Endangered Species Read Free

specifically ordered it.
    â€˜You’ve impressed the Old Woman,’ the Marine Superintendent, Captain Shaw, had said to him, referring familiarly to the widow of the company’s founding chairman, a woman whose influence in the Eastern Steam Navigation Company remained pre-eminent. ‘She insists on you occupying the Third Mate’s berth.’
    Shaw had regarded him through his rheumy eyes, his yellow face already betraying the cancer that, with the overwork of six years of war, would lay him in his grave before the maiden voyage of the new
Matthew Flinders
was over.
    â€˜Don’t let the Old Woman down, laddie,’ Shaw added, repeating the nickname by which Mrs Dent was known throughout Eastern Steam.
    â€˜I’ll do my best, sir.’
    â€˜Aye, see that you do or I’ll have your hide.’
    He had stepped happily out into Water Street, disregarding the sleeting rain driving up from the Pier Head and the restless chop of the grey Mersey beyond. He and Shelagh had high hopes now the war was over, and the approbation of the Old Woman and a berth on a brand new ship meant that they would be able to marry soon, their future secure. Britain, he had thought with the experience of war behind him, would always need her Merchant Navy.
    It was odd, Mackinnon thought, how easy it was to remember these things: the elation, the rain, and Shelagh’s pleasure when he had phoned and told her he would be crossing to Belfast that night. And all because the ‘Old Woman’ approved of him.
    Mackinnon’s memory flashed back to the events that had earned him the Old Woman’s good opinion.
    It had been raining that black night, a stinging rain coming up astern of the convoy with a following sea that made the old
Matthew Flinders
roll and scend in a twisting that racked the creaking hull. The first of her name, she grossed eight thousand tons, a coal-fired steamer capable of no more than nine knots, built for profit out of the reparations greedily scooped up by Dent and his partners after the First World War. She had been obsolete when she had slid down the ways and into the grubby Tees and was over twenty years old that foul and bloody night the U-boats found her off Rockall.
    â€˜Almost home and dry,’ Taffy Davies had said as Apprentice Mackinnon relieved him on the starboard Lewis gun at midnight and about five seconds before the first explosion. Mackinnon had still been shaking the sleep out of his weary young frame after what seemed like weeks of endless, mind-numbing watch-and-watch, four hours on and four off, with sleep in short snatches of three hours if undisturbed by the ship’s motion or the enemy. When the night split apart and the gouts of orange and yellow flame shot skywards to die to a flickering before the concussion rolled over the water towards them, he was conscious of shock, and then the relief of knowing it was not them.
    â€˜Jesus!’ blasphemed Taffy as he made way for Mackinnon in the sand-bagged gun pit, ‘that’s the
Patagonia
.’
    Mackinnon needed no further enlightenment. After days of weary plodding across the Atlantic, they knew the relative position of every ship in those four, strung-out and irregular columns; knew the dawn reshuffling that took place after thedestruction of the nights as the Commodore of Convoy HX 987 rearranged his battered charges. They knew the
Patagonia
well, having laid ahead of her in Newport News and become friendly with her apprentices, penniless like themselves.
    â€˜The poor bastards,’ whispered Davies as the flames were extinguished by the sea and the night was lit by the cold glare of the starshells thrown up by the questing escorts. The SS
Patagonia
had ceased to exist, for she had been laden with high-explosive ammunition.
    â€˜Can you see anything?’ a voice asked, as behind the two boys the Second and Third Mates stared through their binoculars.
    The adjacent ships were thrown into