Atlantic Fury (7 page)

The pilot was leaving now. ‘Okay, Cliff, that settles it. No dice.' He picked up his helmet and his gloves. ‘Pity they don't admit it's blowing like hell out there. No down-draughts. Shelter Bay calm as a mill-pond – that's the report I had from Laerg earlier this morning.'

‘It's always the same when the boys are waiting for their mail.'

‘That's true. But this time I'm under pressure from both ends. The mail could just as well go by LCT, but then this fellow Braddock …' A rain squall lashed the windows. ‘Just listen to that. He should try his hand at landing a helicopter – that'd teach him to be so bloody enthusiastic. What's he want to do, commit suicide? When it's gusting forty it whams down off Tarsaval …' He stared angrily at the blurred panes. ‘Thank God they're closing the place down. That idea of relying on a helicopter service through the winter months – who dreamed that one up?'

‘Colonel Standing.'

‘Well, it was bloody crazy. They'd have discovered the LCTs were more reliable.'

‘The landing craft never operated in Scottish waters after the end of September. You know that.'

‘Well, the trawler then. What was wrong with that?'

‘A question of cost; that's what I heard, anyway. And there was still the problem of trans-shipping men and stores from ship to beach. They lost a lot of dories smashed up on the rocks or overturned.'

‘Well, if it's a question of cost, dories are a damn sight cheaper than helicopters.' He turned up the collar of his flight jacket, huddling down into it with a jerk of the shoulders. ‘Be seeing you, Cliff.' But as he turned towards the door, it was flung open and Major Braddock entered. In place of the light suit he wore battledress, but it was the same face – the face of Lane's photographs, lined and leathery, dark-tanned by the Mediterranean sun, and that scar running in a vertical line down the crease of the forehead to the nose.

‘What's all this about the flight being off?' Not a glance at me, yet he knew I was there. I could feel it. And that urgent vitality, the way he leaned forward, balanced like a runner on the balls of his feet. ‘Mike just told me. Is it definite?'

‘'Fraid so, sir,' the pilot said. ‘You see …'

But he had turned to me. ‘You the guy that's wanting to see me?' The black eyes, staring straight at me, not a flicker of recognition, only the twitch of a muscle to reveal the nervous tension.

‘Yes,' I said. ‘My name's Donald Ross.'

He smiled. And in that instant I was sure. He couldn't change that smile; he'd relied too much on its charm all his life.

‘A private matter,' I said.

He nodded. ‘Okay, just let me deal with this.…' He swung round on the pilot then. ‘Now look here, Adams, it's all arranged. I'm staying the night there and coming back by LCT tomorrow. Just because it's a bit wet and windy … damn it, man, what do you expect in the Hebrides?'

‘It's the down-draughts,' the pilot said unhappily. ‘Being slammed down on the deck – well, you ask Cliff here. It just isn't on, not in this weather.'

And Cliff Morgan agreed, nodding to the wind speed indicator. ‘Blowing twenty plus now, almost forty in the gusts. And beginning to veer already. It'll be worse out there.' He shook his head. ‘The forecast's bad.'

‘The immediate forecast, d'you mean?'

‘Well, no. That's bad enough. But I was thinking of the next forty-eight hours. I've an idea the wind's going to veer and go on veering halfway round the clock. We could have a polar air stream with a drop in temperature of perhaps ten degrees and wind speeds as high as fifty, sixty knots.'

‘When?'

‘How do I know? It's just a feeling I have. It may not happen that way at all.' He indicated the wall to our left, where the big weather maps hung. ‘The lower one shows the position when I came on duty at six o'clock; it relates to o-o-o-one hours this morning. The upper one is my forecast of what the pattern will look like twenty-four hours later.' This map was Perspex-framed and the isobars had been drawn in with Chinagraph pencil on the Perspex. Here the High that had covered the British Isles for days, and which was still shown centred over Eastern Europe in the lower map, had disappeared completely, to be replaced by an intense depression behind it and a weak High over Greenland. ‘A south-westerly air stream now, you see – somewhere between twenty and forty knots. But the outlook is entirely dependent upon those two depressions and what happens to that High over Greenland. My feeling is this – those depressions are going to merge, the High is going to build up. The effect would be for that depression to intensify very rapidly. By tomorrow it could be a very deep one centred over Norway and if at the same time the High builds up …' He shrugged. ‘Wind would be north, you see, gale force at least – perhaps very strong indeed. But there's no certainty about it. Just my interpretation based on nothing more than a feeling I have.'

Braddock stared at the map. ‘Well, whether you're right or wrong, the fine spell's over, eh?'

‘Looks like it, Major.'

‘Still, if you're right – northerlies; we'd still be able to use Shelter Bay.'

The phone rang and Cliff Morgan answered it. ‘For you,' he said, handing it to Braddock.

I watched him as he took the call. The way the black brows came down and the lines deepened. The years had greatly changed him. His voice, too, harsher and more mature. ‘… Who? I see … badly hurt? … Okay, Mike, I'll tell Adams.' His eyes met mine for a moment as he put the receiver down. I thought he smiled, but it was so fleeting a movement of the mouth below the dark moustache that I couldn't be sure. He got up, went over to the pilot and stood facing him. ‘Well now, that gives you a fine little problem. McGregor, the driver of the Scammell, has got himself badly smashed up. A piece of radar equipment toppled on him after he'd got it stuck on one of the bends of the High Road. His leg's crushed right up to the thigh, abdominal injuries, too.' And he stood over the wretched man, daring him to say that he still wouldn't go, just as he'd stood over me when we were kids. ‘Doc says he must be flown out immediately.'

Adams licked his lips. ‘What about the LCTs?'

‘No good. Four-four-Double-o left Laerg at eleven-thirty last night. She should be in the South Ford by now. And Eight-six-one-o left shortly after two this morning …' He shook his head. ‘It'd be almost twenty-four hours before we could get him ashore by LCT, and from what I gather he wouldn't last that long. His life's in your hands. Either you fly him out …' He gave a little shrug and left it at that. And then he turned to me as though the matter were settled. ‘If you're around when I get back tomorrow, we'll have that chat, eh?' He said it with his eyes staring straight at me, still not the slightest flicker and his voice so matter-of-fact I could easily have persuaded myself that he really was Braddock – just Braddock and nothing to do with me.

‘I'll be here,' I said.

He nodded and went towards the door, opening it and marching straight out, leaving Adams standing there.

Cliff Morgan glanced again at the wind speed and direction indicators, pencilled a note or two on a piece of paper and passed it to the pilot. Adams took it, but he didn't look at it, nor did he look at the meteorologist. He didn't seem conscious that we were both of us watching him. He was facing the window, his eyes turned inwards, his whole mind given to the decision. I knew the answer, just as Braddock had known it. Adams knew it, too. I watched him bow to the inevitable, turning up the collar of his flight jacket and walking out without a word, the decision to fly made against his better judgment.

It was the moment that things began to go wrong, but none of us could know that, though perhaps Cliff Morgan sensed it, or again perhaps he knew his weather better than the rest of us. ‘The poor bastard!' he murmured, and I knew he was referring to the pilot, not to the injured man.

He looked at me as the door shut behind Adams. ‘They vary, you know,' he said. ‘In temperament.' And he added, ‘If it had been Bill Harrison now, he wouldn't have hesitated. A reckless devil, Bill; but he knows his own mind. He'd never have let himself be forced into it like that.' He sucked on the end of his pencil, hollowing his cheeks, and then with a quick, abrupt movement, he went into the back room, tore off the teleprint sheets and came back reading them. ‘This bloody evacuation, that's what it is, man. Thinking God Almighty would arrange the weather for them whilst they got their men and equipment off the island. I warned them.'

It was the first I'd heard about the evacuation, and realising this he began to explain as we stood by the window, watching Braddock and Adams walk out to the helicopter and climb in. But I barely took in what he was saying, for my mind had room only for one thought at that moment – the certainty that Braddock was my brother. This in itself was such a staggering revelation that it was only later that I began to consider the other factors – why, for instance, he had applied for a posting to the Hebrides, why he should have been so set on Adams making the flight?

The engine started, the rotor blades began to turn and the helicopter rose from the parking apron, drifting sideways in a gust and just clearing the hangar. Almost immediately its shape became blurred; then it vanished completely, lost in the low cloud and a squall of rain. For a moment longer the engine was faintly audible. Then that, too, was swallowed up as rain lashed at the windows.

The risk they ran in attempting that flight was something I couldn't assess; I had no experience then of the incredible malignant power of the down-draughts that come smashing down from Tarsaval and the other heights of Laerg, down into Shelter Bay. Nor was it possible for me to absorb the whole complex setup of this military operation into the midst of which I had suddenly been pitchforked. Even when Cliff Morgan had explained to me the details of the evacuation, how Braddock had insisted on sending a detachment with towing vehicles down to the old rocket range on South Uist so that the LCTs could beach in the South Ford as an alternative to Leverburgh, the night-and-day drive to get Laerg cleared and the round-the-clock movement of landing craft, I still didn't appreciate how vulnerable the whole operation was to the weather. I had no experience of landing craft.

Nor for that matter had Cliff Morgan. But weather to him was a living thing, the atmosphere a battleground. He had, as I've said, a sixth sense where weather was concerned and he was very conscious of the changed pattern. ‘A polar air stream now,' he said to himself as though facing the implications for the first time. ‘Jesus, man!' He lit a cigarette, staring at me over the flame. ‘Know anything about weather?'

‘A little,' I said, but he didn't seem to hear.

‘No imagination – that's the Army for you. Look at Braddock. Up into the air and not a clue what he faces at the other end. And Standing – you'd think Standing would try to understand. He's got brains. But no imagination, you see, none at all.' He slid his bottom on to the swivel seat and drew a sheet of paper towards him. ‘Look you now, I'll draw it for you. As I see it – in here.' And he tapped his forehead. ‘Not the wind on my face, but a map, a chart, a picture. Imagination! But
dammo di
, they're none of them Celts. Though Braddock—' He shook his head as though he weren't quite certain about Braddock, and then he reached for a blank sheet of paper and with his pen drew a map that included North America, Greenland, Norway – the whole North Atlantic. On this he pencilled in the existing pattern: the Azores High bulging north towards Ireland and the two Lows driving that other High, that had been over England, east towards Russia.

‘Now, the area I'm watching is down here.' His pencil stabbed the left-hand bottom edge of the map. ‘That's about seen hundred miles north-east of Bermuda. It's the place where our depressions are born – the place where the cold, dry air from the north, sweeping down the east of North America, meets up with the warm, damp air of the Gulf Stream. It's the breeding place for every sort of beastliness – hurricanes bound for the States, big depressions that move across the North Atlantic at tremendous speed to give Iceland, and sometimes the Hebrides and the north of Scotland, wind speed almost as bad as the much-publicised Coras and Ethels and Janets and what-have-yous that cause such havoc in America. Now look at this.'

He picked up a red pencil and with one curving sweep drew an arrow across to the area between Iceland and Norway. ‘There! That's your Low now.' He drew it in, a deep depression centred over Norway, extending west as far as Iceland, east into Siberia. And then on the other side, over towards Greenland and Canada, more isobars drawn in with long, curving sweeps of hand and pencil. A high pressure area, and between the High and the Low, in ink, he marked in arrows pointing south and south-east. ‘That's a polar air stream for you. That's a real big polar air stream, with the wind roaring out of the Arctic and temperatures falling rapidly. Snow at first in the north. Then clear skies and bitter cold.'

He stared at it for a moment, an artist regarding his handiwork. ‘I haven't seen that sort of weather pattern up here – not at this time of the year. But I experienced it once in Canada just after the war when I was working for the Department of Transport at Goose Bay. By Christ, man, that was something. A Low over Greenland, a High centred somewhere over the mouth of the Mackenzie River and a polar air stream pouring south across the Labrador.' He drew it for me then on another sheet of paper, adding as his red pencil circled in the pattern, ‘Have you any idea what a polar air stream means up there in the Canadian North in October – to the Eskimos, the prospectors, the ships in Hudson Bay?' And when I shook my head he embarked on an explanation. I can't remember all he said; I found myself listening to the tone of his voice rather than to his actual words. It had become noticeably more Welsh, a distinct lilt that seemed to change his personality. It was his enthusiasm for the subject, I suppose, but all at once he was like a poet, painting with words on a canvas that was one quarter of the globe. I listened, fascinated; and as he talked the red pencil was constantly moving, filling in that old atmospheric battle picture until the high pressure system over north-western Canada had become a great whorl of concentric lines.