‘Curran! Quickly! Chief Engineer Patterson. You’ll find him in the hospital. Tell him to start up and turn the ship either into the wind or away from the wind. Away is better – that means hard a-starboard. Tell him the superstructure is going to fall over the side any minute.’
For a man usually slow to obey any order and handicapped though he was by his constricted lower limbs, Curran made off with remarkable alacrity. It could have been that he was a good man in an emergency, but more likely he didn’t fancy being on the bridge when it vanished into the Barents Sea.
Ferguson eased two layers of scarf from his mouth. ‘Difficult working conditions, Bo’sun. Impossible, a man might say. And have you seen the temperature?’
The Bo’sun glanced at the bulkhead thermometer which was about the only thing still working on the bridge. ‘Two above,’ he said.
‘Ah! Two above. But two above what? Fahrenheit, that’s what it’s above. That means thirty degrees of frost.’ He looked at the Bo’sun in what he probably regarded as a meaningful fashion. ‘Have you ever heard of the chill factor, eh?’
The Bo’sun spoke with commendable restraint. ‘Yes, Ferguson, I have heard of the chill factor.’
‘For every knot of wind the temperature, as far as the skin is concerned, falls by one degree.’ Ferguson had something on his mind and as far as he was concerned the Bo’sun had never heard of the chill factor. ‘Wind’s at least thirty knots. That means it’s sixty below on this bridge. Sixty!’ At that moment, at the end of an especially alarming roll, the superstructure gave a very loud creak indeed, more of a screech than a creak, and it didn’t require any kind of imagination to visualize metal tearing under lateral stress.
‘If you want to leave the bridge,’ the Bo’sun said, ‘I’m not ordering you to stay.’
‘Trying to shame me into staying, eh? Trying to appeal to my better nature? Well, I got news for you. I ain’t got no better feelings, mate.’
The Bo’sun said, mildly: ‘Nobody aboard this ship calls me “mate”.’
‘Bo’sun.’ Ferguson made no move to carry out his implied threat and he wasn’t even showing any signs of irresolution. ‘Do I get danger money for this? Overtime, perhaps?’
‘A couple of tots of Captain Bowen’s special malt Scotch. Let’s spend our last moments usefully, Ferguson. We’ll start with some measuring.’
‘Already done.’ Ferguson showed the spring-loaded steel measuring tape in his hand and tried hard not to smile in smug self-satisfaction. ‘Me and Curran have already measured the front and side screens. Written down on that bit of plywood there.’
‘Fine, fine.’ The Bo’sun tested both the electric drill and electric saw. Both worked. ‘No problem. We’ll cut the plywood three inches wider and higher than your measurements to get the overlap we need. Then we’ll drill holes top, bottom and sides, three-quarters of an inch in, face the plywood up to the screen bearers, mark the metal and drill the holes through the steel.’
That steel is three-eighths of an inch. Take to next week to drill all those holes.’
The Bo’sun looked through the tool box and came up with three packets of drills. The first he discarded. The drills in the second, all with blue tips, he showed to Ferguson.
‘Tungsten. Goes through steel like butter. Mr Jamieson doesn’t miss much.’ He paused and cocked his head as if listening, though it was a purely automatic reaction, any sound from the after end of the ship was carried away by the wind: but there was no mistaking the throbbing that pulsed through the superstructure. He looked at Ferguson, whose face cracked into what might almost have been a smile.
The Bo’sun moved to the starboard wing door – the sheltered side of the ship – and peered through the gap where the screen had been in the upper half of the door. The snow was so heavy that the seas moving away from the San Andreas were as much imagined as seen. The ship was still rolling in the troughs. A vessel of any size that has been lying dead in the water can take an unconscionable time -depending, of course, on the circumstances – to gather enough momentum to have steerage way on, but after about another minute the Bo’sun became aware that the ship was sluggishly answering to the helm. He couldn’t see this but he could feel it: a definite quartering motion had entered into the rolling to which they had been accustomed for some hours.
McKinnon moved away from the wing door. ‘We’re turning to starboard. Mr Patterson has decided to go with the wind. We’ll soon have both sea and snow behind us. Fine, fine.’
‘Fine, fine,’ Ferguson said. This was about twenty seconds later and the tone of his voice indicated that everything was all but fine. He was, indeed, acutely uneasy and with reason. The San Andreas was heading almost due south, the heavy seas bearing down on her port quarter were making her corkscrew violently and the markedly increased creaking and groaning of the superstructure was doing little enough for his morale. ‘God’s sake, why couldn’t we have stayed where we were?’
‘A minute’s time and you’ll see why.’ And in a minute’s time he did see why. The corkscrewing and rolling gradually eased and ceased altogether, so did the creaking in the superstructure and the San Andreas, on an approximately south-west course, was almost rock-steady in the water. There was a slight pitching, but, compared to what they had just experienced, it was so negligible as not to be worth the mentioning. Ferguson, with a stable deck beneath his feet, the fear of imminent drowning removed and the snowstorm so squarely behind them that not a flake reached the bridge, had about him an air of profound relief.
Shortly after the Bo’sun and Ferguson had started sawing out the rectangles of plywood, four men arrived on the bridge – Jamieson, Curran, McCrimmon and another stoker called Stephen. Stephen was a Pole and was called always by his first name: nobody had ever been heard to attempt the surname of Przynyszewski. Jamieson carried a telephone, Curran two black heaters, McCrimmon two radiant heaters and Stephen two spools of rubber-insulated cable, one thick, one thin, both of which he unreeled as he went.
‘Well, this is more like it, Bo’sun,’ Jamieson said. ‘A millpond, one might almost call it. Done a power of good for the morale down below. Some people have even rediscovered their appetites. Speaking of appetites, how’s yours? You must be the only person aboard who hasn’t had lunch today.’
‘It’ll keep.’ The Bo’sun looked to where McCrimmon and Stephen were already attaching wires from the heaters to the heavy cable. ‘Thanks for those. They’ll come in handy in an hour or two when we’ve managed to keep all this fresh air out.’
‘More than handy, I should have thought.’ Jamieson shivered. ‘My word, it is fresh up here. What’s the temperature?’
The Bo’sun looked at the thermometer. ‘Zero. That’s two degrees it’s dropped in a few minutes. I’m afraid, Mr Jamieson, that we’re going to be very cold tonight.’
‘Not in the engine-room,’ Jamieson said. He unscrewed the back of the telephone and started connecting it to the slender cable. ‘Mr Patterson thinks this is an unnecessary luxury and that you just want it so that you can talk to someone when you feel lonely. Says that keeping the stern on to wind and seas is child’s play and that he could do it for hours without deviating more than two or three degrees off course.’
‘I’ve no doubt he could. That way we’ll never see Aberdeen. You can tell Mr Patterson that the wind is backing and that if it backs far enough and he still keeps stern on to the wind and sea we’ll end up by making a small hole in the north of Norway and a large hole in ourselves.’
Jamieson smiled. ‘I’ll explain that to the Chief. I don’t think the possibility has occurred to him – it certainly didn’t to me.’
‘And when you go below, sir, would you send up Naseby? He’s an experienced helmsman.’
‘I’ll do that. Need any more help up here?’
‘No, sir. The three of us are enough.’
‘As you say.’ Jamieson screwed the back of the telephone in place, pressed the call-up button, spoke briefly and hung up. ‘Satisfaction guaranteed. Are you through, McCrimmon? Stephen?’ Both men nodded, and Jamieson called the engine-room again, asked for power to be switched on and told McCrimmon and Stephen to switch on one heater apiece, one black, one radiant. ‘Still require McCrimmon as a runner, Bo’sun?’
The Bo’sun nodded towards the telephone. ‘Thanks to you, I’ve got my runner.’
One of McCrimmon’s radiant heaters had started to glow a dim red. Stephen removed a hand from the black heater and nodded.