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.
All this would take a little time to produce but it shouldn’t be too difficult. Testing the finished product as a floating proposition would be interesting, and finding a way to push it along would stretch a few minds, but I didn’t really
doubt that it could be done. And the final result, weird of shape and design, was going to win no prizes for elegance. I jiggled with a list of required materials; some of them were going to be hard to find if not impossible. All in all, I couldn’t see why on earth I was so confident that the plan would work.
‘We have to go up a stage, Ben,’ I said, still sketching. ‘Look at this.’
The hexagon is a very useful shape, ask any honey bee, but I doubt if it has been used much in naval architecture.
‘Start off assuming we’ve built an “A”-gon,’ I told Ben. That was how new words came into a language, I guess, though I didn’t think this one would last long enough to qualify for
Webster’s Dictionary.
Ben caught on and grinned in appreciation. ‘Here’s what comes next.’
Take an ‘A’-gon and float it in shallow water so that a man could stand on the bottom and still handle equipment. Float another six ‘A’-gons round it and fasten together the hexagons of the outer ring. There is no need to fasten the inner one because, like the first drum, it is totally surrounded and pressed in from all sides.
The result is a ‘B’ hexagon, a ‘B’-gon in our new nomenclature, with a positive buoyancy of ten and a half tons, enough to carry over a hundred people or a medium sized truck. We decided to make two of them, which is why we needed a hundred drums.
Hammond was impressed and fascinated. ‘How do we make the cages?’ he asked.
‘We’ll have to find timber and cut pieces to the exact size,’ I said. ‘That won’t be too difficult. I’m more concerned about finding planking to deck it, otherwise it’ll be unsafe to walk on. Nyalan women make good cordage, and we can lash the “A”-gon frames together, which will save nails. But I’m worried about the fastening of the larger “B”-gons. Rope and fibre won’t help us there. We need steel cable.’
‘I’ve got some,’ he offered, a shade reluctantly.
‘I don’t want to have to use that yet. We’ll figure out something else.’
I stood up. ‘It’s only four o’clock and I need some exercise. There’s two hours of daylight yet. Let’s go build us an “A”-gon.’
We were just leaving the office when Bing arrived back.
‘Mister Zimmerman says they’ve only found sixty-seven drums,’ he said.
At the compound we found Zimmerman, Kirilenko and Derek Grafton looking mucky with old oil and somewhat bad-tempered. It appeared that there were not many empty drums. Kironji seldom got them back, and these had not been placed neatly away from the full drums but stood all over the place. Here Kironji’s normal tidiness had deserted him, to our detriment. It didn’t help that neither Grafton nor Kirilenko knew why they had to find empty drums, and of the two only the Russian was equable about taking unexplained orders.
I commiserated with them and sent them off for a breather, after we’d rolled eight or nine drums down to the lake shore. Zimmerman stayed with us. Hammond left in search of Kironji, to get the workshop unlocked; he would cut some timber frameworks and we decided to use rope, which we knew was available, for the prototype ‘A’-gon.
‘I don’t see how we’re going to find enough empties,’ Zimmerman grumbled.
‘Ever hear about the guy who went into a store to buy some eggs? There was a sign up saying “Cracked Eggs Half Price”, so he asked them to crack him a dozen eggs.’
Zimmerman smiled weakly.
‘You mean empty out full drums?’
‘Why not? To start with we’ll fill every fuel tank we can with either gas or diesel, and all our spare jerrycans too. If there are still not enough drums we’ll dig a big pit somewhere
well away from the camp and ditch the stuff. And put up a “No Smoking” notice.’
He realized I wasn’t joking and his jaw dropped. I suppose that as an oil man he was more used to getting the stuff out of the earth than to putting it back in. Then we were interrupted by Sam Kironji in his usual state of high indignation.
‘You cut trees! You use my saw. You never stop make trouble.’
I looked enquiringly at Sandy Bing who had raced in behind him. ‘Yes, Mister Mannix. Mister Hammond found a chain saw in the workshop. But it won’t be good for long. The teeth are nearly worn out and there’s no replacement.’
Kironji shook his head sadly. ‘You use my saw, you welcome. But you cut tree, you get in big trouble with Mister Nyama.’
‘Who’s he, Sam?’
‘Everybody know Mister Nyama. Big Government tree man. He cut many tree here, with big machine.’
I said, ‘Are you telling us that there’s a government logging camp near here?’
‘Sure.’
‘Well where, for God’s sake?’
Sam pointed along the lake. ‘One, two mile. They use our road.’
I recalled that the road led on past the compound, but I hadn’t given any thought as to where it went. A bad oversight on my part.
‘Chain saws,’ Zimmerman was saying, his voice rising to a chant of ecstasy, ‘Axes, felling axes, trimming axes, scrub cutters.’
‘Fantastic. Get off there right away. We’ve got enough drums to be going on with. Take some men, some of Sadiq’s if you have to. I’ll clear it with him. And Harry, plunder away; we’ll make everything good some time. Break in if you have to. My bet is that there’ll be nobody there anyhow.’
Zimmerman went off at a run and Kironji said dolefully, ‘You steal from Government, you steal from
anybody.’
Hammond rejoiced at the good news and had some himself. ‘Found an oxyacetylene welding kit in there with a few bottles. And a three-and-a-half inch Myford lathe that’ll come in handy.’
‘Bit small, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll find a use for it. There’s another outboard engine, too, and some other useful bits and pieces.’
‘Take them,’ said Kironji hysterically. ‘No need you steal. I give.’
I chuckled. When he saw us pouring his precious gasolene into a hole in the ground he’d be a broken man. ‘Come on, let’s build our “A”-gon.’
It took six of us nearly two hours to build the prototype ‘A’-gon but then we were inventing as we went along. From the middle distance the Nyalans watched us and wondered. Our people came to watch and make comments. At last we wrestled it down to the water and to our relief it floated, if a trifle lopsidedly. We dragged it ashore again as the light was fading and Bing arrived to say that a meal was ready. I felt tired but surprisingly contented. This had been a fruitful day, I was careful not to dwell on the possible outcome of my plans.
After an unsatisfying meal everybody gathered round, and between us Hammond and I explained the basics of the scheme. We said little about the military side of the operation and discouraged questions. We concentrated on the more immediate goal, the building of the ‘B’-gons.
Grafton was sceptical, possibly because he’d had firsthand experience of the labour involved.
‘It took you two hours to make that thing. How many do you need?’
‘Fourteen for two “B”-gons. Possibly more.’
He looked appalled. ‘It’ll take days at that rate.’
‘Ever hear about Henry Ford’s biggest invention?’
‘The Model T?’
‘No, bigger than that. The assembly line.’
Hammond said at once. ‘Ford didn’t invent that. The Royal Navy had one going in Chatham in seventeen ninety-five for making ships’ blocks.’
‘I think the Egyptian wall paintings show something like an assembly line,’ put in Atheridge.
‘We won’t be chauvinistic about it,’ I said. ‘But that’s what we’re going to do. We build simple jigs, stakes driven into the sand will do, one at each corner to give the shape. Then the teams move along the rows. That’s the difference between this line and those in Cowley or Chicago. Each man goes along doing just one job. They lay down the bottom planking, put the drums on top, drop the side members between the stakes and make them fast. Then they put on a top and do likewise.’
They listened intently, and then Antoine Dufour spoke up. His English was good but heavily accented.
‘I have worked in such a place. I think it is better you take the Japanese model, piecework is no good here. You will have too many people moving about, getting confused perhaps. You want teams each in one place.’
It took very little rethinking to see that he was right, and I said so.
‘Great going, Antoine. It will be better that way. Each team builds one “A”-gon from the bottom up, complete. Another team to go along doling out material. Another one rolling the drums to them. And a couple of really strong teams to shift the finished “A”-gons to the water, probably towing them on mats. We’ve got rubber matting in the trucks.’
I looked at Dufour. ‘You say you’ve had some experience at this. How would you like to be in charge of the work teams, you and Dan?’
He considered and then nodded. ‘Yes. I will do it.’
His matter-of-fact acceptance of the feasibility of the programme did a lot to encourage the others. Questions and ideas flew about, with me taking notes. At last I held up a hand for silence.
‘Enough to go on with. Now let’s hear from Doctor Kat.’
The Doctor gave us a brief report on Lang and on Wingstead, who was sleeping soundly and would be none the worse as long as he was restrained for a few days. ‘Sister Mary is much better, and taking care of Mister Wingstead is the perfect job for her. She will keep him quiet.’
I hadn’t seen much of the senior nun but if she was anything like Sister Ursula there was no doubt that Geoff Wingstead would shut up and obey orders.
Of the other invalids, he said that as fast as they got one person on their feet so another would go down with exhaustion, sickness or accident. The rickety thatched wards were as busy as ever.
I turned to Harry Zimmerman.
‘Harry’s got some good news he’s been saving,’ I said.
‘We found a logging camp,’ he reported cheerfully. ‘We brought back two loads of equipment, in their trucks. Chain saws, axes, hammers, nails and screws, a whole lot of stuff like that. The big power saws are still there but they work.’
‘But you did even better than that, didn’t you?’ I prompted.
‘Yeah. Planks,’ he breathed happily.
‘We’ll be bringing in a load in the morning. That means our decking is sorted out, and that’s a big problem solved. And we can get all the struts for the cages cut to exact measurements in no time.’ The assembly responded with more enthusiasm than one might have thought possible, given how weary they all were.
‘It’s amazing,’ said Dr Marriot. ‘I saw your “A”-gon. Such a flimsy contraption.’
‘So is an eggshell flimsy, but they’ve taken one tied in a bag outside a submarine four hundred feet deep and it didn’t break. The “A”-gon’s strength lies in its stress factors.’
She said, ‘It’s your stress factors we have to think about,’ and got a laugh. Morale was improving.
The meeting over, we dispersed without any discussion about the proposed attack on the ferry for which all this was merely the prologue, and I was grateful. Those who were to be my fellow travellers in the boat stayed on to talk. We decided to move out by first light and return upriver in time to get cracking on the coming day’s work. Sadiq had been briefed and while not exactly enthusiastic he had agreed to come with us, to see the enemy for himself.
Later I lay back looking at the dark shape of the rig looming over us, a grotesque shape lit with the barest minimum of light. I wondered what the hell we were going to do with it. I had enough thinking to keep me awake all night long.
But when I hit the sack I didn’t know a thing until I felt Hammond gently awakening me, three hours before dawn.