South by Java Head

by Alistair MacLean

  “No demonstration,” Nicolson said hastily. “That’s the last thing we want. As far as brother Jap is concerned, we haven’t even a firecracker between us. This is what I want you to do.” His instructions to Farnholme were rapid and concise, as were those given immediately afterwards to the rest of the boat’s company. There was no time to waste on lengthier explanations, to make sure he was fully understood: the enemy was almost on them.

  The sky to the west was still alive and glowing, a kaleidoscopic radiance of red and orange and gold, the barred clouds on the horizon ablaze with fire, but the sun was gone, the east was grey and the sudden darkness of the tropical night was rushing across the sea. The submarine was angling in on their starboard quarter, grim and black and menacing in the gathering twilight, the glassy sea piling up in phosphorescent whiteness on either side of its bows, the diesels dying away to a muted murmur, the dark, evil mouth of the big for'ard gun dipping and moving slowly aft as it matched the relative movement of the little lifeboat, foot by remorseless foot. And then there had come some sharp, unintelligible command from the conning-tower of the submarine; McKinnon cut the engine at a gesture from Nicolson and the iron hull of the submarine scraped harshly along the rubbing piece of the lifeboat.

  Nicolson craned his neck and looked swiftly along the deck and conning-tower of the submarine. The big gun for'ard was pointing in their direction, but over their heads, as he had guessed it would: it had already reached maximum depression. The light A.A. gun aft was also lined up at them—lined up into the heart of their boat: he had miscalculated about that one, but it was a chance they had to take. There were three men in the conning-tower, two of them armed—an officer with a pistol and a sailor with what looked like a submachine gun—and five or six sailors at the foot of the conningtower, only one of them armed. As a reception committee it was dismaying enough, but less than what he had expected. He had thought that the lifeboat’s abrupt, last-minute alteration off course to port—a movement calculated to bring them alongside the port side of the submarine, leaving them half-shadowed in the gloom to the east while the Japanese were silhouetted against the afterglow of sunset—might have aroused lively suspicion: but it must have been almost inevitably interpreted as a panic-stricken attempt to escape, an attempt no sooner made than its futility realised. A lifeboat offered no threat to anyone and the submarine commander must have thought that he had already taken far more than ample precautions against such puny resistance as they could possibly offer.

  The three craft—the submarine and the two lifeboats—were still moving ahead at about two knots when a rope came spinning down from the deck of the submarine and fell across the bows of number one lifeboat. Automatically Vannier caught it and looked back at Nicolson.

  “Might as well make fast, Fourth.” Nicolson’s tone was resigned, bitter. “What good’s fists and a couple of jack-knives against this lot?”

  “Sensible, so sensible.” The officer leaned over the conning-tower, his arms folded, the barrel of the gun lying along his upper left arm: the English was good, the tone self-satisfied, and the teeth a white gleaming smirk in the dark smudge of the face. “Resistance would be so unpleasant for all of us, would it not?”

  “Go to hell!” Nicolson muttered.

  “Such incivility! Such lack of courtesy—the true Anglo-Saxon.” The officer shook his head sadly, vastly enjoying himself. Then he suddenly straightened, looked sharply at Nicolson over the barrel of his gun. “Be very careful!” His voice was like the crack of a whip.

  Slowly, unhurriedly, Nicolson completed his movement of extracting a cigarette from the packet Willoughby had offered him, as slowly struck a match, lit his own and Willoughby’s cigarettes and sent the match spinning over the side.

  “So! Of course!” The officer’s laugh was brief, contemptuous. “The phlegmatic Englishman! Even though his teeth chatter with fear, he must maintain his reputation—especially in front of his crew. And another of them!” Up in the bows of the lifeboat Vannier’s bent head, a cigarette clipped between his lips, was highlit by the flaring match in his hand. “By all the gods, it’s pathetic, really pathetic.” The tone of his voice changed abruptly. “But enough of this—this foolery. Aboard at once—all of you.” He jabbed his gun at Nicolson. “You first.”

  Nicolson stood up, one arm propping himself against the hull of the submarine, the other pressed close by his side.

  “What do you intend to do with us, damn you?” His voice was loud, almost a shout, with a nicely-induced tremor in it. “Kill us all? Torture us? Drag us to those damned prison camps in Japan?” He was shouting in earnest now, fear and anger in the voice: Vannier’s match hadn’t gone over the side, and the hissing from the bows was even louder than he had expected. “Why in the name of God don’t you shoot us all now instead of—”

  With breath-taking suddenness there came a hissing roar from the bows of the lifeboat, twin streaks of sparks and smoke and flame lancing upwards into the darkening sky across the submarine’s deck and at an angle of about thirty degrees off the vertical and then two incandescent balls of flame burst into life hundreds of feet above the water as both the lifeboat’s rocket parachute flares ignited almost at the same instant. A man would have had to be far less than human to check the involuntary, quite irresistible, impulse to look at the two rockets exploding into flame far up in the skies, and the Japanese crew of the submarine were only human. To a man, like dolls in the hands of a puppet master, they twisted round to look, and to a man they died that way, their backs half-turned to the lifeboat and their necks craned back as they stared up into the sky.

  The crash of automatic carbines, rifles and pistols died away, the echoes rolled off into distant silence across the glassy sea and Nicolson was shouting at everyone to lie flat in the boat. Even as he was shouting, two dead sailors rolled off the sloping deck of the submarine and crashed into the stern of the lifeboat, one of them almost pinning him against the gunwale. The other, lifeless arms and legs flailing, was heading straight for little Peter and the two nurses, but McKinnon got there first. The two heavy splashes sounded almost like one.

  One second passed, two, then three. Nicolson was on his knees, staring upwards, fists clenched as he waited in tense expectation. At first he could hear the shuffle of feet and the fast, low-pitched murmur of voices behind the shield of the big gun. Another second passed, and then another. His eyes moved along the submarine deck, perhaps there was someone still alive, still seeking a glorious death for his Emperor—Nicolson had no illusions about the fanatical courage of the Japanese. But now everything was still, still as death. The officer hanging tiredly over the conning-tower, gun still locked in a dangling hand—Nicolson’s pistol had got him, and the other two had fallen inside. Four shapeless forms lay in a grotesque huddle about the foot of the conning-tower. Of the two men who had manned the light A.A. gun there was no sign: Farnholme’s automatic carbine had blasted them over the side.

  The tension was becoming intolerable. The big gun, Nicolson knew, couldn’t depress far enough to reach the boat, but he had vague memories of stories told him by naval officers of the almost decapitating effects of a naval gun fired just above one’s head. Perhaps the blast of the concussion would be fatal to those directly beneath, there was no way of knowing. Suddenly, silently, he began to curse his own stupidity and turned quickly to Willoughby.

  “Start the engine up, Bo’sun. Then reverse—fast as you can. The conning-tower can block off that gun if we—”

  The words were lost, obliterated in the roar of the firing gun. It wasn’t a roar, really, but a flat, violent whip-lash crack that stabbed savagely at the eardrums and almost stunned in its intensity. A long red tongue of flame flickered evilly out of the mouth of the barrel, reaching down almost to the boat itself. The shell smashed into the sea, throwing up a fine curtain of spray and a spout of water that reached fifty feet up into the sky, and then the sound had died, the smoke had cleared, and Nicolson, desperately shaking a dazed head, k
new that they were alive, that the Japanese were frantically trying to load again, knew that the time had come.

  “Right, Brigadier.” He could see Farnholme heaving himself to his feet. “Wait till I give the word.” He looked up swiftly towards the bows as a rifle boomed.

  “Missed him.” Van Effen was disgusted. “An officer looked over the edge of the conning-tower just now.”

  “Keep your gun lined up,” Nicolson ordered. He could hear the boy wailing with fear and knew that the blast of the big gun must have terrified him: his face twisted savagely as he shouted to Vannier. “Fourth! The signal set. A couple of red hand flares and heave them into the conning-tower. That’ll keep ‘em busy.” He was listening all the time to the movements of the gun crew. “All of you—watch the tower and the fore and aft hatches.”

  Perhaps another five seconds passed and then Nicolson heard the sound he had been waiting for—the scrape of a shell in the breech and the block swinging solidly home. “Now!” he called sharply.

  Farnhome didn’t even bother to raise the gun to his shoulder but fired with the stock under his arm, seemingly without taking any aim whatsoever. He didn’t need to, he was even better than he had claimed to be. He ripped off perhaps five shots, no more, deflected them all down the barrel of the big gun then dropped to the bottom of the lifeboat like a stone as the last bullet found the percussion nose of the shell and triggered off the detonation. Severe enough in sound and shock at such close range, the explosion of the bursting shell inside the breech was curiously muffled, although the effects were spectacular enough. The whole big gun lifted off its mounting and flying pieces of the shattered metal clanged viciously against the conning-tower and went whistling over the sea, ringing the submarine in an erratic circle of splashes. The gun-crew must have died unknowing: enough T.N.T. to blow up a bridge had exploded within arm’s length of their faces.

  “Thank you, Brigadier.” Nicolson was on his feet again, forcing his voice to steadiness. “My apologies for all I ever said about you. Full ahead, Bo’sun.” A couple of sputtering crimson hand flares went arching through the air and landed safely inside the conningtower, silhouetting the coaming against a fierce red glow. “Well done, Fourth. You’ve saved the day today.”

  “Mr. Nicolson?”

  “Sir?” Nicolson glanced down at the captain.

  “Wouldn’t it be better, perhaps, if we stayed here a little longer? No one dare show his head through the hatches or over the tower. In ten or fifteen minutes it’ll be dark enough for us to reach that island there without the beggars taking potshots at us all the time.”

  “Afraid that wouldn’t do, sir.” Nicolson was apologetic. “Right now the lads inside there are shocked and stunned, but pretty soon someone’s going to start thinking, and as soon as he does we can look for a shower of hand grenades. They can shuck them into the boat without having to show a finger—and even one would finish us.”

  “Of course, of course.” Findhorn sank back wearily on his bench. “Carry on, Mr. Nicolson.”

  Nicolson took the tiller, came hard round with both lifeboats through a hundred and eighty degrees, circled round the slender, fish-tail stern of the submarine while four men with guns in their hands watched the decks unblinkingly, and slowed down just abaft the submarine’s bridge to allow Farnholme to smash the A.A. gun’s delicate firing mechanism with a long, accurate burst from his automatic carbine. Captain Findhorn nodded in slow realisation.

  “Exit their siege gun. You think of everything, Mr. Nicolson.”

  “I hope so, sir.” Nicolson shook his head. “I hope to God I do.”

  The island was perhaps half-a-mile distant from the submarine. A quarter of the way there Nicolson stooped, brought up one of the lifeboat’s two standard Wessex distress signal floats, ripped away the top disc seal, ignited it by tearing off the release fork and immediately threw it over the stern, just wide enough to clear Siran’s boat. As soon as it hit the water it began to give off a dense cloud of orange-coloured smoke, smoke that hung almost without moving in the windless twilight, an impenetrable screen against the enemy. A minute or two later bullets from the submarine began to cut through the orange smoke, whistling overhead or splashing into the water around them, but none came near enough to do any damage; the Japanese were firing at random and in blind anger. Four minutes after the first smoke float, now fizzling to extinction, had been thrown overboard the second one followed it, and long before it, too, had burnt out they had beached their boats and landed safely on the island.

  NINE

  It hardly deserved the name of island. An islet, perhaps, but no more. Oval in shape, lying almost due east and west, it was no more than three hundred yards long, and about a hundred and fifty from north to south. It wasn’t a perfect oval, however: about a hundred yards along from the apex the sea had cut deep notches on both sides, at points practically opposite one another, so that the islet was all but bisected. It was in the southerly bight—Nicolson had taken the precaution of rounding the island before landing—that they had beached their boats and moored them to a couple of heavy stones.

  The narrow end of the island, east beyond the bights, was low and rocky and bare, but the west had some vegetation—scrub bushes and stunted lalang grass—and rose to a height of perhaps fifty feet in the middle. On the southern side of this hill there was a little hollow, hardly more than a shelf, about half-way up the slope, and it was towards this that Nicolson urged the passengers as soon as the boat had grounded. The Captain and Corporal Fraser had to be carried, but it was only a short trip and within ten minutes of the boats’ grounding the entire party had taken refuge in the hollow, surrounded by all the food, water supplies and portable equipment, even the oars and the crutches.

  A light breeze had sprung up with the going down of the sun, and clouds were slowly filling up the sky from the north-east, blanketing the early evening stars, but it was still light enough for Nicolson to use his glasses. He stared through them for almost two minutes, then laid them down, rubbing his eyes. He was aware, without being able to see, that everybody in the hollow was watching him anxiously—all except the boy who was bundled up in a blanket and already drowsing off to sleep.

  “Well?” Findhorn broke the silence.

  “They’re moving round the western tip of the island, sir, Pretty close inshore, too.”

  “I can’t hear them.”

  “Must be using their batteries. Why, I don’t know. Just because they can’t see us it doesn’t mean that we can’t see them. It’s not all that dark.”

  Van Effen cleared his throat. And what do you think the next move is going to be, Mr. Nicolson?”

  “No idea. It’s up to them, I’m afraid. If they had either their big gun or A.A. gun left they could blast us out of here in two minutes.” Nicolson gestured at the low ridge that bounded the hollow to the south, barely visible in the gloom even six feet away. “But with a little luck I think that’ll stop rifle bullets.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Time enough to worry about that when it happens,” Nicolson answered shortly. “Maybe they’ll try to land men at various points and surround us. Maybe they’ll try a frontal attack.” He had the glasses to his eyes again. “Whatever happens they can’t just go home and say they left us here—they’d get their heads in their hands, perhaps literally. Either that or hara-kiri all over the shop.”

  “They won’t go home.” Captain Findhorn’s voice was heavy with certainty. “Too many of their shipmates have died.”

  For some time there had been a murmur of voices behind them, and now the murmur died away and Siran spoke.

  “Mr. Nicolson?”

  Nicolson lowered his binoculars and looked over his shoulder.

  “What do you want?”

  “My men and I have been having a discussion. We have a proposition to make to you.”

  “Make it to the captain. He’s in charge.” Nicolson turned away abruptly and raised the binoculars again.

&n
bsp; “Very well. It is this, Captain Findhorn. It is obvious—painfully obvious, if I may say so—that you do not trust us. You force us to occupy a separate lifeboat—and not, I think, because we don’t bathe twice a day. You feel—wrongly, I assure you—that you must watch us all the time. We are a heavy—ah—responsibility, a liability, I should say. We propose, with your permission, to relieve you of this liability.”

  “For heaven’s sake get to the point,” Findhorn snapped irritably.

  “Very well. I suggest you let us go, have no more worry about us. We prefer to be the prisoners of the Japanese.”

  “What!” The angry interjection came from Van Effen. “God in heaven, sir, I’d shoot the lot of them first!”

  “Please!” Findhorn waved a hand in the darkness, looking curiously at Siran, but it was too dark to see his expression.

  “As a matter of interest, how would you propose to surrender yourselves. Just walk off down the hill towards the beach?”

  “More or less.”

  “And what guarantee would you have that they wouldn’t shoot you before you surrendered? Or, if you did succeed in surrendering, that they wouldn’t torture or kill you afterwards?”

  “Don’t let them go, sir.” Van Effen’s voice was urgent.

  “Do not distress yourself,” Findhorn said dryly. “I’ve no intention of complying with his ridiculous request. You stay, Siran, although heaven knows we don’t want you. Please don’t insult our intelligence.”

  “Mr. Nicolson!” Siran appealed. “Surely you can—”

  “Shut up!” Nicolson said curtly. “You heard what Captain Findhorn said. How naïve and dim-witted do you think we are? Not one of you would risk his precious neck if there was the slightest chance of being shot or ill-treated by the Japs. It’s a hundred to one—”

  “I assure you—” Siran made to interrupt but Nicolson stopped him.