South by Java Head

by Alistair MacLean

  “Why should they bother when they can have a far better go at us once we’re in the water?” Nicolson shrugged his shoulders. “We’ve no option, sir.”

  “Of course. Forgive a foolish objection.” Findhorn leaned back and closed his eyes.

  “There will be no trouble from the ‘planes.” It was Van Effen speaking, and he seemed oddly sure of himself. He smiled at Nicolson. “You and I could have been dead twice over: they either cannot fire or do not wish to fire. There are other reasons, too, but time is short, Mr. Nicolson.”

  “Time is short.” Nicolson nodded, then clenched his fists as a deep, rumbling roar reverberated throughout the ship. A heavy, prolonged shudder ran through the superstructure of the Viroma, a shudder that culminated in a sudden, sickening lurch as the deck dropped away under their feet, towards the stern. Nicolson smiled faintly at Van Effen. “Time is indeed short, Van Effen. Must you illustrate your points quite so thoroughly?” He raised his voice. “Right, everybody, into the boats.”

  The need for speed had been urgent before: it was desperate now. The bulkheads of number two tank had ruptured, and one of the tanks, possibly both, were open to the sea: the Viroma was already settling by the stern. But speed was a double-edged weapon and Nicolson only too clearly realised that undue haste and pressure would only drive the untrained passengers into panic, or, at best—and equally delaying—confusion. McKinnon and Van Effen were invaluable, shepherding the passengers to their positions, carrying the wounded and laying them down between the thwarts, talking quietly, encouragingly all the time. Inside, that is—outside they had to shout to make themselves heard above the sound of the flames—a weird, terrifying noise compounded of a thin, highpitched hissing noise that set teeth and nerves on edge and a deep, continuous tearing sound like the ripping of calico, only magnified a thousand times.

  The heat was no longer uncomfortable. It was intense, and the two great curtains of flame were beginning to sweep irresistibly together—the pale-blue transparent gauze, shimmering and unreal, of the petrol fire from the bows, and the blood-red, smoke-shot flames from the stern. Breathing became a rasping, throat-tearing agony, and Jenkins, especially, suffered terribly as the super-heated air laid agonising fingers on his scorched skin and raw, bleeding hands. Of them all, young Peter Tallon suffered the least discomfort: McKinnon had dipped a large, fleecy blanket in the pantry sink and wrapped it round the little boy, covering him from head to toe.

  Within three minutes of giving the order both boats were in the water. The port lifeboat, manned only by Siran and his six men, was first away—with fewer men, and none of these injured, it had taken less time to embark them, but, from the glimpse Nicolson had of them before he ran back to the starboard lifeboat, it was going to take them a long time to get clear of the burning ship. They were having difficulty in clearing the falls, although Nicolson had given instructions about the patent release gear, two of them were swinging fear-maddened blows at one another and all of them gesticulating and shouting at the tops of their voices. Nicolson turned away, heedless, indifferent. Let them sort it out themselves and if they failed the world would be the better for their failure. He had given them what they had denied the little boy—a chance to live.

  Less than a minute later Nicolson, the last man to leave, was sliding down the knotted lifeline into the waterborne number one lifeboat. He could see the lifeboat beneath him, jammed with passengers and equipment, and realised how difficult it would be to ship the oars and pull away, especially with only three or four people fit or able to use an oar, but even as his feet touched a thwart the engine coughed, sputtered, coughed again, caught and settled down to a gentle murmur he could barely hear above the flames.

  Within a minute they were well away from the Viroma’s side, circling anti-clockwise round the bows. Abreast the fo’c’sle, with two hundred feet of intervening sea, the heat from the flames still stung their eyes and caught at their throats but Nicolson still held the lifeboat in, rounding the bows as closely as they dared. And then, all at once, the long length of the port side of the Viroma opened up and they could see number two lifeboat. Three minutes, at least, had passed since she had been launched: she was still less than twenty yards from the side of the ship. Siran had finally succeeded in restoring order with the lash of his tongue and the heavy and indiscriminate use of the boathook, but, with two men lying groaning on the bottom-boards and a third nursing a numbed and, for the moment, useless arm, Siran had only three men left to man the heavy sweeps. On board number one boat Nicolson compressed his lips and looked at Findhorn. The captain interpreted the look correctly and nodded heavily and reluctantly.

  Half a minute later McKinnon sent a coil of rope snaking expertly over the water. Siran himself caught it and made it fast to the mast thwart, and almost at once the motorboat took up the slack and started towing Siran and his men clear of the ship’s side. This time Nicolson made no attempt to circle the ship but moved straight out to sea intent on putting the maximum possible distance between themselves and the Viroma in the least possible time.

  Five minutes and five hundred yards passed and still nothing happened. The motorboat, with the other lifeboat in tow, was making a top speed of perhaps three and a half knots, but every foot covered was a foot nearer safety. The fighters still cruised overhead, but aimlessly: they had made no move to attack since the embarkation had begun and obviously had no intention of making any now.

  Two more minutes passed, and the Viroma was burning more fiercely than ever. The flames from the fo’c’sle were now clearly visible, no longer swallowed up by the brilliance of the sunlight: the dense pall of smoke from the two after cargo tanks now spread over half a square mile of sea and not even the fierce tropical sun could penetrate its black intensity. Under this dark canopy the two great pillars of flame swept more and more closely together, remorseless, majestic in the splendour of their inexorable progress. The tips of the two great fires leaned in towards one another—some curious freak of the superheated atmosphere—and Findhorn, twisted round in his seat and watched his ship die, knew with sudden certainty that when these two flames touched the end would come. And so it was.

  After the barbaric magnificence of the dying, the death was strangely subdued and unspectacular. A column of white flame streaked upwards just abaft the bridge, climbing two, three, four hundred feet, then vanishing as suddenly as it had come. Even as it vanished a low, deep, prolonged rumble came at them across the stillness of the sea; by and by the echoes vanished away in the empty distance and there was only then the silence. The end came quietly and without any fuss, even with a certain grace and dignity, the Viroma slipping gently under the surface of the sea on an even steady keel, a tired and dreadfully wounded ship that had taken all it could and was glad to go to rest. The watchers in the lifeboats could hear the gentle hissing, quickly extinguished, of water pouring into red-hot holds, could see the tips of the two slender masts sliding down vertically into the sea, then a few bubbles and then nothing at all, no floating wood or flotsam on the oily waters, just nothing at all. It was as if the Viroma had never been.

  Captain Findhorn turned to Nicolson, his face like a stone, his eyes drained and empty of all expression. Almost everybody in the lifeboat was looking at him, openly or covertly, but he seemed completely unaware of it, a man sunk in a vast and heedless indifference.

  “Unaltered course, Mr. Nicolson, if you please.” His voice was low and husky, but only from weakness and blood. “200, as I remember. Our objective remains. We should reach the Macclesfield Channel in twelve hours.”

  EIGHT

  Hours passed, interminable, breathless hours under a blue, windless sky and the fierce glare of the tropical sun and still number one lifeboat chugged steadily south, towing the other boat behind it. Normally a lifeboat carries a fuel supply good only for a hundred miles steaming at about four knots, and is used solely for emergencies, such as towing other boats clear of a sinking ship, cruising around for survivors, going for im
mediate help or keeping the boat itself hove to in heavy seas. But McKinnon had had the foresight to throw in extra cans of petrol and, even allowing for the possibility of bad weather, they had enough, and more than enough, to carry them to Lepar, an island about the size of the Isle of Sheppey on the starboard hand as they passed through the Macclesfield Channel. Captain Findhorn, with fifteen years in the Archipelago behind him, knew where he could find petrol on Lepar, and plenty of it. The only unknown quantity was the Japanese: they might have already taken over the island, but with their land forces already so widespread and thinly stretched it seemed unlikely that they could yet have had the time or sufficient reason to garrison so small a place. And with plenty of petrol and fresh water there was no saying how far they might go: the Sunda Straits between Sumatra and Java was not impossible, especially when the north-east trades started up again and helped them on their way.

  But there were no trades just now, not even the lightest zephyr of a breeze; it was absolutely still and airless and suffocatingly hot and the tiny movement of air from their slow passage through the water was only a mockery of coolness and worse than nothing at all. The blazing sun was falling now, slipping far to the west, but still burning hot: Nicolson had both sails stretched as awnings, the jib for the fore end and the lug-sail, its yard lashed half-way up the mast, stretched aft as far as it would go, but even beneath the shelter, of these the heat was still oppressive, somewhere between eighty and ninety degrees with a relative humidity of over 85 per cent. It was seldom enough in the East Indies, at any time of the year, that the temperature dropped below eighty degrees. Nor was there any relief to be obtained, any chance of cooling off by plunging over the side into the water, the temperature of which lay somewhere between eighty degrees and eighty-five. All the passengers could do was to recline limply and listlessly in the shade of awnings, to sit and suffer and sweat and pray for the sun to go down.

  The passengers. Nicolson, sitting in the stern-sheets with the tiller in his hand, looked slowly round the people in the boat, took in their condition and lifeless inertia and tightened his lips. If he had to be afloat in an open boat in the tropics, hundreds—thousands—of miles from help and surrounded by the enemy and enemy-held islands, he could hardly have picked a boatload of passengers less well equipped for handling a boat, with a poorer chance of survival. There were exceptions, of course, men like McKinnon and Van Effen would always be exceptions, but as for the remainder …

  Excluding himself, there were seventeen people aboard. Of these, as far as sailing and fighting the boat were concerned, only two were definite assets: McKinnon, imperturbable, competent, infinitely resourceful, was worth any two men, and Van Effen, an otherwise unknown quantity, had already proved his courage and value in an emergency. About Vannier it was difficult to say: no more than a boy, he might possibly stand up to prolonged strain and hardship, but time alone would show. Walters, still looking sick and shaken, would be a useful man to have around when he had recovered. And that, on the credit side, was just about all.

  Gordon, the second steward, a thin-faced, watery-eyed and incurably furtive individual, a known thief who had been conspicuously and mysteriously absent from his action stations that afternoon, was no seaman, no fighter and could be trusted to do nothing whatsoever that didn’t contribute to the immediate safety and benefit of himself. Neither the Muslim priest nor the baffling, enigmatic Famholme—they were seated together on the same thwart, conversing in low murmurs—had shown up too well that afternoon either. There was no more kindly nor better-meaning man than Willoughby, but, outside his engine room and deprived of his beloved books and for all his rather pathetic eagerness to be of assistance, there was no more ineffectual and helpless person alive than the gentle second engineer. The captain, Evans, the quartermaster, Fraser and Jenkins, the young able seaman, were too badly hurt to give any more than token assistance. Alex, the young soldier—Nicolson had discovered that his name was Sinclair—was as jittery and unstable as ever, his wide, staring eyes darting restlessly, ceaselessly, from one member of the boat’s company to the next, the palms of his hands rubbing constantly up and down the thighs of his trousers, as if desperately seeking to rub off some contamination. That left only the three women and young Peter—and if anyone wanted to stack the odds even higher, Nicolson thought bitterly, there was always Siran and his six cut-throat friends not twenty feet away. The prospects, overall, were not good.

  The one happy, carefree person in the two boats was young Peter Tallon. Clad only in a haltered pair of white, very short shorts, he seemed entirely unaffected by the heat or anything else, bouncing incessantly up and down on the stern-sheets and having to be rescued from falling overboard a dozen times a minute. Familiarity breeding trust, he had quite lost his earlier fear of the other members of the crew but had not yet given him his unquestioning confidence: whenever Nicolson, whose seat by the tiller was nearest to the youngster, offered him a piece of ship’s biscuit or a mug with some watered down sweet condensed milk, he would smile at him shyly, lean forward, snatch the offering, retreat and eat or drink it, head bent and looking suspiciously at Nicolson under lowered eyelids. But if Nicolson reached out a hand to touch or catch him he would fling himself against Miss Drachmann, who sat on the starboard side of the sternsheets, entwine one chubby hand in the shining black hair, often with a force that brought a wince and an involuntary ‘ouch’ from the girl, twist his head round and regard him gravely through the spread fingers of his left hand. It was a favourite trick of his, this peeping from behind his fingers, one which he seemed to imagine made him invisible. For long moments at a time Nicolson forgot the war, the wounded men and their own near-hopeless situation, absorbed in the antics of the little boy but always he came back to the bitter present, to an even keener despair, to a redoubled fear of what would happen to the child when the Japanese finally caught up with them.

  And they would catch up with them. Nicolson had known that, known it beyond any shadow of doubt, known that Captain Findhorn knew it also despite his encouraging talk of sailing for Lepar and the Sunda Straits. The Japanese had their position to within a few miles, could find them and pick them off whenever they wished. The only mystery was why they had not already done so. Nicolson wondered if the others knew that their hours of freedom and safety were limited, that the cat was playing with the mouse. If they did, it was impossible to tell by their behaviour and appearance. A helpless, useless bunch in many ways, a crushing liability to any man who hoped to sail his boat to freedom, but Nicolson had to concede them one saving grace: Gordon and the shocked Sinclair apart, their morale was magnificent.

  They had worked hard and uncomplainingly to get all the blankets and provisions stowed away as neatly as possible, had cleared spaces at the expense of their own comfort for the wounded men—who themselves, in spite of obvious agony, had never complained once—and accepted all Nicolson’s orders and their own cramped positions cheerfully and willingly. The two nurses, surprisingly and skilfully assisted by Brigadier Farnholme, had worked for almost two hours over the wounded men and done a splendid job. Never had the Ministry of Transport’s insistence that all lifeboats carry a comprehensive first-aid kit been more fully justified, and seldom could it have been put to better use: collapse revivers, ‘Omnopon,’ sulphanilamide powder, codeine compounds, dressings, bandages, gauze, cotton wool and jelly for burns—they were all there and they were all used. Surgical kit Miss Drachmann carried herself: and with the lifeboat’s hatchet and his own knife McKinnon had perfectly adequate splints improvised from the bottom-boards for Corporal Fraser’s shattered arm within ten minutes of being asked for them.

  And Miss Plenderleith was magnificent. There was no other word for it. She had a genius for reducing circumstances and situations to reassuring normality, and might well have spent her entire life in an open boat. She accepted things as they were, made the very best of them, and had more than sufficient authority to induce others to do the same. It was she who wrapped th
e wounded in blankets and pillowed their heads on lifebelts, scolding them like unruly and recalcitrant little children if they showed any signs of disobeying: Miss Plenderleith never had to scold anyone twice. It was she who had taken over the commissariat and watched over the wounded until they had eaten the last crumb and drunk the last drop of what she had offered them. It was she who had snatched Farnholme’s gladstone bag from him, stowed it beneath her side bench, picked up the hatchet McKinnon had laid down, and informed the seething Brigadier, with the light of battle in her eyes, that his drinking days were over and that the contents of the bag, which he had been on the point of broaching, would be in future reserved for medicinal use only—and thereafter, incredibly, had produced needles and wool from the depths of her own capacious bag and calmly carried on with her knitting. And it was she who was now sitting with a board across her knees, carefully slicing bully beef and bread, doling out biscuits, barley sugar and thinned down condensed milk and ordering around a grave and carefully unsmiling McKinnon, whom she had pressed into service as her waiter, as if he were one of her more reliable but none too bright school children. Magnificent, Nicolson thought, trying hard to match his bo’sun’s deadpan expression, just magnificent: there was no other word for her. Suddenly her voice sharpened, rose almost an octave.

  “Mr. McKinnon! What on earth are you doing?” The bo’sun had dropped his latest cargo of bread and corned beef to the bottomboards and sunk down on his knees beside her, peering out below the awning, ignoring Miss Plenderleith as she repeated her question. She repeated it a third time, received no answer, tightened her lips and jabbed him ferociously in the ribs with the haft of her knife. This time she got a reaction.

  “Will you look what you’ve done, you clumsy idiot?” She pointed her knife angrily at McKinnon’s knee: between it and the side bench half a pound of meat was squashed almost flat.