re able to tell us, I’m sure they will.’
‘Good God, of course! Not very bright, are we? At least, I’m not. What do you mean – “if’? Captain Bowen was able to talk about twenty minutes ago.’
‘That was twenty minutes ago. You know how painful burns can be. Dr Singh is sure to have given them painkillers and sometimes the only way they can work is by knocking you out.’
‘And the other possibility?’
‘The chart house. Mr Batesman was working on a chart – he still had a pencil in his hand. I’ll go.’
Patterson grimaced. ‘Sooner you than me.’
‘Don’t forget Flannelfoot, sir.’ Patterson touched his overalls where he had concealed his gun. ‘Or the burial service.’
Patterson looked at the leather-covered folder in distaste. ‘And where am I supposed to leave that? On the operating table?’
‘There are four empty cabins in the hospital, sir. For recuperating VIPs. We don’t have any at the moment.’
‘Ah. Ten minutes, then.’
The Bo’sun was back in five minutes, the Chief Engineer in fifteen. An air of almost palpable gloom hung over Patterson.
‘No luck, sir?’
‘No, dammit. You guessed right. They’re under heavy sedation, may be hours before they come to. And if they do start coming to, Dr Singh says, he’s going to sedate them again. Apparently, they were trying to tear the bandages off their faces. He’s got their hands swathed in bandages – even an unconscious man, the doctor says, will try to scratch away at whatever irritates him. Anyway, their hands were burnt – not badly, but enough to justify the bandages.’ ‘They’ve got straps for tying wrists to the bed-frames.’ ‘Dr Singh did mention that. He said he didn’t think Captain Bowen would take too kindly to waking up and finding himself virtually in irons on his own ship. By the ‘way, the missing helmsman was Hudson. Broken ribs and one pierced his lung. Doctor says he’s very ill. What luck did you have?’
‘Same as you, sir. Zero. There was a pair of parallel rules lying beside Mr Batesman so I assume he must have been pencilling out a course.’
‘You couldn’t gather anything from the chart?’ ‘It wasn’t a chart any more. It was just a bloodstained rag.’
THREE
It was snowing heavily and a bitter wind blew from the east as they buried their dead in the near-Stygian darkness of the early afternoon. A form of illumination they did have, for the saboteur, probably more than satisfied with the results of his morning’s activities, was now resting on his laurels and the deck floodlights were working again, but in that swirling blizzard the light given off was weak, fitful and almost ineffectual, serving only to intensify the ghoulish effect of the burial party hastening about their macabre task and the ghostlike appearance of the bare dozen of snow-covered mourners. Flashlight in hand, Chief Engineer Patterson read out the burial service, but he might as well have been quoting the latest prices on the stock exchange for not a word could be heard: one by one the dead, in their weighted canvas shrouds, slipped down the tilted plank, out from under the Union flag and vanished, silently, into the freezing water of the Barents Sea. No bugle calls, no Last Post for the Merchant Navy, not ever: the only requiem was the lost and lonely keening of the wind through the frozen rigging and the jagged gaps that had been torn in the superstructure.