Free Landfall by Nevil Shute Page A

silent, as he told his story.
    The lieutenant-commander, Dale, listened with all the overbearing confidence of youth. He had little knowledge of the Air Force, or of anything outside the Navy. He had entered at the age of fourteen and had lived in, and lived for, the Navy ever since. He was efficient. He hated inaccurate, slovenly work. He never made mistakes himself: they were unnecessary, beastly things. Only damn fools made mistakes. Here was this blushing, stammering young ass who had the insolence to say that he could work out a position accurately, working with one hand upon a chart that was sliding about on a seat cushion. The result was that he had made mistakes—not one, but a whole flock of them, and one of them had caused the
Caranx
to be sunk. He listened in a cyncial cold rage.
    Rutherford listened sympathetically. He was closer to the disaster than the others. He knew all the officers of
Caranx
intimately, had messed with them for months. Most of his service life had been spent in submarines and he had known several disasters. He had come to realise this one only an hour before, but already he had accepted with a numbed acquiescence that never again would he meet Billy Parkinson, or play a round of golf with Stone, or drink a beer with Sandy Anderson. Presently he would have to write the letters to Jo Parkinson and Dorothy Stone, and to Anderson’s mother at Dairy. From his experience he knew how these things happened. Good men, honest, competent chaps, made a mistake—a hatch had been left open one time. As a young lieutenant he himself had very nearly sunk his own submarine by doing the wrong thing with a lavatory flush. If it were true that
Caranx
had been lost by this young pilot’s mistake, the fault was rather in thesystem that put such power into the hands of inexperienced young men. There was no blame in his mind for Chambers. He had been older than that when he had had his trouble with the lavatory.
    Captain Burnaby listened with a mind overlaid with policy. Throughout his service life the strategy and tactics of reconnaissance had been his speciality. He had been in destroyers for much of his time, and had risen to the command of a flotilla. Now he was in this shore job and in intimate liaison with the Royal Air Force. For the first time in his life he drew reports from a service that he did not control. He felt like a horse in blinkers. He could not reach out quickly and pull in his information as he had done all his life; he must ask another service if they would get it for him, and they would only do so if they had the time to spare, or so he felt. He was perpetually maddened and infuriated with the restraint. He believed, with all his heart and soul, that the existing system was totally wrong, that the aeroplanes patrolling the narrow seas should be under naval control, staffed by the Navy, part of the Fleet Air Arm. Most of the Admiralty, he knew, agreed with him. Dual control was inefficient, and mistakes were bound to happen. One of them had happened now, and a valuable unit of the Navy had been sunk by this young fool. Perhaps after this the Cabinet would listen to the Admiralty case. The
Caranx
was a bitter and a serious loss, but if, through her, the Navy were to gain control of its own air service, she would not have been lost in vain.
    Dickens sat warily watching, sitting on the fence. He knew all that passed in the simple, direct mind of Captain Burnaby; he realised the political aspect of the matter to the full. He could not help his pilot and he did not much want to. If Chambers had really sunk the
Caranx
it was a bad show, a piece of inefficiency discreditable to the Royal Air Force. The pilot wouldhave to suffer, as a matter of course. It was much more important that the relations of the Navy and the Air Force should not be impaired; in time of war there must be no internal quarrels. He knew the Navy wanted their own coastal patrol: he believed that they had too little experience of