Juggernaut

After a few minutes the surgeon stood up and to my amazement he looked quite relieved. 'Please send for a stretcher,' he said courteously, but there was one already waiting, and willing hands to carry Wingstead to the mobile hospital. Dr Marriot went with him, but Dr Kat stayed behind.

'I should have seen this coming,' he said. 'But you may set your minds at rest, gentlemen. Mister Wingstead will be perfectly all right. He is not dangerously ill.'

'What the hell is it then?' I asked.

'Overstrain, overwork, on top of the injuries he suffered in the plane crash. He should have been made to take things more easily. Tell me, did you notice anything wrong yourselves?'

I said, feeling sick with anger at myself, 'Yes, I did. I've seen him losing his drive, his energy. And I damned well kept pushing at him, like a fool. I'm sorry -'

Kemp cut me off abruptly.

'Don't say that. I saw it too and I know him better than anyone else here. We must have been crazy to let him go on like that. Will he really be all right?'

'All he needs is sleep, rest, good nourishment. We can't do too much about the last but I assure you I won't let him get up too soon this time. I might tell you that I'm very relieved in one respect. I have been afraid of fever – cholera, typhoid -any number of scourges that might strike. When I heard that Mister Wingstead had collapsed I thought it was the first such manifestation. That it is not is a matter of considerable relief.'

The Doctor's report on Wingstead was circulated, and the concern that had run through the convoy camp like a brush fire died down.

I found Hammond. 'I want to talk to all the crew later this evening. The medical staff too. We'll tell them the whole plan. It's risky, but we can't ask people to work in ignorance.'

Then I went to find Sam Kironji.

'Sam, what's in that little hut inside the compound?' I asked him.

He looked at me suspiciously. He'd already found the compound gate unlocked and Harry Zimmerman and two others counting empty drums, much to his disgust. 'Why you want to know?'

I clung to my patience. 'Sam, just tell me.'

There was nothing much in it. The hut held a miscellany of broken tools, cordage, a few other stores that might be useful, and junk of all sorts. It was where Sam put the things he tidied away from everywhere else.

I made a space in the middle of it, had Kironji's desk brought in, and established it as my headquarters. The roadside cabin was too far from the camp and too exposed. Some wag removed a Pirelli calendar from the cabin wall and hung it in the hut, and when Kironji saw this I think it hurt him most of all.

'Stealers! Now you take my women,' he said tragically.

'Only to look at, same as you. You'll get them back, I promise. Thank you for the desk and the chair, Sam.'

He flapped his hand at me. 'Take everything. I not care no more. Mister Obukwe, he fire me.'

Hammond was listening with amusement. 'Never mind, Sam. If he does I'll hire you instead,' I said and hustled him outside. I sat down and Hammond perched on the end of the desk. We each had a pad of paper in front of us.

'Right, Ben. This is what I've got in mind.'

I began to sketch on the pad. I still have those sketches; they're no masterpieces of the draughtsman's art, but they're worth the whole Tate Gallery to me.

Take an empty drum and stand it up. Place around it, in close contact, six more drums, making damn sure their caps are all screwed home firmly. Build an eight-sided wooden framework for them, top, bottom and six sides, thus making a hexagon. No need to fill the sides solidly, just enough to hold the drums together like putting them in a cage. This I called the 'A' hexagon, which was to be the basic component of the raft. It had the virtue of needing no holes drilled into the drums, which would waste time and effort and risk leaks.

How much weight would an 'A' hexagon support?

We got our answer soon enough. While we were talking Sandy Bing reported breathlessly to the office. 'Mister Mannix? I got forty-three and a half gallons into a drum.' He was soaking wet and seemed to have enjoyed the exercise.

'Thanks, Sandy. Go and see how many empties Harry Zimmerman has found, please.' Zimmerman and his team were getting very greasy out in the compound.

The drums were forty-two gallons nominal but they were never filled to brimming and that extra space came in handy now. We figured that the natural buoyancy of the wooden cage would go some way to compensate for the weight of the steel drums, and Bing had just handed me another few pounds of flotation to play about with. We decided that my 'A' hexagon should support a weight of 3,000 pounds: one and a half tons.

But there wouldn't be much standing room. And a floating platform about six by five feet would be distinctly unstable. So my next lot of figures concerned the natural development upwards.