When Eight Bells Toll

'Pine needles.'  I told him what had happened.    'Why a machine this size?   You could ferry a battalion in this one.'

'Fourteen men, to be precise. I do lots of crazy things, Calvert, but I don't fly itsy-bitsy two-bit choppers in this kind of weather. Be blown out of the sky. With only two of us, the long-range tanks are full.'

'You can fly all day?'

'More or less. Depends how fast we go. What do you want from me?'

'Civility, for a start. Or don't you like early morning rising?'

'Tm an Air-Sea Rescue pilot, Calvert. This is .the only machine on the base big enough to go out looking in this kind -of weather. And I should be out looking, not out on some cloak-and-dagger joy-ride. I don't care how important it is, there's people maybe clinging to a life-raft fifty miles out in the Atlantic. That's my job. But I've got my orders. What do you want?'

'The Moray Reset'

'You heard?   Yes, that's her.'

'She doesn't exist.  She never has existed.'

'What are you talking about?   The news broadcasts-----'

'I'll tell you as much as you need to know, Lieutenant. It's essential that I be able to search this area without arousing suspicion. The only way that can be done is by inventing an ironclad reason. The foundering Moray Rose is that reason. So we tell the tale,'

'Phoney?'

'Phoney.'

'You can fix it?' he said slowly. 'You can fix a news broadcast?'

'Yes.'

'Maybe you could get me fired at that.' He smiled for the first time. 'Sorry, sir. Lieutenant Williams - Scotty to you - is now his normal cheerful willing self. What's on?'

'Know the coast-lines and islands of this area well?'

'Prom the air?'

'Yes.'

'I've been here twenty months now. Air-Sea Rescue and in between army and navy exercises and hunting for lost climbers. Most of my work is with the Marine Commandos. I know this area at least as well as any man alive.'

'I'm looking for a place where a man could hide a boat. Afairly big boat. Forty feet - maybe fifty. Might be in a big boathouse, might be under over-hanging trees up some creek, might even be in some tiny secluded harbour normally invisible from the sea. Between Islay and Skye.'

'Well, now, is that all. Have you any idea how many hundreds of miles of coastline there is in that lot, taking in aU the islands? Maybe thousands? How long do I have for this job? A month?'

'By sunset to-day. Now, wait. We can cut out all centres of population, and by that I mean anything with more than two or three houses together. We can cut out known fishing grounds. We can cut out regular steamship routes. Does that help?'

'A lot. What are we really looking for?'

'I've told you.'

'Okay, okay, so mine is not to reason why. Any idea where you'd like to start, any ideas for limiting the search?'

'Let's go due east to the mainland. Twenty miles up the coast, then twenty south. Then we'll try Torbay Sound and the Isle of Torbay. Then the islands farther west and north.'

'Torbay Sound has a steamer service.'

'Sorry, I should have said a daily service. Torbay has a bi-weekly service.'

'Fasten your seat-belt and get on those earphones. We're going to get thrown around quite a bit to-day. I hope you're a good sailor.'

'And the earphones?' They were the biggest I'd ever seen, four inches wide with inch-thick linings of what looked like sorbo rubber. A spring loaded swing microphone was attached to the headband.

'For the ears,' the lieutenant said kindly. 'So that you don't get perforated drums. And so you won't be deaf for a week afterwards. If you can imagine yourself inside a steel drum in the middle of a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering outside, you'll have some idea of what the racket is like once we start up.'

Even with the earphone muffs on, it sounded exactly like being in a steel drum in a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering on the outside. The earphones didn't seem to have the slightest effect at all, the noise came hammering and beating at you through every facial and cranial bone, but on the one and very brief occasion when I cautiously lifted onephone to find out what the noise was like without them and if they were really doing any good at all, I found out exactly what Lieutenant Williams meant about perforated drums. He hadn't been joking. But even with them on, after a couple of hours ray head felt as if it were coming apart. I looked occasionally at the dark lean face of the young Welshman beside me, a man who had to stand this racket day in, day out, the year round. He looked quite sane to me. I'd have been in a padded cell in a week.

I didn't have to be in that helicopter a week. Altogether, I spent eight hours' flying time in it and it felt like a leap year.

Our first run northwards up the mainland coast produced what was to be the first of many false alarms that day. Twenty minutes after leaving Torbay we spotted a river, a small one but still a'river, flowing into the sea. We