Jansen came up the ladder behind him. He was a tall, heavily-built man and in spite of the tangled black beard, the knitted cap and faded reefer coat with no rank badges, was a chief petty officer. A lecturer in Moral Philosophy at Harvard before the war and a fanatical weekend yachtsman, he had resolutely defeated every attempt to elevate him to commissioned rank.
‘A lone wolf, Lieutenant.’
‘You can say that again,’ Jago told him. ‘A JU 88 in the Hebrides.’
‘And one of the Reichsmarschall’s later models, to judge by his turn of speed.’
‘But what in the hell was he doing here?’
‘I know, Lieutenant,’ Jansen said soothingly. ‘It’s getting so you can’t depend on anyone these days. I’ve already checked below, by the way. Superficial damage. No casualties.’
‘Thanks,’ Jago said. ‘And that smoke flare was quick thinking.’
He found that his right hand was trembling slightly and held it out. ‘Would you look at that. Wasn’t it yesterday I was complaining that the only thing we got to fight up here was the weather?’
‘Well, you know what Heidegger had to say on that subject, Lieutenant.’
‘No, I don’t Jansen, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘He argued that for authentic living what is necessary is the resolute confrontation of death.’
Jago said patiently, ‘Which is exactly what I’ve been doing for two years now and you’ve usually been about a yard behind me. Under the circumstances, I’ll tell you what you can do with Heidegger, Jansen. You can put him where grandma had the pain. And try to rustle up some coffee while I check over the course again.’
‘As the Lieutenant pleases.’
Jago went into the wheelhouse and slumped into the chart-table chair. Petersen had the wheel – a seaman with ten years in the merchant service before the war, including two voyages to Antarctica in whalers.
‘You okay?’ Jago demanded.
‘Fine, Lieutenant.’
Jago pulled out British Admiralty chart 1796. Barra Head to Skye. South Uist, Barra and a scattering of islands below it, with Fhada, their destination, at the southern end of the chain. The door was kicked open and Jansen came in with a mug of coffee which he put on the table.
‘What a bloody place,’ Jago said, tapping the chart. ‘Magnetic anomalies reported throughout the entire area.’
‘Well, that’s helpful,’ Jansen said. ‘Just the thing when you’re working out a course in dirty weather.’
‘Those islands south of Uist are a graveyard,’ Jago went on. ‘Everywhere you look on the damned chart it says Heavy Breakers or Dangerous Seas. One hazard after another.’
Jansen unfolded a yellow oilskin tobacco pouch, produced a pipe and started to fill it, leaning against the door. ‘I was talking to some fishermen in Mallaig before we left. They were telling me that sometimes the weather out there is so bad, Fhada’s cut off for weeks at a time.’
‘The worst weather in the world when those Atlantic storms start moving in,’ Jago said. ‘God knows what it must be like in winter.’
‘Then what in the hell is Admiral Reeve doing in a place like that?’
‘Search me. I didn’t even know he was up here till I was told to pick up that dispatch for him in Mallaig and deliver it. Last I heard of him was D-day. He was deputy director of operations for Naval Intelligence and got himself a free trip on the Norwegian destroyer Svenner that was sunk by three Möwe-class torpedo boats. He lost his right eye and they tell me his left arm’s only good for show.’
‘A hell of a man,’ Jansen said. ‘He got out of Corregidor after MacArthur left. Sailed a lugger nearly six hundred miles to Cagayan and came out on one of the last planes. As I remember, he went down in a destroyer at Midway, was taken aboard the Yorktown and ended up in the water again.’
‘Careful, Jansen. Your enthusiasm is showing and I didn’t think that was possible where top brass was concerned.’
‘But this isn’t just another admiral we’re talking about, Lieutenant. He’s responsible for an excellent history of naval warfare and probably the best biography of John Paul Jones in print. Good God, sir, the man can actually read and write.’ Jansen put a match to the bowl of his pipe and added out of the side of his mouth, ‘Quite an accomplishment for any naval officer, as the Lieutenant will be the first to agree?’
‘Jansen’, Jago said. ‘Get the hell out of here.’
Jansen withdrew and Jago swung round to find Petersen grinning hugely. ‘Go on, you too! I’ll take over.’
‘Sure thing, Lieutenant.’
Petersen went out and Jago reached for another cigarette. His fingers had stopped trembling. Rain spattered against the window as the MGB lifted over another wave and it came to him, with a kind of wonder, that he was actually enjoying himself, in spite of the aching back, the constant fatigue that must be taking years off his life.
Harry Jago was twenty-five and looked ten years older, even on a good day, which was hardly surprising when one considered his war record.
He’d dropped out of Yale in March 1941 to join the navy and was assigned to PT boats, joining Squadron Two in time for the Solomons’ campaign. The battle for Guadalcanal lasted six months. Jago went in at one end a crisp, clean nineteen-year-old ensign and emerged a lieutenant, junior grade, with a Navy Cross and two boats shot from under him.
Afterwards Squadron Two was recommissioned and sent to England at the urgent request of the Office of Strategic Services to land and pick up American agents on the French coast. Again Jago survived, this time the Channel, the constant head-on clashes with German E-boats out of Cherbourg. He even survived the hell of Omaha beach on D-day.
His luck finally ran out on 28 June, when E-boats attacked a convoy of American landing craft waiting in Lyme Bay to cross the Channel. Jago arrived with dispatches from Portsmouth to find himself facing six of the best that the Kriegsmarine could supply. In a memorable ten-minute engagement, he sank one, damaged another, lost five of his crew and ended up in the water with shrapnel in his left thigh, the right cheek laid open to the bone.
When he finally came out of hospital in August they gave him what was left of his old crew, nine of them, and a new job: the rest that he so badly needed, playing postman in the Hebrides to the various American and British weather stations and similar establishments in the islands in a pre-war MGB, courtesy of the Royal Navy, that started to shake herself to pieces if he attempted to take her above twenty knots. Some previous owner had painted the legend Dead End underneath the bridge rail, a sentiment capable of several interpretations.
Just for a month or two, the squadron commander had told Jago. Look on it as a kind of holiday. I mean to say, nothing ever happens up there, Harry.
Jago grinned in spite of himself and, as a rain squall hurled itself against the window, increased speed, the wheel kicking in his hands. The sea was his life now. Meat and drink to him, more important than any woman. It was the circumstance of war which had given him this, but the war wouldn’t last forever.
He said softly, ‘What in the hell am I going to do when it’s all over?’
There were times when Rear Admiral Carey Reeve definitely wondered what life was all about. Times when the vacuum of his days seemed unbearable and the island that he loved with such a deep and unswerving passion, a prison.
On such occasions he usually made for the same spot, a hill called in the Gaelic Dun Bhuide, the Yellow Fort, above Telegraph Bay on the south-west tip of Fhada, and so named