Path of the Storm

by Douglas Reeman

  What had he really expected? Perhaps he half thought Pirelli might have been sheltering here, although God knows it was a hard enough place to reach. Or perhaps a cache of arms left in some secret cave, waiting the landing of a trained Communist commando. But it was now painfully clear that there was nothing. There was not even the possibility of a hiding place which might warrant a closer inspection by daylight. Gunnar cursed himself and looked back at the islet’s ragged outline. There was another cloudbank moving fast towards the moon. He could just make out the ensign’s silhouette framed against the glittering water, and toyed with the idea of making some additional explanation.

  Surprisingly, Pip Maddox’s voice lacked both amusement or surprise. ‘Gives me the creeps! I can imagine myself getting a bit scared up here!’

  Gunnar looked at the clouds. ‘We’ll wait a couple of minutes until they’ve passed and then go back to the other side.’

  Maddox gestured towards a black clump of gorse. ‘Good idea, sir. We could stumble around in that lot!’ He pushed at the nearest bush with the rifle, and then they both stood stock-still with shock. There was a strange, tinny rattling, like the discordant jangling of bells.

  The ensign said, ‘What in hell’s name——’ But as Gunnar tugged at his pistol he gasped, ‘Christ, there’s someone in there!’

  Gunnar pushed at the boy’s shoulder and sent him rolling down the slope, at the same time he threw himself sideways as the darkening sky was torn apart by a savage burst of gunfire. It seemed to come from right underfoot, so that Gunnar imagined the bullets had passed within inches of his face. Blindly he pumped the trigger of his pistol, slipping and reeling as his ankle became entangled in the thing which had raised the alarm. The oldest trap in the world, and he had allowed himself to walk right into it. Just a few cans tied on a length of wire which Pip’s rifle had inadvertently brought to life, and with it the man behind the gun.

  The young ensign was nowhere to be seen, and as yet his rifle was silent. Gunnar could feel the prickle of suspense between his shoulder-blades as he lay, holding his breath in the spray-sodden gorse. Perhaps the boy was already dead? He bit his lip until he could taste the blood on his tongue.

  The pistol felt like lead in his hand, and with sudden panic he found he could not remember how many times he had fired. He had another clip in his pocket, but he knew from past experience that in the heart-chilling silence his hidden adversary was listening for just one movement to open fire again.

  His eyes clouded with strain, and he wanted to cry out as the impossibility of his position became more evident with each dragging minute. He had brought it all on himself. In spite of the warnings, the threats on his life, he had still wanted to be the big man. Now it was too late, and worse than that, he had sacrificed yet another life for nothing.

  Then he heard Pip’s voice from somewhere beyond his left shoulder. It was strained and frightened. ‘I’m sorry, sir! I can’t find the rifle!’

  Instantly, the orange tongue of flame tore across the wilting gorse, the night again crazy with the sound of whining and ricocheting bullets.

  Gunnar staggered to his feet, his eyes blinded by the muzzle flash. He shouted wildly: ‘Run for it! Get back to the beach!’ Then he lunged forward and down, his pistol jumping in his hand like a mad thing. Pip’s sudden movement had drawn the other man’s fire, had betrayed him for those few vital seconds. Teeth bared like an animal, Gunnar fired again and again until the hammer clicked against nothing, and in the very next instant he was rolling and kicking on top of the man who had tried to kill him.

  Grunting and gasping they rolled and thrashed, struggling and fighting for a handhold until Gunnar thought his lungs would burst. He could feel the man’s breath hot and foul on his face, could sense the eyes within inches of his own. Once they rolled across something hard and unyielding, and Gunnar felt a prick of savage triumph as he realised it was the man’s sub-machine gun. A blinding pain made him cry out for the first time as the man brought his knee up into his groin. Helpless and sobbing, he rolled clear and saw the stooping shadow outlined against a faint beam of moonlight as it groped for the discarded gun.

  Gunnar moaned and waited for the thudding agony of the first burst. Instead there was one solitary crack, almost puny on the open slope, and with the suddenness of an apparition the other man vanished into the gorse, his pitching body disturbing the jangling cans for the last time.

  ‘Are you okay, sir?’ Pip Maddox was already pulling him to his feet, his voice small and shaken.

  Gunnar nodded and picked up his automatic. Without speaking he rammed a fresh clip into the butt. He switched on his torch and then rolled the dead man on to his back. In the flashlight he could see the expression of incredulity on the distorted face, the teeth bared in a final cry.

  The ensign stooped behind Gunnar and then turned violently away. Gunnar heard him vomiting but forced himself to continue with his examination. This must have been one of the men surprised by Inglis’s landing party. Overlooked by Jago’s troops, he had probably been kept alive by supporters from the main island.

  He stood up and flashed the light around the small, sheltered foxhole. Just big enough to sleep two men, it was covered with rough planks and disguised by gravel and pieces of gorse. There were packs of ammunition which bore U.S. markings, and several tins of food. The man himself was big, and extremely dirty. He looked like a soldier, although he carried no marks of identification.

  In another minute he would have killed me. Now in the flashlight the man looked fragile and pathetic, a mere dirty remnant which did not belong.

  Over his shoulder Gunnar said quietly: ‘You did well, Pip. Don’t reproach yourself. You don’t get a second chance in this game. You got yours, and responded better than most men put in your position!’ He straightened up and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘War is okay when viewed through a gunsight or on the television. But this is the real war. Now you know.’

  Pip said in a strangled voice: ‘I just fired. I would never have believed it possible!’

  Gunnar grinned in spite of the tension within him. ‘Just as well for me as it turns out!’

  The ensign took a grip of himself with obvious effort. ‘What’ll we do with—with him, sir?’

  ‘Leave him. He’s no loss to anyone.’ Gunnar was surprised at the hardness of his own voice. He added, ‘I’d give a month’s pay to know what he was up to all the same.’ He picked up the sub-machine gun. Grimly he said, ‘Another bit of American aid which got into the wrong channel!’

  Pip Maddox said in an awed tone, ‘You expected to find something, didn’t you, sir?’

  Gunnar shrugged. ‘I don’t know what I expected. But this isn’t the end. It’s just part of the pattern. It proves I was right, that I was on the correct angle all the time. The-doctor noticed it before I did. Two bodies were brought in by Jago’s patrol after Inglis was shot. Both were in full uniform, as if they had just landed from some ship. This one tonight was in rags. I think those two men in uniform were already dead when the patrol found them. Just a couple of coolies snatched for the purpose of deceiving us into believing that it was a casual brush with a Red patrol from the mainland. The real killers got away, that was why neither of the bodies was wearing a bayonet. My men were bayoneted after they died and that was what the doctor noticed.’

  They started down the cliff path into the face of the wind, and then Pip said, ‘The dinghy’s here already!’

  Gunnar quickened his pace and almost collided with the girl and the towering shape of Tsung. Gunnar caught her by the shoulders. ‘I said to wait till I signalled!’

  But she did not seem to hear. He could feel the warmth of her shoulders under his hands and knew that she was shaking. She said: ‘We heard the shooting! I thought you had fallen into a trap!’ There was a sob in her voice. ‘After all you have been through, and I thought—I thought——’ Then she was pressed against him, and he was holding her tightly, with her hair brushing his mouth.
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br />   He felt at a loss. ‘There was only one of them. He is dead.’

  It was like a dream, like a world he had forgotten. They all stood crowded across the narrow path, yet he was conscious only of the girl’s body pressed against his own, the fragrance of her damp hair as she cried uncontrollably into his shoulder. It was all so clear, as if made so by the nearness to death those few moments before.

  Gently he turned her body towards the sea, so that the wind pushed the hair free from her face. ‘Come on, we’d better get back to your boat.’ She did not try to free her shoulders from his arm, and allowed herself to be guided back to the waiting dinghy.

  Once aboard the Osprey, she allowed Tsung to keep the wheel while she sat silently on the deck in front of the wheelhouse, her eyes towards the pitching bows.

  The spray streamed back from the stemhead like tropical rain, and with the girl beside him Gunnar was soon soaked to the skin. When he suggested that she should go below she merely shook her head. ‘No. I want it to last. I am afraid of tomorrow. But now …’ She left the rest unsaid. Gunnar reached out and took her hand. It was damp with spray, yet warm within his own.

  He did not know how it had happened, or even for sure what was happening. But he did know what had been lacking for so long and for the first time allowed his mind to consider the possibility of a future.

  Pip Maddox stood beside the wheelhouse and allowed the spray to soak his face as if to wash away the mingled feeling of fear and disgust. It had not been as he had imagined it would, but now that it was over he had to admit to a feeling of elation which filled him with shame. He had actually killed a man. The thought hammered through his brain again and again. He still did not know how he had done it. Desperation, fear, the draining sickness of self-preservation, each had played a part. That one action, whatever had prompted it, had saved them all. They were aboard this boat and the islet was lost in the black sea astern, as if it had never been. He looked across at the captain. He too must have felt as he did. The girl’s head had fallen sideways and rested on Gunnar’s shoulder, and in spite of the wind and the boat’s uneven motion there was for a while a sense of great peace.

  * * *

  Colonel Lloyd Jago was rapidly working himself into an open rage. It was a violent, destructive thing which fanned across his hard features like the clouds which Gunnar had watched blot out the moon. His green shirt was darkly patched with sweat, and he looked as if he had not slept for twenty-four hours. As he paced beneath the bare bulbs of his bunker he seemed to grow in size, as if the place was no longer big enough for him and his immediate problem.

  He stopped suddenly and stared fixedly at Gunnar’s impassive features, as if to find some small detail which he might have missed. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he exploded again with the fury of a breaking wave, ‘do I have to spell it out for you? It would be just the same if you were a four-striped captain in a task-force cruiser, I’m in charge!’

  Gunnar’s voice seemed quiet by comparison, but the spots of colour on his cheeks showed the signs of inner resentment, ‘So you said when I first came——’

  But Jago stamped his booted foot. ‘Hear me out! God knows I was willing to tolerate your crackpot ideas at first, but this is the goddamned limit! You get yourself blown up, and then before I can get the thing organised, you’re out on some crazy scheme of your own amongst the islands, and as near as hell get killed again!’ He stared at the other man as if surprised by his own words. ‘Then you come back here as large as life with this cock-an’-bull yarn about a conspiracy which is about to pull us all down!’ He paused for breath. ‘Really, Captain, what do you take me for?’

  Gunnar started once more. It seemed useless, but the marine’s fury had fanned his own anger into the open. ‘If you’re not prepared to accept my suggestions, then I can only ask a higher authority, Colonel!’

  ‘Like Jesus you can! I’ve already made my report, and your status here has been confirmed, again! You’re not an adviser on political and military integration now, Captain, you merely happen to be here on sufferance as far as I am concerned. You command one small ship, a mere fragment of the Seventh Fleet, do I make myself clear? I’m not talking to you as a brother officer, or even as a fellow-American, such terms are too simple for a mind like yours. I’m speaking to you as your superior, a mouthpiece if you like. But even if you don’t like it, it still goes!’

  In a far corner Sergeant Rickover, earphones on head, cranked busily on a lever and spoke quickly into his mouthpiece.

  ‘See him?’ Jago waved his arm violently. ‘He’s trying to keep in touch. Since this fiasco started all hell has been let loose around here. Ever since that fool exec of yours balled up a simple towing job, our name is mud!’

  Gunnar said tightly: ‘It’s all in my report. Maddox did what he could. He could not possibly have forced the British to keep away from that freighter.’

  Jago eyed him coldly. ‘He should never have been in charge in the first place. If you had stayed in the ship as I requested you would have been out there with the ship. Instead you were swimming.’ He glared. ‘Swimming, I goddamn well ask you!’ He hurried on: ‘In any case, Maddox did foul it up, and now the local Chinks are cutting loose in every direction. There have been a dozen incidents already since your ship crawled in!’

  Gunnar bit his lip. Maddox’s own explanation was pretty bad at that. It was the one weak link in his own argument with Jago. ‘They’re being incited by professional agitators, I expect,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Maybe! But they think we deliberately handed those refugees over to the Limeys as a matter of course, don’t you see that? They think that all my efforts to form them into a unified group under Taiwan is so much crap, and that we only intend to take over as a base for ourselves.’

  ‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ Gunnar was also shouting. ‘If you had been more level with them, or tried to do something for the islanders instead of training a lot of stupid prison guards to form fours, you might have got results!’

  ‘Is that so?’ Jago’s voice dropped to a dangerous level ‘That’s where you’re wrong. If there are any commies, they are amongst the so-called islanders, see?’ He stared at Gunnar with exasperated calm. ‘How can I make you see that what you’re doing is wrong? That man you killed on the islet may have been a commie agent, he might have been a bandit, or even an escaped criminal, who knows? It doesn’t really concern me or you. What does concern both of us is the fact that your actions, plus this latest fiasco on the part of your ship botching the towing job, has put us in a new jam. Now I can’t even call in marines without stirring things up worse than they are. These agitators will tell the mobs that is what we intended all along. I’ve only got my Chinese troops to do an unnecessarily difficult job which would never have arisen before you came.’

  ‘What about the commandant?’ Gunnar felt tired and bitter. All the feeling of rested hope had vanished within minutes of the Hibiscus’s return. It was true what Jago had said. Mobs had roamed the town, there had been outbreaks of stone-throwing, and several times the troops had fired above their heads to disperse them.

  ‘The commandant? He’s a useless slob!’ Jago picked up a ruler and bent it in his strong hands. ‘He can’t ask for troops without good reason. Would you in his position?’

  Gunnar did not answer, so he added with heavy sarcasm, ‘I hate to think what you would do, Captain!’

  Rickover looked across. ‘They’ve just burnt down the hospital, Captain.’

  Gunnar stood up. ‘Is Connell all right?’

  Rickover nodded. He too looked tired out. ‘Yes. A platoon went there and took him back to the ship.’

  Gunnar shifted uneasily. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And another thing, Captain. No more despatches to the admiral. Your orders are to maintain radio silence until otherwise told. Just receive the normal traffic, and that’s all. From now on leave this mess to me!’

  Gunnar looked unseeingly at the wall map. ‘And you don’t consider that
I’m right about a possible takeover by the Reds, by Bolod, for instance?’

  ‘Of course I know they’re up to something, but it’s nothing I can’t handle once this civil disobedience is checked. God, man, what did you expect here?’ He wagged his finger. ‘But this is not going to be another Cuba, it’s not going to be another anything! Get that through your head, and just stay out of trouble.’

  Gunnar turned towards the door. ‘I’d like to see the headman, Tao-Cho. He might listen to me.’

  Jago snapped the ruler with sudden impatience. ‘That bastard! He’s a mean-minded, self-important old swine who should have been thrown in the pen years ago!’

  ‘I’m asking your permission to visit him, officially if you like.’

  Jago snorted. ‘Officially is right! No more of your cloak-and-dagger tactics here. It might have been all right in your outfit in Viet Nam, but this is a strictly military affair. Any buck from Tao-Cho and there’ll be a massive retaliation which will put his nose really out of joint!’ He breathed out slowly, aware that Gunnar’s face was still unmoved by the outburst. ‘Okay. You go and see him. But you’ll take an armed escort, and it’ll be official and above board, got it?’

  Gunnar smiled tightly. ‘Got it.’

  Jago pushed back his chair. ‘See here, Captain, I’ve got nothing against you personally; You’ve had a tough time, and maybe it’s affected you worse than you realise. I admire your record, but that’s all in the past. I got a medal in Korea, but I don’t expect the admiral to kiss my arse because of it, see?’

  Gunnar eyed him impassively ‘I try to forget the past too.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. But we don’t want any more killings, or the Senate will be asking what sort of an outfit we’re running.’ He smiled thinly. ‘My lads can deal with anything from the outside. In any case long enough for me to call up a strike force from the fleet.’