I had a Very pistol that fired a red flare from a cartridge. It would be quick enough, but would a thin red streamer be sufficient in itself to scare off the confident Alistair? He might think it merely an addition to the brotherly greeting. .
I knew!
When we had taken over the weather ship she had been fitted out as a whaler. She had been bought complete, ready for sea. I had found myself in possession of a miscellaneous collection of equipment, some of which I had decided might come in useful.
In the hold were six big whale-marker canister flares.
Catchers signalled the position of their prey at night with them to mother-ship helicopters. They were fired electrically.
Alistair might realize when he saw such a dramatic flare that something was seriously amiss. It would stop his onrush towards-what?
Yet-one fired on board would be a danger. The flaming burst could well set the ship alight. . the radiosonde balloon platform! We had deliberately isolated it from possible entanglements to give the weather balloons free ascent. It was the ideal flare launching pad.
'Number One! I want the bo'sun and three good men up here-at the double!'
Feldman looked startled, but he jumped at my tone.
'Fourie!' I told the inquiring bo'sun who stood with his team in streaming oilskins. ‘I want one of those whale-marker canister flares from No. 1 hold. Get it up aloft and lash it to the radiosonde platform …'
'What …!' exploded Feldman behind me. I ignored him. I could not trust myself in front of the crew.
Fourie grinned. 'Guy Fawkes' night, sir? Remember when we tried out the first one down south — a real tit of an explosion. .'
The men were grinning too.
'Don't blow yourself up on the way,’ I responded. Take it easy and hang on to the bloody thing-all of you. The ship's bouncing like a drunken impala in these seas. That detonator. .'
Fourie threw a shabby little salute. 'Not to worry, sir. She's as good as fixed.' The team made off. Six-thirty.
Half an hour to the rendezvous!
The sea had built up terrifyingly. The wind simply tore the water up. All the devils of the deep were unleashed in the darkness. It was this malignant quality of the sea, something I had never witnessed even during the worst storms in the Southern Ocean, which awed the three of us on the bridge into a still more frigid silence: even through the icy, pouring rain the frost-white of tormented water would show when Walvis Bay rose to the top of a wave, before making a slewing, sickening descent into the trough. She seemed more under water than afloat; yet, as far as I could judge, we had so far lost only a few stanchions and some loose gear which had not been securely lashed. I had had no further damage reports from the two technicians, Miller and Taylor; perhaps Nick Scannel's ingenuity had saved the delicate apparatus. The flimsy radiosonde hut abaft the funnel was still standing, mainly, I think, because we were taking the run of the sea slightly on the starboard bow and the heavy bridge structure formed a protection against the hundreds of tons of water which continually swept the whaler.
The battle was on in deadly earnest.
After sunset, I had had a curious, mainly instinctive feeling that Walvis Bay had been actually travelling faster over the ground than the thirteen knots I had ordered. I had nothing specific to account for this feeling. Any land observations were out of the question: the strip of maelstrom between Walvis Bay and the land held up an impenetrable curtain of darkness, rain and driving spray. The Agulhas Current was credited with a five-knot maximum, but I had felt earlier that it was pushing southwards faster than that, battling the counter-current and the gale, bearing Walvis Bay along with it, and masking my dead-reckoning still further.
Walvis Bay gave three short staggering leaps across three white-tops and then, like a man losing his balance, after a frantic attempt to keep his feet, collided with her starboard side into a fourth, huge roller. I felt the shuddering wince of metal high up aft. The vibrations rippled through the superstructure. I could see only sea through the bridge windows.
Feldman turned to me, his face mottled with fear. There was no need to voice his unspoken question. Miller or Taylor would be here soon enough to tell us.
It was Miller. The radar antenna's gone!' His voice had ' a hysterical edge. 'We hit something …'
'Something hit us,' I retorted. 'It was the sea — just plain sea. Pull yourself together, man! Where is Taylor?'
Miller took a grip of himself, but he could not look beyond the bridge windows.
'Lying on the floor-out,' he said. 'I think he needs a doctor. .'
'He doesn't,' I snapped. Try him with a shot of rum from the ward-room locker.' I wanted Feldman out of the way too. If the two men's hysteria got loose among the others, it could mean the end of the ship.
'See to it,' I yelled to Feldman above the noise of the gale. Take a look at the wind gauge as you come back.'
Feldman was back sooner than I thought. The bridge smelt of rum. He had interpreted my orders liberally.
'Force 10 — gusting 65 miles an hour,' he reported.
A whole gale, that rare animal, a whole, whole gale!
Now there was a new alignment of sea and gale, by contrast to what I had felt before: the wind was able, by its power alone, to hold back the progress of the weather ship, unlike her previous forward rush under the current's impulse. The powerful bridge and enclosed forward superstructure became a metal sail held up against the wind. As she reared to the crests I could feel the gale take hold and thrust the small ship bodily backwards and sideways; Jubela's shirt was soaked, despite the iciness outside, as he tried to hold her on course. It was impossible to see the length of the foredeck because of the rain and breaking seas. Had another ship loomed up ahead, we could not have seen it in time to avoid a collision. 1 comforted myself that all shipping had cleared out of the area by now. The run of the sea had changed, too: it struck strongly from the south-west into the teeth of the master Agulhas stream, breaking up its customary southwards flow into a tumult of jerking seas which became progressively higher and steeper. Judging by the ship's motion, it seemed likely that she was actually standing still in her progress over the ground, despite the unreduced engine speed.
I checked the clock.
Six-forty-five.
Barely fifteen minutes to the rendezvous!
The quarter of an hour was about the Limit I could go on flogging Walvis Bay. I would have to slacken speed soon; at any moment I expected to hear that the complicated satellite observing gear had gone. It was not the gear alone: the very fabric of the ship was under pressure. On occasion I wondered whether she would dive headlong into the next wave and never come up again. She was not riding and throwing her head clear any more, but ducking into the sea with a tiring action, a growing unwillingness to rise.
I did not hate the south-west wind that night. Not as I do now. Nor did I hate the south-westerly run of the sea. I did not fear when the wind gusted over sixty knots. At that time they had still not touched her, Tafline. I was seeing them for the first time as nakedly and unfettered as Waratah had seen them for the last time. I was a sailor at sea that night, and she was safely ashore in Cape Town; we had not, she and I, joined our forces to challenge the scend of the sea. I was seeing professionally, detachedly, how much strain a hull, two engines and a crew could stand in the face of the worst storm I had ever encountered. I was pushing all to the limit, but I knew there was a limit, and that it was in sight. Douglas Fairlie and Captain Ilbery would also have judged what the limits were-or did they ever have the opportunity to do so? That is what I had to find out tonight.