Free The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes

had to come from him. I couldn’t drive him. I knew that. I just sat there and waited and the silence tightened between us. He finished his coffee and put the mug down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The silence became unbearable, full of the death-struggle sounds of the ship. ‘Better come and have a drink,’ he said, his voice tense.
    I didn’t move. I didn’t say anything either.
    â€˜It’s tough on you, but you didn’t have to come on board, did you?’ He stared at me angrily. ‘What the hell do you think I can do?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ I said. ‘You’re the captain. It’s for you to give the orders.’
    â€˜Captain!’ He laughed without mirth. ‘Master of the
Mary Deare
!’ He rolled it round his tongue, sneeringly. ‘Well, at least I’ll have gone down with the ship this time. They said she was jinxed, some of them.’ He seemed to be speaking to himself. ‘They were convinced she’d never make it. But we’re all jinxed when times get hard; and she’s been kicked around the world for a good many years. She must have been a crack cargo liner in her day, but now she’s just a rusty old hulk making her last voyage. We’d a cargo for Antwerp, and then we were taking her across the North Sea to Newcastle to be broken up.’ He was silent after that his head on one side, listening. He was listening to the sounds of the ship being pounded by the waves. ‘What a thing it would be—to steam into Southampton with no crew and the ship half-full of water.’ He laughed. It was the drink in him talking, and he knew it. ‘Let’s see,’ he said, still speaking to himself. ‘The tide will be turning against us in a few hours. Wind over tide. Still, if we could hold her stern-on to the wind, maybe we could keep her afloat a little longer. Anything could happen. The wind might shift; the gale might blow itself out.’ But there was no conviction in the way he said it. He glanced at his watch. ‘Barely twelve hours from now and the tide will be carrying us down on to the rocks and it’ll still be dark. If visibility is all right, we should be able to see the buoys; at least we’ll know—’ His voice checked abruptly. ‘The buoys! That’s what I was thinking about before I went to sleep. I was looking at the chart . . .’ His voice had become animated, his eyes suddenly bright with excitement. And then his fist crashed against the palm of his hand and he jumped to his feet. ‘That’s it! If we were to hit the tide just right . . .’ He pushed by me and I heard his feet take the steps of the ladder leading to the bridge two at a time.
    I followed him up and found him in the chartroom, poring over a big book of Admiralty tide-tables. He looked up and for the first time I saw him as a leader, all the fatigue wiped out, the drink evaporated. ‘There’s just a chance,’ he said. ‘If we can keep her afloat, we might do it. It means working down in that stoke-hold—working like you’ve never worked in your life before; turn-and-turn about—the stoke-hold and the wheelhouse.’ He seized hold of my arm. ‘Come on! Let’s see if we’ve got sufficient head of steam to move the engines.’ A wave hit the side of the ship. Sheets of water fell with a crash, sluicing into the wheel-house through the broken doorway leading to the port wing of the bridge. Out of the tail of my eye I saw water thundering green across the half-submerged bows. And then I was following him down the ladder again into the body of the ship and he was shouting: ‘By God, man, I might cheat them yet.’ And his face, caught in the light of my torch as it was turned momentarily up to me, was filled with a sort of crazy vitality.

3
    THE DARKNESS OF the engine-room was warm with the smell of hot oil and