“I’m looking for a place where a man could hide a boat. A fairly big boat. Forty feet – maybe fifty. Might be in a big boathouse, might be under over-hanging trees up some creek, might even be in some tiny secluded harbour normally invisible from the sea. Between Islay and Skye.”
“Well, now, is that all. Have you any idea how many hundreds of miles of coastline there is in that lot, taking in aU the islands? Maybe thousands? How long do I have for this job? A month?”
“By sunset to-day. Now, wait. We can cut out all centres of population, and by that I mean anything with more than two or three houses together. We can cut out known fishing grounds. We can cut out regular steamship routes. Does that help?”
“A lot. What are we really looking for?”
“I’ve told you.”
“Okay, okay, so mine is not to reason why. Any idea where you’d like to start, any ideas for limiting the search?”
“Let’s go due east to the mainland. Twenty miles up the coast, then twenty south. Then we’ll try Torbay Sound and the Isle of Torbay. Then the islands farther west and north.”
“Torbay Sound has a steamer service.”
“Sorry, I should have said a daily service. Torbay has a bi-weekly service.”
“Fasten your seat-belt and get on those earphones. We’re going to get thrown around quite a bit to-day. I hope you’re a good sailor.”
“And the earphones?” They were the biggest I’d ever seen, four inches wide with inch-thick linings of what looked like sorbo rubber. A spring loaded swing microphone was attached to the headband.
“For the ears,” the lieutenant said kindly. “So that you don’t get perforated drums. And so you won’t be deaf for a week afterwards. If you can imagine yourself inside a steel drum in the middle of a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering outside, you’ll have some idea of what the racket is like once we start up.”
Even with the earphone muffs on, it sounded exactly like being in a steel drum in a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering on the outside. The earphones didn’t seem to have the slightest effect at all, the noise came hammering and beating at you through every facial and cranial bone, but on the one and very brief occasion when I cautiously lifted one phone to find out what the noise was like without them and if they were really doing any good at all, I found out exactly what Lieutenant Williams meant about perforated drums. He hadn’t been joking. But even with them on, after a couple of hours ray head felt as if it were coming apart. I looked occasionally at the dark lean face of the young Welshman beside me, a man who had to stand this racket day in, day out, the year round. He looked quite sane to me. I’d have been in a padded cell in a week.
I didn’t have to be in that helicopter a week. Altogether, I spent eight hours’ flying time in it and it felt like a leap year.
Our first run northwards up the mainland coast produced what was to be the first of many false alarms that day. Twenty minutes after leaving Torbay we spotted a river, a small one but still a”river, flowing into the sea. We followed it upstream for a mile, then suddenly the trees, crowding down close to the banks on both sides, met in the middle where the river seemed to run through some rocky gorge.
I shouted into the microphone: “I want to see what’s there.”
Williams nodded. “We passed a place a quarter of a mile back. I’ll set you down.”
“You’ve got a winch. Couldn’t you lower me?”
“When you know as much as I do about the effect of forty to fifty miles an hour winds in steep-sided valley,” he said, “you’ll never talk about such things. Not even in a joke. I want to take this kite home again.”
So he turned back and set me down without much difficulty in the shelter of a bluff. Five minutes later I’d reached the beginning of the overhanging stretch. Another five minutes and I was back in the helicopter.
“What luck?” the lieutenant asked.
“No luck. An ancient oak tree right across the river, just at the entrance to the overhang.”
“Could be shifted.”
“It weighs two or three tons, it’s imbedded feet deep In the mud and it’s been there for years.”
“Well, well, we can’t be right first time, every time,”
A few more minutes and another river mouth. It hardly looked big enough to take a boat of any size, but we turned up anyway. Less than half a mile from its mouth the river foamed whitely as it passed through rapids. We turned back,
By the time it was fully daylight we had reached the northern limit of possibility in this area. Steep-sided mountains gave way to precipitous cliffs that plunged almost vertically into the sea.
“Hew far does .this go north?” I asked.
“Ten, twelve miles to the head of Loch Lairg.”
“Know h?”
“Flown up there a score of times.”
“Caves?”
“Nary a cave.”
I hadn’t really thought that there would be. “How about the oilier side?” I pointed to the west where the mountainous shore-line, not five miles away yet barely visible through the driving rain and low scudding cloud, ran in 9″almost sheer drop from the head of Loch Lairg to the entrance to Torbay Sound.
“Even the gulls can’t find a foothold there. Believe me.”
I believed him. We flew back the way we had come as far as our starting point on the coast, then continued southwards. From the Isle of Torbay to the mainland the sea was an almost unbroken mass of foaming white, big white-capped rollers marching eastwards across the darkened firth, long creamy lines of spume torn from the wave-tops veining the troughs between. There wasn’t a single craft in sight, even the big drifters had stayed at home, it was as bad as that. In that buffeting gale-force wind our big helicopter was having a bad time of it now, violently shaking and swaying like an out-of-control express train in the last moments before it leaves the track: one hour’s flying in those conditions had turned me against helicopters for life. But when I thought of what h would be like down there in a boat in that seething maelstrom of a firth I could feel a positive bond of attachment growing between me and that damned helicopter.
We flew twenty miles south – if the way we were being jarred and flung through the air could be called flying – but covered sixty miles in that southing. Every little sound between the islands and the mainland, every natural harbour, every sea-loch and inlet had to be investigated. We flew very low most of the ‘time, not much above two hundred feet: sometimes we were forced down to a hundred feet – so heavy was the rain and so powerful the wind now battering against the streaming windscreen that the wipers were almost useless and we had to get as low as possible to see anything at all. As it was, I don’t think we missed a yard of the coastline of the mainland or the close’ in-shore islands. We saw everything. And we saw nothing.
I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. The day wearing on and nothing achieved. I said: “How much more of this can the helicopter stand?”
“I’ve been 150 miles out over the Atlantic in weather a damn’ sight worse than this,” Lieutenant Williams showed no signs of strain or anxiety or fatigue, if anything he seemed to be enjoying himself. “The point is how much more can you stand?”
“Very little. But we’ll have to. Back to where you picked me up and we’ll make a circuit of the coast of Torbay. South coast first, then north up the west coast, then east past Torbay and down the southern shore of the Sound.”
“Yours to command.” Williams brought the helicopter round to the north-west in a swinging side-slipping movement that didn’t do my stomach any good. “You’ll find coffee and sandwiches in that box there.” I left the sandwiches and coffee where they were.
It took us almost forty minutes to cover the twenty-five miles to the eastern tip of the Isle of Torbay, that wind took us two steps back for every three forward. Visibility was so bad that Williams flew on instruments the whole way and with that violent cross-wind blowing he should have missed our target by miles. Instead he hit that sandy cove right on the nose as if he’d been flying in on a radio beacon. I was beginning to have a very great deal of confidence in Williams, a man who knew exactly what he was doing: I was beginning to have no confidence at all in myself and to wonder if I had any idea in the world what I was doing. I thought about Uncle Arthur and quickly decided I’d rather think about something else.