South by Java Head

by Alistair MacLean

  The jagged rock—or maybe it was a knife-edge of coral—sliced the bottom out of the rushing boat, from the stern clear back to the bows. The jarring, braking shock jerked people free from their clutching handholds, flung them in headlong confusion, all arms and bodies and legs, towards the stern, and hurled two or three over the side into the water. A second later the wrecked boat slewed violently to the side and overturned, catapulting everyone into the seething afterwash of the surf.

  Of the seconds that followed no one had afterwards any more than a confused, inchoate recollection, a recollection of being rolled over and over by the surging sea, of swallowing sea-water and scrambling to their feet on the shingly, shelving beach only to be knocked down and buffeted by the inverted lifeboat, scrambling to their feet again to have their legs sucked from under them by the retreating seas, struggling upright again and wading, staggering ashore to fling themselves down on the beach in gasping, heart-pounding exhaustion.

  Nicolson made three trips to the beach altogether. That first was with Miss Plenderleith. The shock of the collision had flung her hard against him even as they went over the stern, and he had instinctively tightened his arm round her as they had gone to the bottom together. She had been almost twice the weight he had expected, she had both her forearms locked through the handles of her heavy canvas travelling bag, and resisted Nicolson’s efforts to tear it away with what he could only imagine to be a strength—an unreasoning suicidal strength—born of fear and panic. But he had got her ashore somehow, still grimly clutching her bag, waited his chance for the receding surf, then plunged back into the sea to help Vannier carry the captain ashore. Findhom hadn’t wanted assistance, he kept on repeating that he didn’t want assistance, but his legs and his strength had gone as a result of his wound and the suffering of the past week, and he would have drowned where he had lain, in a couple of feet of water. Slipping, stumbling, falling and getting up again, they had carried him ashore bodily and dumped him on the shingle beyond the reach of the waves.

  By now there were almost a dozen of them clustered in a tight knot on the beach, some lying, some sitting, some standing, indistinct blurs in the darkness who gasped for breath or moaned or retched sea-water in convulsive agony. Chest heaving and gasping for breath himself, Nicolson started to take a quick roll-call of those present. But he didn’t even get beyond the first name.

  “Gudrun. Miss Drachmann!” There was no reply, just the moaning and the painful retching. “Miss Drachmann! Has anyone seen Miss Drachmann? Has anyone got Peter?” There was only silence. “For God’s sake, somebody answer! Has anyone seen Peter? The little boy? Has anyone seen him?” But there was only the sullen boom of the surf, the rustling shirr of the retreating sea dragging the shingle down the beach.

  Nicolson dropped to his knees, felt the forms and faces of those who were lying on the beach. No Peter there, no Gudrun Drachmann. He jumped to his feet, knocked staggering someone who was standing in his way and rushed madly down into the sea, plunged out into the water and was knocked off his feet by the surge of the incoming surf. He was on his feet again like a cat, all his exhaustion gone as if it had never existed. He was vaguely conscious of someone plunging into the sea behind him but paid no attention.

  Six running, splashing steps at the full stretch of his legs and something struck him with cruel, numbing force against the kneecaps. The boat, drifting upside down. He somersaulted in mid-air, struck his shoulder against the keel, landed flat on his back on the water on the other side with an explosive smack that drove all the breath out of his body, then was on his way again, propelled by a fear and a nameless anger such as he had never known before. The pain in his chest and his legs was another turn of the rack for every step he took, but he drove himself on remorselessly as if the fire in his legs and his body’s gasping demands for air simply did not exist. Another two steps and he had crashed into something soft and yielding and knocked it backwards into the next incoming rush of water. He stooped, grabbed hold of a shirt and lifted, bracing the two of them against the surge of the sea.

  “Gudrun?”

  “Johnny! Oh, Johnny!” She clung to him and he could feel her trembling.

  “Peter! Where’s Peter?” he demanded urgently.

  “Oh, Johnny!” The habitual cool self-possession was gone, and her voice was almost a wail. “The boat struck and—and—”

  “Where is Peter?” His fingers digging deeply into her shoulders, he was shaking her violently, his voice a savage shout.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know! I—I can’t find him.” She broke away, dived sideways into the water that was boiling waist-high by them. He caught her, jerked her to her feet and whirled round. It was Vannier who had followed him into the surf, and he was right behind him. He thrust the girl at him.

  “Take her ashore, Vannier.”

  “I won’t go! I won’t!” She was struggling in Vannier’s arms, but she hadn’t the strength left to struggle very much. “I lost him! I lost him!”

  “You heard me, Vannier?” Nicolson’s voice as he turned away was a cutting whip. Vannier mumbled “Yes, sir” to the retreating back and started to drag the half-hysterical girl through the surf.

  Again and again Nicolson plunged into the white water, his hands scrabbling desperately along the shingled bed of the sea: again and again he came up empty-handed. Once he thought he had found him, but it was only an empty bag; he threw it away like a man demented and flung himself yet farther out into the surf, near the coral that had sunk them. He was up almost shoulder high in the water now, being swept off his feet with monotonous regularity, swallowing great mouthfuls of sea, shouting the name of the boy over and over again like some crazy litany, driving his exhausted body to incredible, inhuman efforts, driven by a horrifying fear, a dreadful anxiety that left him no longer sane, and anxiety such as he had not known could exist in the heart of any man. Two minutes, perhaps three, had elapsed since the boat had struck, and even in his madness he knew that the little boy could not have lived so long in these waters. What little reason he had left told him so, but he ignored it, dived once more through the creaming surf to the shingled floor of the sea. But again nothing, below the water or on the surface, only the wind, the rain, the darkness and the deep-throated booming of the surf. And then, high and clear above the wind and the sea, he heard it.

  The child’s thin, terrified cry came from his right, along the beach, about thirty yards away. Nicolson whirled and plunged in that direction, cursing the deep waters that reduced his stumbling run to grotesque slow-motion. Again the child cried, not a dozen feet away this time. Nicolson shouted, heard a man’s answering call, and then all at once he was upon them, the looming bulk of a man as tall as himself, with the child high up in his arms.

  “I am very glad to see you, Mr. Nicolson.” Van Effen’s voice was very faint and far away. “The little one is not harmed. Please to take him from me.” Nicolson had barely time to snatch him in his arm before the Dutchman swayed on his feet, just once, then toppled and fell his length, face down in the foaming water.

  THIRTEEN

  The jungle, dank, dripping and steaming hot, was all around them. High above, through tiny gaps in the interwoven branches of heavily lianad trees, they could catch glimpses of the grey sullen sky, the same sky that had completely obscured the sunrise, just over two hours previously. The light that filtered down from these tree-tops had a strangely unreal quality, sinister and foreboding, but a quality that accorded well with the claustrophobic green walls of the jungle and the scummed, miasmal swamps that bounded both sides of the jungle path.

  Even as a jungle path it was almost a failure. As far as the jungle was concerned, it offered a fairly free passage, and axes or machetes had evidently been busy, fairly recently, on either side. But as a path it was treacherous to a degree, one moment hard-packed and worn smooth by constant use, the next vanishing abruptly and mysteriously as it rounded a giant tree-trunk and dipped into the waiting swamps ahead then reappea
ring a few yards ahead, smooth and firm again.

  Nicolson and Vannier, already covered to the waists in the rotting, evil-smelling slime, were beginning to discover the techniques for dealing with these sudden breaches in the path. Invariably, they were beginning to find, there was an alternative route round these swamp patches and if they cast around long enough they usually found it. But it took too long to seek out these bypasses and, more than once, they had wandered so far from the track that they had regained it only by chance, so that now, unless the bypass was almost immediately obvious, they plunged through the swamps and regained firm land on the other side, pausing every time to wipe off as much of the slime as possible and the ugly grey leeches that fastened to their legs. Then they would hurry on again, following the tortuous path round the massive trees as best they could in the weird, dim half-light of the tropical forest, trying their best to ignore the strange stirrings and rustlings that paralleled their progress on either side.

  Nicolson was a seaman, first, last and all the time. He was little at home on land, still less so in the jungle, and this was not a journey that he would ever have made, would ever have contemplated making, had there been any option. But there had been no option, none whatsoever, a fact that had become cruelly evident soon after the first grey stirrings of dawn had let him look around to assess their position and the condition of the boat’s company. Both had been very far from reassuring.

  They had landed somewhere on the Java shore of the Sunda Straits, in a deep bay, two miles wide across the horns, with a narrow shingled beach and a jungle that crowded down almost to the water’s edge, a dense, impenetrable looking jungle that ran back into the high rain-forests that covered the slopes of the low hills to the south. The shores of the bay itself were completely empty of any life, animal or human, or any signs of life: there was only their own little company, huddled for what pitiful shelter they could under a cluster of palms, and, about a hundred yards along the beach, the upturned lifeboat.

  The lifeboat was in bad shape. A great hole, almost fifteen feet in length, had been ripped out between the keel and the bilge grabrail, and the keel itself had been broken and wrenched away from its hog piece. The lifeboat was beyond repair, a total loss. There was only the jungle left for them, and they were in no condition to face that.

  Captain Findhorn, for all his courage, was still a very sick man, unable to walk a dozen steps. Van Effen was weak too, and in considerable pain, violently sick at regular intervals: before Nicolson and McKinnon had succeeded in freeing his badly mangled leg from the clam that had seized it while he had been bringing the child ashore, he had almost drowned in the shallow water, and this, coupled with the shrapnel wound in the thigh received some days previously and the crack on the skull lately given him by Farnholme had dangerously lowered his resistance and powers of recuperation. Both Walters and Evans had swollen arms from infected wounds, and they, too, suffered constantly, while McKinnon, though in no great pain, limped on a badly stiffened leg. Willoughby was weak, Gordon shiftless and worse than useless and Siran and his men obviously intended to be of help to no one but themselves.

  That left only Nicolson and the fourth officer, and Nicolson knew that there was nothing they could do for the others, not directly. To try to repair the lifeboat was out of the question, and to think of building any kind of boat or raft with the few tools they had left was just ridiculous. On land they were, and on land they would have to remain. But they couldn’t remain on that beach indefinitely. If they did, they would starve. Nicolson had no illusions about their ability to survive for any time at all on the food they could scrape from trees, bushes, on and under the ground. An experienced jungle man might get enough for survival, but the chances were that they would poison themselves in the very first meal they took. Even if they didn’t, bark and berries wouldn’t keep seriously ill men alive for long, and without medicines and fresh bandages for infected and suppurating wounds, the outlook was bleak indeed.

  Food, shelter, bandages and medicine—these were the essentials and wouldn’t just come to them. They would have to go to look for them, to seek for help. How far distant help might be, and in what direction it would lie, was anybody’s guess. The north-west corner of Java, Nicolson knew, had a fair population, and there were, he remembered, one or two largish towns some way inland. Too far inland—their best chances lay with the coastal fishing villages. They might encounter hostility instead of help, they might possibly encounter Japanese—in a mountainous land of forest and jungle like Java, they would almost certainly confine their activities to the coastal areas. But these possibilities, Nicolson realised, weren’t even worth considering: they had to do this, and the incidental risks, no matter how severe, had to be ignored. Less than an hour after dawn he had taken a Colt .455—the only other salvaged weapon, the brigadier’s machine-carbine, he had left with McKinnon—and moved off into the jungle, Vannier close behind him.

  Less than twenty yards inland, just before they had reached the belt of forest, they had struck a well-defined path, running northeast and south-west between the woods and the sea. Automatically, without even looking at one another, they had turned south-west: it wasn’t until they had gone some distance that Nicolson realised why they had done it: in the long run, the south represented ultimate escape and freedom. Less than half a mile from where they had left the others, the beach to their left curved away to the west and north-west, following the lower horn of the bay: but the path had carried straight on across the base of the promontory, leaving the scrub and bushes and penetrating deep into the rain-forest itself.

  Ninety minutes and three miles after leaving the beach Nicolson called a halt. They had just struggled through a thirty-yard patch of watery swamp that had taken them almost up to the armpits, and both men were exhausted. The effort, the sheer labour involved in their grotesquely slow-motion wading through these swamps was energy-sapping enough for men who had had little to drink and almost nothing to eat for a week: but even worse was the steaming jungle, the oppressive heat, the enervating humidity that stung and blinded their eyes with sweat.

  Safe on a patch of firm ground, Nicolson sat and leaned his back against a thick tree-trunk. He wiped some mud off his forehead with the back of his left hand—the right still clutched the gun—and looked at Vannier, who had slid down almost full length on the ground, a forearm across his eyes, his chest rising and falling, deeply, quickly.

  “Enjoying yourself, Fourth? I bet you never thought your Second Mate’s ticket was a licence for traipsing through the Indonesian jungles?” Unconsciously, almost, he kept his voice down to a gentle murmur: the jungle, and everything about it, breathed hostility.

  “Bloody awful, isn’t it, sir?” Vannier stirred, groaned softly as some aching muscle rebelled, then tried to smile. “These treeswinging Tarzans you see in films give you a quite erroneous idea of how progress is made through the jungle. Me, I think this damn path here just goes on for ever and ever. You don’t think we’re travelling in circles, do you, sir?”

  “Possible enough,” Nicolson admitted. “Haven’t seen the sun all day, and it’s so blasted thick overhead that you can’t even see lightness in the sky. We could be going north, south, or west, but I don’t think so. I think this path will come out again to the sea.”

  “I hope you’re right.” Vannier was gloomy, but not depressed. Looking at the thin, sun-darkened face, with the now too- prominent cheekbones and the blistered, resolute mouth, Nicolson thought that, in the past few days, the furnace of privation and experience had cast Vannier in a completely different mould, changing him from an irresolute, uncertain boy to a toughened, determined man, a man aware of newfound resources and unsuspected capacities, a man well worth having by his side.

  A minute, perhaps two, passed in silence, a silence marred only by the diminishing sound of their breathing and the sodden dripping of water in the leaves of the trees. Then, abruptly, Nicolson stiffened, his left hand reaching out to touch Vannier warningly o
n the shoulder. But the warning was unheeded. Vannier, too, had heard it, was drawing his legs under him and rising steadily, noiselessly to his feet. Seconds later both men were standing behind the trunk of the tree, waiting.

  The murmur of voices and the soft pad of footsteps on the matted jungle floor came steadily nearer, the owners of the voices still hidden by the curve in the trail, less than ten yards away. They would have to wait till the last moment before identifying the approaching men, but it couldn’t be helped. Nicolson looked swiftly round for a better place of hiding but there was none. The treetrunk would have to do, and behind the tree-trunk they would wait. The approaching men—it sounded as if there were only two of them—might be Japanese. Even muffled by his shirtfront, the click of the Colt’s safety-catch sliding off sounded unnaturally loud: a month ago he would have shrunk from the thought of shooting unsuspecting men from ambush; a month ago …