A Twist Of Sand

"He's trying to say something to you," said the nurse gently.

He spoke loudly.

"North?" I echoed. It sounded like north to me, but his voice was going.

"Twenty miles — north." He just couldn't get his failing voice round the last word. "North — north — north"

but it wasn't quite north, the way he said it. "Twenty miles south of north — big rock — twenty miles south of…"

The death rattle severed the last word.

Then to our utter astonishment, he sat up straight and said quite clearly and strongly: "A twist of sand, boy. It's your damn property anyway."

The nurse was crying. She put down the limp arm.

"His heart had stopped before he said that," she whispered.

VII

On the Tail of a Whale

the long South Atlantic afternoon ebbed out westwards towards St. Helena. From the conning-tower the ocean stretched away, apparently limitless, across steamship routes forsaken for years of their peacetime traffic. War made the South Atlantic lonelier than it is in peacetime, and that is lonely enough. Sun-tanned, wearing shorts, off-duty men played Uckers on the casing near the gun. The swell from the south-west scarcely had energy enough to reach up the steel deck. Between Mossamedes and St. Helena we seemed the only craft afloat on the great waters.

John Garland, white shirt open at the neck, and tanned as an advertisement figure, looked down lazily on the group below.

"If this goes on, Geoffrey, we'll all be so bored that we'll be betting on the Uckers men too — despite Navy regulations."

I said nothing. I was worried. I could see the signs of slackness, the canker of the present easy life, eating into my veteran, battle-tried crew. Sun-tanned beauties don't return from submarine cruises. It had all been so easy, and so unwarlike, that even the ghastly shadow of why I was here at all on a sunny afternoon in the South Atlantic seemed far away. I had flown out to Gibraltar and found Trout waiting. She was ready fuelled, ammunitioned and stocked up. On someone's orders — someone high-up who smelled the danger of the Trout's mission without actually knowing it — cases of Canadian and American luxury foods had been sent aboard, a case or two of Scotch for the officers, and even a dozen of the finest Tio Pepe especially for me. For those about to die… I thought grimly to myself.

There was no doubt at Gibraltar and at Freetown, where we fuelled, and again at Simonstown, Cape, that Trout was priority. Nothing was too much trouble, and no request was refused. The crew got on to it quickly. But, Navy-like, they forgot what danger must lurk behind these unusual gestures, and were content to live like lords. I overheard one of my ratings, half drunk, say at Simonstown: "Whisky, my boy; no piddling drinks for the Trout-men — only the best is good enough for Trout."

At first I had not seen the softness, but the long weeks of solitary cruising up and down, down and up, through the vastness of the South Atlantic was robbing the crew of their super-sharp vigilance. That is the difference between life and death in a submarine. As the afternoon wore on, I was more and more jarred by the easy-going air of life aboard H.M.S. Trout. I had done the conventional thing. I had ruled the South Atlantic off into tight little squares. I had plotted the position where the Dunedin Star had first been rent under water; I had patrolled day and night, night and day. For weeks I had not even seen a ship. There was, in fact, nothing. Not a ship, not a sail.

John's remark jarred. I could not go on carrying out practice attacks, dives, dummy shelling and the rest of it day after day. Trout seemed to have reached a point of crisis, a crisis of deadly boredom. All war is boring, but this was boring beyond any war. My orders were explicit: to locate and sink NP I. Where in God's name, I thought desperately, gazing round the limitless sea about me, could she be? Had she simply blown up and disappeared without trace? Would Trout continue her ceaseless patrolling until two men at the Admiralty became convinced that she no longer existed? Or would they recall me peremptorily, asking for an account of the failure of my mission?

I cast a mental eye over the charts. There was nowhere where NP I could hide. I thought of every remote anchorage from Walvis Bay to Pointe Noire in Africa; the South American coast was too long to even consider in relation to this damn-fool square-search pattern. And I meant to go on doing it for months yet!

Through this mangrove tangle of conflicting thoughts the look-out's voice came like a bucket of cold water.

"Bridge, sir! Tripod masts bearing red one-oh."

Heavens! The relief of spotting a ship! It surged over me even as I pressed the alarm. The Uckers men gazed at one another in disbelief. I really think they had forgotten what an emergency dive was like, I spoke into the voice-pipe.

"Eighty feet. Course three-two-oh. Clear the bridge."