Night Over Water - Ken Follett [161]
PART V
BOTWOOD TO SHEDIAC
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Eddie Deakin could feel the hostility of his crewmates as they went ashore in the launch. None of them would meet his eye. They all knew how close they had come to running out of fuel and crashing into the stormy ocean. Their lives had been in danger. No one yet knew just why it had happened, but fuel was the engineer’s responsibility, so Eddie was to blame.
They must have noticed that he had been behaving oddly. He had been preoccupied the whole flight, he had talked scarily to Tom Luther during dinner, and a window had inexplicably broken while he was in the men’s room. No wonder the others felt he was not one hundred percent reliable anymore. That kind of feeling spread fast in a tightly knit crew whose lives depended on one another.
The knowledge that his mates no longer trusted him was a bitter pill to swallow. He was proud to be considered one of the most solid guys around. To make matters worse, he himself was slow to forgive others’ mistakes, and had sometimes been scornful of people whose performance fell off because of personal problems. “Excuses don’t fly,” he sometimes said, a crack that now made him wince every time he thought of it.
He had tried telling himself he did not give a damn. He had to save his wife and he had to do it alone: he could not ask anyone for help, and he could not worry about other people’s feelings. He had risked their lives, but the gamble had paid off and that was the end of it. It was all perfectly logical, and none of it made any difference. Engineer Deakin, solid as a rock, had turned into Unreliable Eddie, a guy you had to watch in case he screwed up. He hated people like Unreliable Eddie. He hated himself.
A lot of passengers had stayed on board the plane, as always at Botwood: they were glad of the chance to catch some sleep while the plane was still. Ollis Field, the F.B.I. man, and his prisoner, Frankie Gordino, had also stayed behind, of course: they had not disembarked at Foynes either. Tom Luther was in the launch, wearing a topcoat with a fur collar and a dove gray hat. As they approached the pier, Eddie moved next to Luther and murmured: “Wait for me at the airline building. I’ll take you to where the phone is.”
Botwood was a huddle of wooden houses around a deepwater harbor in the landlocked estuary of the Exploits River. Even the millionaires on the Clipper could never find much to buy here. The village had had telephone service only since June. Such few cars as there were drove on the left, for Newfoundland was still under British rule.
They all went into the wooden Pan American building and the crew made their way to the flight room. Eddie immediately read the weather reports sent by radio from the big new landplane airport thirty-eight miles away at Gander Lake. Then he calculated the fuel requirement for the next leg. Because this hop was so much shorter, the calculation was not so crucial, but all the same the plane never carried a great excess of fuel because payload was expensive. There was a sour taste in his mouth as he worked out the arithmetic. Would he ever be able to go through these sums again without thinking of this awful day? The question was academic: after what he was about to do, he would never again be engineer on a Clipper.
The captain might already be wondering whether to trust Eddie’s calculations. Eddie needed to do something toward restoring confidence. He decided to show some implicit self-doubt. He went over his figures twice, then handed his work to Captain Baker, saying in a neutral tone: “I’d appreciate it if someone would