South by Java Head

by Alistair MacLean

  “Colonel Kiseki.” Van Effen’s voice was very far away. He tried to smile again, but it was only a pathetic twitch of his lower lip. “Perhaps we have something in common. I think—” Here his voice faded into nothingness, then came again, strongly. “I think we both have a weakness for very little children.”

  Nicolson stared down at him, then twisted round as a loud, rending crash echoed across the kampong and a sheet of flame leapt up, a flame that illumined every remotest corner of the little village. The council house, its last supports burnt out, had collapsed in on itself and was burning more furiously than ever. But only for a moment. Even as Nicolson watched the licking tongues of flame shrank back down towards the earth and the dark gloomy shadows crept forward from every side. Nicolson looked away and bent down to talk again to Van Effen, but Van Effen was unconscious.

  Slowly, wearily, Nicolson straightened himself, but remained sunk on his knees, staring down at the grievously wounded man. All at once the exhaustion, the despair and the sharp, fiery agony of his legs and feet and arms flooded in on him and the temptation to let himself go, to slip into the friendly, embracing darkness that hovered round the woolly, shadowed edges of his mind was almost overpowering. He was actually swaying backwards and forwards on his knees, eyes all but closed and his arms swinging limply from his shoulders, when he heard a voice shouting, the sound of feet thudding across the kampong at a dead run and felt the hard urgent fingers biting cruelly through the red charred skin of his upper arm.

  “Come on, sir, come on! For God’s sake get to your feet!” There was a fierceness, a burning desperation in McKinnon’s voice that Nicolson had never heard before. “They’ve got them, sir. Those yellow devils have taken them away!”

  “What? What?” Nicolson shook his aching fuzzy head from side to side. “They’ve taken what away? The plans, the diamonds? They’re welcome to all—”

  “I hope the diamonds go to hell and roast there with every little yellow bastard in the East.” McKinnon was half-sobbing, half-shouting at the top of his voice in a voice Nicolson had never heard before, his eyes were flooded with tears, his great fists whiteknuckled by his side, and he was quite mad, insane with rage. “It’s not only the diamonds they’ve taken, sir, I wish to God it was. The inhuman devils have taken hostages with them, I saw them throw them into their truck. The captain, Miss Drachmann and that poor wee boy!”

  FIFTEEN

  Beyond anger lies fury, the heedless, ungovernable rage of the berserker, and beyond that again, a long, long step beyond the boundary of madness, lies the region of cold and utterly uncaring indifference. When a man enters that region, as few ever do, he is no longer himself, he is a man beside himself, a man without all his normal codes and standards of feeling and thought and emotions, a man for whom words like fear and danger and suffering and exhaustion are words that belong to another world and whose meaning he can no longer comprehend. It is a state characterised by an abnormally heightened clarity of mind, by a hyper-sensitive perception of where danger lies, by a total and unhuman disregard for that danger. It is, above all, a state characterised by an utter implacability. It was in such a state that Nicolson found himself at half-past eight on the evening of that day in late February, seconds only after McKinnon had told him that Gudrun and Peter were gone.

  His mind was clear, unnaturally so, swiftly weighing up the situation as far as he knew it, balancing the possibilities and the probabilities, racing ahead and formulating the only plan that could offer any hope at all of success. His weariness, the sheer physical exhaustion, had dropped from him like a falling cloak: he knew the change was psychological, not physiological, that he would pay heavily for it later, but it didn’t matter, he was oddly certain that no matter what the source of his energy, it would carry him through. He was still aware, remotely, of the severe burns on his legs and arms, of the pain in his throat where the Japanese bayonet had bitten in so deeply, but his awareness was no more than an intellectual acknowledgment of these burns and wounds, they might well have belonged to another man.

  His plan was simple, suicidally simple, and the chances of failure so high that they seemed inevitable, but the thought of failure never entered his mind. Half a dozen questions fired at Telak, the same at McKinnon and he knew what he must do, what everyone must do if there was to be any hope at all. It was McKinnon’s story that settled the problem for him.

  The council house had blazed so fiercely, had gone up with such incredible speed, for one reason only—McKinnon had saturated the whole windward wall with the contents of a four-gallon can of petrol. He had stolen this from the Japanese truck within a couple of minutes of its arrival—the driver had kept careless watch and was now lying on the ground, less than ten feet away—and he had been just on the point of setting fire to it when a patrolling sentry had almost literally stumbled across him. But he had done more than steal the petrol, he had tried to immobilise the truck. He had searched for the distributor, failed to find it in the darkness, but had located the carburettor intake fuel line, and the soft copper had bent like putty in his hands. It seemed unlikely, impossible rather, that the truck could get much more than a mile on the cupful of fuel that remained—and it was four miles to the town of Bantuk.

  Quickly, Nicolson asked Telak for co-operation, and got it at once. With his father and several of his tribesmen dead, neutrality no longer existed for Telak. He said little, but what little he did say was bitter and savage and concerned with nothing but vengeance. He nodded immediate compliance to Nicolson’s request that he provide a guide to lead the main party—only seven now, all told, under the leadership of Vannier—via the main road to Bantuk, where they were to seize and board the launch, if this could be done in absolute silence, and rapidly translated to one of his tribesmen, giving him the rendezvous. He then ordered half a dozen of his men to search the dead Japanese soldiers lying around the kampong and to bring all their weapons and ammunition to a central spot. A tommy-gun, two automatic rifles and a strange automatic pistol proved to be still serviceable. Telak himself disappeared into a nearby hut and emerged with two Sumatran parangs, honed to razor-sharp edges, and a couple of curious, elaborately-chased daggers, ten inches long and shaped like a flame, which he stuck in his own belt. Within five minutes of the destruction of the council house, Nicolson, McKinnon and Telak were on their way.

  The road to Bantuk—no road, really, but a graded jungle path barely six feet wide—wound tortuously in and out among palm-oil plantations, tobacco plantations and evil-smelling swamps, waist deep and infinitely treacherous in the darkness. But the way Telak led them that night skirted the road only once, crossed it twice, penetrated straight through swamps and paddy fields and plantations, arrow-straight for the heart of Bantuk. All three men were hurt, and badly: all of them had lost blood, Telak most of all, and no competent doctor would have hesitated to immobilise any of the three in hospital: but they ran all the way to Bantuk, across impossible, energy-sapping, heart-breaking terrain, never once breaking down into a walk. They ran with their hearts pounding madly under the inhuman strain, leaden legs fiery with the pain of muscles taxed far beyond endurance, chests rising and falling, rising and falling as starving lungs gasped for more and still more air, the sweat running off their bodies in streams. They ran and they kept on running, Telak because this was his element and his father lay dead in the village with a Japanese bayonet through his chest, McKinnon because he was still mad with rage and his heart would keep him going until he dropped, Nicolson because he was a man beside himself and all the pain and labour and suffering was happening to someone else.

  The second time they crossed the road they saw the Japanese truck, not five yards away in the darkness. They didn’t even break stride, there could be no doubt that it was abandoned, that the Japanese had taken their prisoners with them and hurried on foot towards the town. And the truck had managed to travel much farther than they had expected before it had broken down, at least half-way towards Bantuk, and they had n
o means of knowing how long ago the Japanese had left it. Nicolson was coldly aware that their chances now were all the poorer, very slender indeed. All of them knew it, but not one of them expressed the thought, suggested that they might ease their killing pace, even if only a fraction. If anything they lengthened their strides and pounded on even more desperately through the darkness.

  More than once, after the sight of that truck, pictures flashed into Nicolson’s mind of how the Japanese soldiers must be treating their prisoners as they hurried them on fearfully along the jungle path. He had visions of rifle butts, maybe even bayonets, prodding viciously into the sick old captain, stumbling in sheer weakness and weariness, and into Gudrun as she, too, stumbled along in the darkness, cruelly handicapped by the crippling weight of the little boy in her arms—even after half a mile, a two-year old can become an intolerable weight. Or maybe she had dropped young Peter, maybe they had abandoned the little boy in their haste, left him by the side of the jungle, left him surely to die. But the mentor watching over Nicolson’s mind that night never let these thoughts stay with him long. They stayed long enough only to spur him on to even greater efforts, never long enough for obsession and ultimate weakness. Throughout all that interminable lurching, gasping run in the darkness, Nicolson’s mind remained strangely cold and remote.

  It had turned cold, the stars had gone and it was beginning to rain when at last they reached the outskirts of Bantuk. Bantuk was a typical Javanese coastal town, not too big, not too little, a curious intermingling of the old and the new, a blend of Indonesia of a hundred years ago and of Holland ten thousand miles away. On the shore, following the curve of the bay, were the crazy, ramshackle huts erected on long bamboo poles below the highwater mark, with their suspended nets to trap the tidal catch of fish, and half-way along the beach a curved breakwater hooked far out into the bay, sheltering launches and fishing vessels, the tented prahus and the double outrigger canoes too large to be dragged up past the fishinghuts. Paralleling the beach, behind the huts, stretched two or three straggling, haphazard rows of straw-roofed wooden huts as found in the villages in the interior, and behind that again was the shopping and business centre of the community, which led in turn to the houses that stretched back into the gentle valley behind. A typical Dutch suburb, this last, not perhaps with the wide, lined boulevards of Batavia or Medan, but with trim little bungalows and the odd colonial mansion, every one of them with its beautifully kept garden.

  It was towards this last section of the town that Telak now led his two companions. They raced through the darkened streets in the middle of the town, making no attempt at concealment, for the time for concealment was past. Few people saw them, for there were few abroad in the rain-washed streets. At first Nicolson thought that the Japanese must have declared a curfew, but soon saw that this was not the case, for a few coffee shops here and there were still open, their smocked Chinese proprietors standing under the awnings at the doorways, watching their passing in an impassive silence.

  Half a mile inland from the bay, Telak slowed down to a walk and gestured Nicolson and McKinnon into the sheltered gloom of a high hedge. Ahead of them, not more than fifty yards away, the metalled road they were now standing on ended in a cul-de-sac. The bounding wall was high, arched in the middle, and the archway beneath was illuminated by a pair of electric lanterns. Below the archway itself two men were standing, talking and smoking, each leaning a shoulder against the curving walls. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the grey-green uniforms and hooked caps of the Japanese army, for the light was strong. Behind the archway they could see a drive-way stretching back up the hill, illuminated by lamps every few yards. And beyond that again was a high, whitewalled mansion. Little of it was visible through the archway, just a pillared stoop and a couple of big bay windows to one side, both of them brightly lit. Nicolson turned to the gasping man by his side.

  “This is it, Telak?” They were the first words spoken since they had left the kampong.

  “This is the house.” Telak’s words, like Nicolson’s, came in short, jerky gasps. “The biggest in Bantuk.”

  “Naturally.” Nicolson paused to wipe the sweat off his face and chest and arms. Very particularly he dried the palms of his hands. “This is the way they would come?”

  “No other way. They are sure to come up this road. Unless they have already come.”

  “Unless they have already come,” Nicolson echoed. For the first time the fear and anxiety swept through his mind like a wave, a fear that would have panicked his mind and an anxiety that would have wrecked his plans but he thrust them ruthlessly aside. “If they’ve come, it’s already too late. If not, we still have time in hand. We may as well get our breath back for a minute or two—we can’t go into this more dead than alive. How do you feel, Bo’sun?”

  “My hands are itching, sir,” McKinnon said softly. “Let’s go in now.”

  “We won’t be long,” Nicolson promised. He turned to Telak. “Do I see spikes above the walls?”

  “You do.” Telak’s voice was grim. “The spikes are nothing. But they’re electrified all the way.”

  “So this is the only way in?” Nicolson asked softly.

  “And the only way out.”

  “I see. I see indeed.” No words were spoken for the next two minutes, there was only the sound of their breathing becoming shallower and more even, the intervals between breaths lengthening all the time. Nicolson waited with an almost inhuman patience, carefully gauging the moment when recovery would be at its maximum but the inevitable reaction not yet set in. Finally he stirred and straightened, rubbing his palms up and down the charred remnants of his khaki drills to remove the last drop of excess moisture, and turned again to Telak.

  “We passed a high wall on this side about twenty paces back?”

  “We did,” Telak nodded.

  “With trees growing up behind it, close to the wall?”

  “I noticed that also,” Telak nodded.

  “Let’s get back there.” Nicolson turned and padded softly along in the shelter of the hedge.

  It was all over inside two minutes, and no one more than thirty or forty yards away could have heard the slightest whisper of sound. Nicolson lay on the ground at the foot of the high wall and moaned softly, then more loudly, more pitifully still as his first groans had attracted no attention at all. Within seconds, however, one of the guards started, straightened up and peered anxiously down the road, and a moment later the second guard, his attention caught by an especially anguished moan, did the same. The two men looked at one another, held a hurried consultation, hesitated, then came running down the road, one of them switching on a torch as he came. Nicolson moaned even more loudly, twisted in apparent agony so that his back was to them and so that he could not be so quickly identified as a Westerner. He could see the flickering gleam of bayonets in the swinging light of the torch, and an edgy guard would be just that little bit liable to prefer investigating a corpse to a living enemy, no matter how seriously hurt he might appear to be.

  Heavy boots clattering on the metalled road, the two men slithered to a stop, stooped low over the fallen man and died while they were still stooping, the one with a flame-shaped dagger buried to the hilt in his back as Telak dropped off the high wall above, the other as McKinnon’s sinewy hands found his neck a bare second after Nicolson had kicked the rifle out of his unsuspecting hand.

  Nicolson twisted swiftly to his feet, stared down at the two dead men. Too small, he thought bitterly, far too damned small. He’d hoped for uniforms, for disguise, but neither of these two uniforms would have looked at any of the three of them. There was no time to waste. Telak and himself at wrists and ankles, one swing, two, a powerful boost from McKinnon in the middle and the first of the guards was over the high wall and safely out of sight, five seconds more and the other had joined him. Moments later all three men were inside the grounds of the mansion.

  The well-lighted pathway was flanked on both sides by either high
bushes or trimmed trees. On the right-hand side, behind the trees, was only the high wall with the electric fence on top: on the other side of the drive-way was a wide, sloping lawn, bare in patches but well-kept and smooth, dotted with small trees irregularly planted in circular plots of earth. Light reached the lawn from the drive-way and the front of the house, but not much. The three men flitted soundlessly across the grass, from the shadowed shelter of one tree to the next until they reached a clump of bushes that bordered the gravel in front of the portico of the house. Nicolson leaned forward and put his mouth to Telak’s ear.

  “Ever been here before?”

  “Never.” Telak’s murmur was as soft as his own.

  “Don’t know about any other doors? Never heard if the windows are barred or live-wired or fitted with intruder alarms?”

  Telak shook his head in the darkness.

  “That settles it,” Nicolson whispered. “The front door. They won’t be expecting visitors, especially visitors like us, through the front door.” He groped at his belt, unhooked the parang Telak had given him and began to straighten up from his kneeling position. “No noise, no noise at all. Quick and clean and quiet. We mustn’t disturb our hosts.”

  He took half a pace forward, choked a muffled exclamation and sank back to his knees again. He had little option. McKinnon, for all his medium height, weighed almost two hundred pounds and was phenomenally strong.

  “What is it,” Nicolson whispered. He rubbed his burnt forearm in silent agony, certain that McKinnon’s digging forefingers had torn off some of the skin.

  “Someone coming,” McKinnon breathed in his ear. “Must have guards outside.”

  Nicolson listened a second, then shook his head in the gloom to show that he could hear nothing. For all that he believed the bo’sun—his hearing was on a par with his remarkable eyesight.