San Andreas Part 13

'Fahrenheit?'

'Sorry. You don't use that. It's about twenty degrees below, Centigrade.'

'May his nurse come with him? After all, Dr Sinclair went with him last time.'

'Of course. Wouldn't advise you to come on the wing bridge, though.' McKinnon gathered up s.e.xtant and chronometer and accompanied them up to the bridge. This time Ulbricht made it unaided. He went out on both wing bridges in turn and chose the starboard from which to make his observations. It took him longer than it had on the previous occasion, for he found it necessary to take more sights, presumably because the Pole Star was hidden. He came back inside, worked on the chart for some time and finally looked up.

'Satisfactory. In the circ.u.mstances, very satisfactory. Not my navigation. The course we've been holding. No idea if we've been holding it all the time, of course, and that doesn't matter. We're "south of the Arctic Circle now, near enough 66.20 north, 4.20 east. Course 213, which seems to indicate that the wind's backed only five degrees in the past twelve hours. We're fine as we are, Mr McKinnon. Keeping the sea and the wind to the stern should see us through the night and even if we do wander off course we're not going to b.u.mp into anything. This time tomorrow morning we'll lay off a more southerly course.'

'Thank you very much, Lieutenant,' McKinnon said. 'As the saying goes, you've earned your supper. Incidentally, I'll have that sent up inside half an hour. You've also earned a good night's sleep - I won't be troubling you any more tonight.'

'Haven't I earned something else, too? It was mighty cold out there, Mr McKinnon.'

'I'm sure the Captain would approve. As he said, so long as you're navigating.' He turned to the girl. 'You coming below?'

'Yes, yes, of course she must,' Ulbricht said. 'I've been most remiss, most.' If remorse were gnawing it didn't show too much. 'All your other patients - '

'All my other patients are fine. Sister Maria is looking after them. I'm off duty.'

'Off duty! That makes me feel even worse. You should'", be resting, my dear girl, that or sleeping.'

'I'm wide awake, thank you. Are_you coming below? It's no trouble now, ship's like a rock and you've just been told you won't be required any more tonight.'

'Well, now.' Ulbricht paused judiciously. 'On balance, I think I should remain. Unforeseeable emergencies, you understand.'

'Luftwaffe officers shouldn't tell fibs. Of course I understand. I understand that the only foreseeable emergency is that you run short of supplies and the only reason you're not coming below is that we don't serve malt whisky with ward dinners.'

The Lieutenant shook his head in sadness. 'I am deeply wounded.'

'Wounded!' she said. They had returned to the hospital mess deck. 'Wounded.'

'I think he is.' McKinnon looked at her in speculative amus.e.m.e.nt. 'And you, too.'

'Me? Oh, really!'

'Yes. Really. You're hurt because you think he prefers Scotch to your company. Isn't that so?' She made no reply. 'If you believe that, then you've got a very low opinion of both yourself and the Lieutenant. You were with him for about an hour tonight. What did he drink in that time?'

'Nothing.' Her voice was quiet.

'Nothing. He's not a drinker and he's a sensitive lad. He's sensitive because he's an enemy, because he's a captive, a prisoner of war and, of course, he's sensitive above all because he's now got to live all his life with the knowledge that he killed fifteen innocent people. You asked him if he was coming down. He didn't want to be asked 'if. He wanted to be persuaded, even ordered. 'It implies indifference and the way he's feeling it could be taken for a rejection. So what happens? The ward sister tells her feminine sympathy and intuition to take a holiday and delivers herself of some cutting remarks that Margaret Morrison would never have made. A mistake, but easy enough to put right/ 'How?' The question was a tacit admission that a mistake had indeed been made.

'Ninny. You take his hand and say sorry. Or are you too proud?'

'Too proud?' She seemed uncertain, confused. 'I don't know.'

'Too proud because he's a German? Look, I know about your fiance and brother and I'm terribly sorry but that doesn't - '

'Janet shouldn't have told you.'

'Don't be daft. You didn't object to her telling you about my family.'

'And that's not all.' She sounded almost angry. 'You said they went around killing thousands of innocent people and that-'

'Those were not my words. Janet did not say that. You're doing what you accused the Lieutenant of doing - fibbing. Also, you're dodging the issue. Okay, so the nasty Germans killed two people you knew and loved. I wonder how many thousands they killed before they were shot down. But that doesn't matter really, does it? You never knew them or their names. How can you weep over people you've never met, husbands and wives, sweethearts and children, without faces or names? It's quite ridiculous, isn't it, and statistics are so boring. Tell me, did your brother ever tell you how he felt when he went out in his Lancaster bomber and slaughtered his mother's fellow countrymen? But, of course, he'd never met them so that made it all right, didn't it?'

She said in a whisper: 'I think you're horrible.'

'You think I'm horrible. Janet thinks I'm a heartless fiend. I think you're a pair of splendid hypocrites."

'Hypocrites?'

'You know - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The ward sister and Margaret Morrison. Janet's just as bad. At least I don't, deal in double standards.' McKinnon made to leave but she caught him by the arm and indulged, not for the first time, in the rather disconcerting practice of examining each of his eyes in turn.

'You didn't really mean that, did you? About Janet and myself being hypocrites?'

'No.'

'You are devious. All right, all right, I'll make it right with him.'

'I knew you would. Margaret Morrison.'

'Not Ward Sister Morrison?'

'You don't look like Mrs Hyde.' He paused. 'When were you to have been married?'

'Last September.'

'Janet. Janet and your brother. They were pretty friendly, weren't they?'

'Yes. She told you that?'

'No. She didn't have to.'

'Yes, they were pretty friendly.' She was silent for a few moments. 'It was to have been a double wedding.'

'Oh h.e.l.l,' McKinnon said and walked away. He checked ail the scuttles in the hospital area - even from the relatively low alt.i.tude of a submarine conning-tower the light from an uncovered porthole can be seen for several miles - went down to the engine-room, spoke briefly to Patterson, returned to the mess-deck, had dinner, then went into the wards. Janet Magnusson, in Ward B, watched his approach without enthusiasm.

'So you've been at it again.'

'Yes.'

'Do you know what I'm talking about?'

'No. I don't know and I don't care. I suppose you're talking about your friend Maggie - and yourself. Of course I'm sorry for you both, terribly sorry, and maybe tomorrow or when we get to Aberdeen I'll break my heart for yesterday. But not now, Janet. Now I have one or two more important things on my mind such as, say, getting to Aberdeen.'

'Archie.' She put a hand on his arm. 'I won't even say sorry. I'm just whistling in the dark, don't you know that, you clown? I don't want to think about tomorrow.' She gave a shiver, which could have been mock or not. 'I feel funny. I've been talking to Maggie. It's going to happen tomorrow, isn't it, Archie?' It's going to happen tomorrow, isn't it, Archie?'

'If by tomorrow you mean when daylight comes, then, yes. Could even be tonight, if the moon breaks through.'

'Maggie says it has to be a submarine. So you said.'

'Has to be.'

'How do you fancy being taken a prisoner?'

'I don't fancy it at all.'

'But you will be, won't you?'

'I hope not.'

'How can you hope not? Maggie says you're going to surrender. She didn't say so outright because she knows we're friends - we are friends, Mr McKinnon?'

'We are friends, Miss Magnusson.'

'Well, she didn't say so, but I think she thinks you're a bit of a coward, really.'

'A very - what's the word, perspicacious? - a very perspicacious girl is our Maggie.'

'She's not as perspicacious as I am. You really think there's a chance we'll reach Aberdeen?'

There's a chance.'

'And after that?'

'Aha! Clever, clever Janet Magnusson. If I haven't got any plans for the future then I don't see any future. Isn't that it? Well, I do see a future and I do have plans. I'm going to take my first break since nineteen thirty-nine and have a couple of weeks back home in the Shetlands. When were you last back home in the Shetlands?'

'Not for years.'

'Will you come with me, Janet?'

'Of course.'

McKinnon went into Ward A and pa.s.sed up the aisle to where Sister Morrison was sitting at her table. 'How's the Captain?'

'Well enough, I suppose. Bit dull and quiet. But why ask me? Ask him.'

'I have to ask the ward sister's permission to take him out of the ward.'

'Take him out - whatever for?'

'I want to talk to him.'

'You can talk to him here.'

'I can just see the nasty suspicious looks I'd be getting from you if we started whispering together and the nasty suspicious questions I'd be getting afterwards. My dear Margaret, we have matters of state to discuss.'

'You don't trust me, is that it?'

'That's the second time you've asked me that silly question. Same answer. I do trust you. Totally. I trust Mr Kennet there. But there are five others I don't know whether to trust or not.'

McKinnon took the Captain from the ward and returned with him inside two minutes. After she'd tucked him back in bed, Margaret Morrison said: 'That must rank as the shortest state conference in history.'

'We are men of few words.'

'And that's the only communique I'll be getting?'

'Well, that's the way high-level diplomacy is conducted. Secrecy is the watchword.'

As he entered Ward B he was stopped by Janet Magnusson. 'What was all that about, then? You and Captain Bowen, I mean.'

'I have not had a private talk with the Captain in order to tell all the patients in Ward B about it. I am under an* oath of silence.'

Margaret Morrison came in, looked from one to the other, then said: 'Well, Janet, has he been more forthcoming with you than with me?'

'Forthcoming? Under an oath of silence, he claims. His own oath, I have no doubt.'

'No doubt. What have you been doing to the Captain?'

'Doing? I've been doing nothing.'

'Saying, then. He's changed since he came back. Seems positively cheerful.'

'Cheerful? How can you tell. With all those bandages, you can't see a square inch of his face.'

'There are more ways than one of telling. He's sitting up in bed, rubbing his hands from time to time and twice he's said "Aha".'

'I'm not surprised. It takes a special kind of talent to reach the hearts and minds of the ill and depressed. It's a gift. Some of us have it.' He looked at each in turn. 'And some of us haven't.'

He left them looking at each other.

McKinnon was woken by Trent at 2.0 a.m. 'The moon's out, Bo'sun.'

The moon, as McKinnon bleakly appreciated when he arrived on the port wing of the bridge, was very much out, a three-quarter moon and preternaturally bright - or so it seemed to him. At least half the sky was clear. The visibility out over the now almost calm seas was remarkable, so much so that he had no difficulty in picking out the line of the horizon: and if he could see the horizon, the Bo'sun all too clearly realized, then a submarine could pick them up ten miles away, especially if the San Andreas were silhouetted against the light of the moon. McKinnon felt naked and very vulnerable. He went below, roused Curran, told him to take up lookout on the starboard wing of the bridge, found Naseby, asked him to check that the falls and davits of the motor lifeboats were clear of ice and working freely and then returned to the port wing where, every minute or two, he swept the horizon with his binoculars. But the sea between the San Andreas and the horizon remained providentially empty.

The San Andreas itself was a remarkable sight. Wholly covered in ice and snow, it glittered and shone and sparkled in the bright moonlight except for a narrow central area/ abaft of the superstructure where wisping smoke from the shattered funnel had laid a brown smear all the way to the stern post. The fore and aft derricks were huge glistening Christmas trees, festooned with thick-ribbed woolly halliards and stays, and the anchor chains on the fo'c's'le had been transformed into great fluffy ropes of the softest cotton wool. It was a strange and beautiful world with an almost magical quality about it, ethereal almost: but one had only to think of the lethal dangers that lay under the surrounding waters and the beauty and the magic ceased to exist.

An hour pa.s.sed by and everything remained quiet and peaceful. Another hour came and went, nothing untoward happened and McKinnon could scarcely believe their great good fortune. And before the third uneventful hour was up the clouds had covered the moon and it had begun to snow again, a gentle snowfall only, but enough, with the hidden moon, to shroud them in blessed anonymity again. Telling Ferguson, who now had the watch, to shake him if the snow stopped, he went below in search of some more sleep.

It was nine o'clock when he awoke. It was an unusually late awakening for him but he wasn't unduly perturbed -dawn was still an hour distant. As he crossed the upper deck he noted that the conditions were just as they had been four . hours previously - moderate seas, a wind no stronger than Force three and still the same gently falling snow. McKinnon had no belief in the second sight but he felt in his bones that this peace and calm would have gone before the morning was out.

Down below he talked in turn with Jones, McGuigan, Stephen and Johnny Holbrook. They had taken it in turn, and in pairs, to monitor the comings and goings of everybody in the hospital. All four swore that n.o.body had stirred aboard during the night and that, most certainly, no one had at any time left the hospital area.

He had breakfast with Dr Singh, Dr Sinclair, Patterson and Jamieson - Dr Singh, he thought, looked unusually tired and strained - then went to Ward B where he found Janet Magnusson. She looked pale and there were shadows under her eyes.

McKinnon looked at her with concern.

'What's wrong, Janet?'