‘Goodness me! That’s a very serious allegation, Sister. Sorry. Margaret.’
‘Gossipy old women speak in low voices or whispers. Whenever any two of them or three of them or indeed all four are together they speak in low voices or whispers. You can feel the tension, almost smell the fear – well, no, that’s the wrong word, apprehension, I should say. Why do they whisper?’
‘Maybe they’ve got secrets.’
‘I deserve better than that.’
‘We’ve got saboteurs aboard.’
‘I know that. We all know that. The whispers know that we all know that.’ She gave him a long, steady look. ‘I still deserve better than that. Don’t you trust me?’
‘I trust you. We’re being hunted. Somebody aboard the San Andreas has a transmitter radio that is sending out a continuous location signal. The Luftwaffe, the U-boats know exactly where we are. Somebody wants us. Somebody wants to take over the San Andreas.’
For long moments she looked at his eyes as if searching for an answer to a question she couldn’t formulate. McKinnon shook his head and said: ‘I’m sorry. That’s all I know. You must believe me.’
‘I do believe you. Who could be sending out this signal?’
‘Anybody. My guess is that it is a member of our own crew. Could be a survivor from the Argos. Could be any of the sick men we picked up in Murmansk. Each idea is quite ridiculous but one has to be less ridiculous than the others. Which, I have no idea.’
‘Why would anyone want us?’
‘If I knew that, I’d know the answer to a lot of things. Once again, I have no idea.’
‘How would they take us over?’
‘Submarine. U-boat. No other way. They have no surface ships and an aircraft is out of the question. Praying, that’s what your whispers are probably at- praying. Praying that the snow will never end. Our only hope lies in concealment. Praying, as the old divines used to say, that we will not be abandoned by fortune.’
‘And if we are?’
‘Then that’s it.’
‘You’re not going to do anything?’ She seemed more than faintly incredulous. ‘You’re not even going to try to do anything?’
It was quite some hours since McKinnon had made up his mind where his course of action would lie but it seemed hardly the time or the place to elaborate on his decision. ‘What on earth do you expect me to do? Send them to the bottom with a salvo of stale bread and old potatoes? You forget this is a hospital ship. Sick, wounded and all civilians.’
‘Surely there’s something you can do.’ There was a strange note in her voice, one almost of desperation. She went on bitterly: The much-bemedalled Petty Officer McKinnon.’
‘The much-bemedalled Petty Officer McKinnon,’ he said mildly, ‘would live to fight another day.’
‘Fight them now!’ Her voice had a break in it. ‘Fight them! Fight them! Fight them!’ She buried her face in her hands.
McKinnon put his arm round her shaking shoulders and regarded her with total astonishment. A man of almost infinite resource and more than capable of dealing with anything that came his way, he was at an utter loss to account for her weird conduct. He sought for words of comfort and consolation but as he didn’t know what he was supposed to be comforting or consoling about he found none. Nor did repeating phrases like ‘Now, now, then’ seem to meet the case either, so he finally contented himself with saying: ‘I’ll get Trent up and take you below.’
When they had arrived below, after a particularly harrowing trip across the upper deck between superstructure and hospital – they had to battle their way against the great wind and the driving blizzard – he led her to the little lounge and went in search of Janet Magnusson. When he found her he said: ‘I think you’d better go and see your pal, Maggie. She’s very upset.’ He raised a hand. ‘No, Janet, not guilty. I did not upset her.’
She said accusingly: ‘But you were with her when she became upset.’
‘She’s disappointed with me, that’s all.’
‘Disappointed?’
‘She wants me to commit suicide. I don’t see it her way.’
She tapped her head. ‘One of you is touched. I don’t much doubt who it is.’ McKinnon sat down on a stool by a mess table while she went into the lounge. She emerged some five minutes later and sat down opposite him. Her face was troubled.
‘Sorry, Archie. Not guilty. And neither of you is touched. She’s got this ambivalent feeling towards the Germans.’
‘Ambi what?’
‘Mixed up. It doesn’t help that her mother is German. She’s had rather a bad time. A very rough time. Oh, I know you have, too, but you’re different.’
‘Of course I’m different. I have no finer feelings.’
‘Oh, do be quiet. You weren’t to know – in fact, I think I’m the only person who does know. About five months ago she lost both her only brother and her fiance. Both died over Hamburg. Not in the same plane, not even in the same raid. But within weeks of each other.’
‘Oh Jesus.’ McKinnon shook his head slowly and was silent for some moments. Poor bloody kid. Explains a lot.’ He rose, crossed to Dr Singh’s private source of supplies and returned with a glass. ‘The legendary McKinnon willpower. You were with Maggie when this happened, Janet?’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew her before then?’
‘Of course. We’ve been friends for years.’
‘So you must have known those two boys?’ She said nothing. ‘Known them well, I mean?’ Still she said nothing,. just sat there with her flaxen head bowed, apparently gazing down at her clasped hands on the table. As much in exasperation as anything McKinnon reached out, took one of her wrists and shook it gently. ‘Janet.’
She looked up. ‘Yes, Archie?’ Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.
‘Oh dear, oh dear.’ McKinnon sighed. ‘You, too.’ Again he shook his head, again he remained silent for some time. ‘Look, Janet, those boys knew what they were doing. They knew the risks. They knew that, if they could at all, the German anti-aircraft batteries and night-fighter pilots would shoot them down. And so they did and so they had every right to do. And I would remind you that those were no mere pinpoint raids – it was saturation bombing and you know what that means. So while you and Maggie are crying for yourselves, you might as well cry for the relatives of all the thousands of innocent dead that the RAF left behind in Hamburg. You might as well cry for all mankind.’
Two tears trickled down her cheeks. ‘You, McKinnon, are a heartless fiend.’
‘I’m all that.’ He rose. ‘If anyone wants me I’ll be on the bridge.’
Noon came and went and as the day lengthened the wind strengthened until it reached the screaming intensity commonly found in the hurricanes and typhoons of the more tropical parts of the world. By two o’clock in the afternoon when the light, which at best had never been more than a grey half-light, was beginning to fade, what little could be seen of the mountainous seas abeam and ahead of the San Andreas – the blizzard made it quite impossible to see anything abaft of the bridge – were as white as the driving snow itself, the shapeless troughs between the towering walls of water big enough to drown a suburban house or, to the more apprehensive eye, big enough to drown a suburban church including a fair part of its steeple. The San Andreas was in trouble. At 9,300 tons it was not a small vessel and the Bo’sun had had engine revolutions reduced until the ship had barely steerage way on, but still she was in trouble and the causes for this lay neither in the size of the ship, nor the size of the seas, for normally the San Andreas could have ridden out the storm without much difficulty. The two main reasons for concern lay elsewhere.
The first of these was ice. A ship in a seaway can be said to be either stiff or tender. If it is stiff, it is resistant to roll, and, when it does roll, recovers sharply: when it is tender it rolls easily and recovers slowly and reluctantly. Tenderness arises when a vessel becomes top-heavy, raising the centre of gravity. The prime cause of this is ice. As the thickness of ice on the upper decks increases, so does the degree of tenderness: when the ice becomes sufficiently thick the vessel will fail to recover from its roll, turn turtle and founder. Even splendidly seaworthy ocean-going trawlers, specially built for Arctic operations, have succumbed to the stealthily insidious and deadly onslaught of ice: and for aircraft carriers operating in the far north, ice on their vast areas of open upper decks provided a constant threat to stability.