Achilles arrived in Baalkpan Bay on the very heels of the Strakka, after what must have been a record passage. She’d sustained some minor damage, but Matt could find no fault with Jenks’s seamanship. Stony stares greeted her arrival and the flag she flew as she steamed into the bay and eased up to the dock. Only when Captain Reddy, the Captain’s Guard, and Chack’s Marines disembarked was there a marked decrease in the hostile tension. Many people still tried to get at the ship and the people aboard, but the company of the 2nd Marines with Chack was more than sufficient to keep the crowd at bay.
Matt strode to meet Adar, Keje, Letts, and Spanky, flanked by Gray, Stites, O’Casey, and the rest of his personal guard. “It’s good to see you, Adar,” Matt said, receiving the customary embrace. Keje embraced him as well. “I wish it were under better circumstances.”
“As do I, my friend. I cannot express—”
“Skip it,” Matt interrupted. “It’s done. Quit beating yourself up. Now we have to decide what we’re going to do about it.”
“Yes,” Adar agreed. “All has been prepared as you have specified. The wood and charcoal have been brought, as you ordered.” Adar pointed at a massive heap. “That is for Achilles, I take it?”
“Yeah. Jenks wants to get under way as soon as possible. Can’t say I blame him.” He looked at Adar, at all the faces present. “And yes, I do trust him. What’s weird is, even O’Casey trusts him now. You wouldn’t believe the mess they’ve got at home.” He paused. “Or maybe you would. It’s sort of like Aryaal and B’mbaado, except it’s all mixed-up in one government.” He shook his head. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter. Jenks might catch them, but I doubt it. He has to try, though, and we might need him.” Suddenly, Matt looked at Walker, tied securely to the pier. Her upper works had not yet been repainted, except for a few spots where the weather had allowed the painting of some welds and seams. She looked like a patchwork quilt, but she was whole, or mostly so. Smoke rose from two stacks and workers shouted and scrambled over her. A strange-looking gun was being lowered onto her rebuilt and slightly reconfigured aft deckhouse. Her force-draft blower gave the distinct impression she was breathing on her own.
“I didn’t believe it,” he confessed quietly. For a moment, the hard expression he’d worn melted away. “I couldn’t let myself.” He looked at Spanky. “Mr. McFarlane, my compliments—and my most heartfelt appreciation.”
Spanky looked uncomfortable. “Shucks, Skipper, wasn’t just me.”
“No, but you’re the ramrod. Always have been. Looking at you, I doubt you’ve slept since those bastards took the girls.”
Spanky shrugged, glancing down at his stained and filthy self. “Not many have. You’re gonna need your ship for this one, Skipper. She’s the only thing in the world fast enough to catch them. You’ve pulled more than one trick out of her hat. I figure she’s got plenty more where they came from.”
Matt clasped the skinny man’s arm. “You bet. How long?”
“Two weeks, Skipper. We’ll have her good as new by then. Might be a few quirks—we’ve basically rebuilt her from the keel up—but that’s still a week ahead of schedule.”
“I doubt it, if you count the man hours!” Matt chuckled grimly. “Give the guys a little more time off if you can. Don’t worry; I’m not going to stop you now!”
Spanky—everyone—grinned relief. They’d been afraid the captain would want to leave immediately. Undoubtedly he did want to, but he also knew a fully repaired Walker would catch Ajax regardless of the head start over the vast distances they were contemplating. One thing bothered Keje, however, and he had to ask.
“What will this Billingsly do with the hostages? He has threatened to kill them if he is harassed. Might he not do that anyway?”
Matt shook his head. “I don’t think so, and neither does Jenks. Taking the princess was his objective. According to your accounts of the events, everybody else he took was basically an accident. If he just wanted Rebecca dead, he could have assassinated her many times and just left before anyone got wise.” He shook his head. “No, he wants her alive, or this Company he works for does. Probably as a bargaining chip to wring even more power from the governor-emperor. If I know the princess, she’s going to be making life miserable for Mr. Billingsly about now. See, not all of Ajax’s crew are Company men. Even her captain is a loyalist, according to Jenks. Billingsly wouldn’t dare even clap her in irons without risking an open break with what has to be a very divided crew. I bet that will put the princess in a position to demand decent treatment for the hostages.”
“I hope you are right,” murmured Adar.
“Me too,” Matt admitted.
Jenks joined them, saluting. “Please let me express my most abject apologies,” he said sincerely. “If I had only known—”
“You stow it too,” Matt interrupted. “Everybody’s sorry. Okay. We’re all on the same side now, so let’s get on with it. What do you need?”
“Very well. Some assistance loading the fuel aboard my ship would be appreciated. Our victuals should suffice, but a little more couldn’t hurt. Also, after observing the healing effects of your wondrous polta paste, I would beg some of that from you as well.”
Adar, still eyeing Jenks suspiciously, motioned to one of his staff standing a discreet distance away. “See to it,” he commanded.
“How are we fixed for transmitters and receivers?” Matt asked.
Spanky looked around. “I’ll have to ask Riggs. Most have been going in the new ships as soon as they finish ’em.”
“See if we can spare a set for Commodore Jenks. I want a couple of spares aboard Walker too. I never want to be out of touch again.”
“Who’ll operate it?” Spanky asked, referring to the one meant for Achilles.
“Clancy told me Mr. O’Casey has become fairly proficient. He didn’t have much else to do on the voyage out, after all. At least until we transferred him to Dowden.” Matt looked at Jenks, who was staring at his old nemesis.
“Under the circumstances, I believe that would certainly be acceptable, if Mr. O’Casey—Bates—would be kind enough to agree. In fact, with the discovery that my second officer was one of Billingsly’s creatures, I have an opening there as well.”
With a strange expression, O’Casey nodded. “Aye, ’twould be . . . interestin’ ta sail with ye again, Commodore. On the same side.”
Dennis Silva groaned and opened his good eye. He’d actually been awake and alert for some time, but playing possum was a skill he’d learned in China once upon a time, and it had come in handy more than once. When, oh, Chinese gangsters, for example, thought you were down for the count, they were less prepared when you suddenly resurrected yourself and beat them to death with a goofy jade Buddha you didn’t know why you had. Life was weird that way, and it always helped to have an edge. He groaned again, making sure the ladies knew he was awake. He hadn’t learned much during his possum phase, but he did know everyone was alive, where they were, and that, for the moment, they were alone.
“What hit me?” he grumbled. That was still a mystery. He’d been doing well enough, him and Lawrence, when everything just . . . quit. He knew his head hurt—badly—so something must have conked him. He didn’t remember anything else from then, until a short time ago.
“Strange. I would have wagered on ‘where am I?’ came Sister Audry’s voice.
“Wagerin’s a sin, Sister,” Dennis proclaimed piously. “ ’Sides, any fool can tell we’re at sea, an’ I been in enough brigs to recognize one for what it is, even if I never been in it before.”
“The weapon was a bag of musket balls,” Princess Rebecca said, moving quickly to sit beside him where he lay on a pair of moldy blankets. “But the man who hit you was a particularly revolting and traitorous coward named Truelove. He seems to be Billingsly’s chief minion.” She caressed his forehead and then gingerly inspected his wound. “Healing nicely, at last,” she pronounced. Silva hadn’t yet tried to rise, but he suspected it would be a disorientin
g procedure.
“Truelove, eh? Big guy? I remember him. Hafta make a point outta returning the favor. I hate leavin’ obligations like that undid.” He paused, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Knew it had to be a sneak attack. Ol’ Abe the newsboy mighta whupped me in a fair fight, but by the time I met him, it wouldn’t have been fair. Good fella. Readin’ about him’s practically what got me in the Navy. Practically.”
“You fought splendidly before that coward struck you down!” Rebecca gushed. “Splendidly!”
“Well . . . of course I did! Ol’ Larry helped a little, though. Say, how is the little lizardy guy?”
“I okay,” came a familiar voice from the gloom.
Sandra Tucker moved into Dennis’s field of vision. “Lucky for you, you showed enough sense to keep some polta paste in your shooting bag. Rebecca got it for us. She pretty much has the run of the ship. You probably would have come out of it—you’ve got a bad concussion, by the way—but we might have lost young Mr. Cook. Before Truelove hit you, he’d evidently fired his last pistol at the boy. The ball took a big hunk out of the top of his shoulder, close to his neck. Not normally a mortal wound, but it became infected quite quickly.”
“Well. Yeah, I keep some o’ that stuff in there case o’ scratches an’ such. Be kinda stupid, after all we been through, to die o’ some infected scratch. How is the little bugger? Abel, right?”
“I’m here, sir,” came a weak voice. “I’m well enough. I did what you said. I yelled and ran for help!”
“And was shot for his efforts too, the brave, silly boy!” Rebecca scolded.
“Oh, well. Ever’body gets shot sooner or later in the Navy. Seems like it, anyway. You done good, boy.” Silva finally tried to sit up, but it just wasn’t going to happen yet. He growled and lay back down. “So,” he said, “what’s the scam? Why ain’t we been rescued?”
“We’re hostages,” Sandra said simply. “They’ve threatened to kill us if our forces molest them. For a couple of days, one of our planes came and buzzed around, but we haven’t seen it since the storm.”
“A couple o’ days! A storm! How long have I been out?”
“Several days. I believe you were in a coma.”
“Huh. Damn, no wonder I’m so hungry. Several days on this bucket and we could be anywhere. That’s the first thing we gotta figure out: where we are. Then we gotta keep track of our position.”
“Why?” Sister Audry asked.
“So we’ll know when to get off, of course! If they’re keepin’ us hostage, our folks won’t blow the hell outta this tub! Besides, Dennis Silva ain’t nobody’s hostage!”
“What’s your plan?” Rebecca asked eagerly.
“Ain’t got one yet. I just woke up, remember? Gimme a minute or two to figure the angles. So, Miss . . . Lieutenant . . . Minister . . .”
Sandra laughed. “Lieutenant will still do.”
“Thanks, ma’am. Lieutenant Tucker says you got the run o’ the ship?”
“Essentially,” Rebecca replied. “That porcine beast must preserve the fiction he has rescued me from you. No one actually believes it. I spend most of my time down here, after all, but he dares not put me in irons. My behavior is controlled by threats against your well-being.”
“You figure there’s anybody aboard we can count on?”
“I’m sure of it. There are more Company men aboard Ajax than any ship that sailed with the squadron, but not all are traitors. Why, even the captain, Captain Rajendra, is a loyal man! He fairly chafes! He does not know what to do, however. Less than half the crew stands with him.”
“The captain himself, eh?” Silva pondered. “Sure you can trust him?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then get our position from him. We need maps too. Charts.”
“What have you got in mind?” Sandra demanded.
“Well, I’m still conjurin’ it up, and me and the boy have a little healin’ to do, but it strikes me the last thing we want is to wind up wherever this ship is goin’. Once we’re there, there won’t be any use for us. There may not be any use for the princess. So somewhere between here and there, we have to switch trains.”
CHAPTER 21
Irvin Laumer’s eyes jerked open and he leaped to his feet when he heard the scream. Everyone was exhausted and he’d been taking a short siesta in the shade of a leafy lean-to on the beach. Only an idiot would do such a thing under the standing trees on Talaud Island. It took him an instant to realize the scream had come from the workers near the sub. Sprinting through the loose sand, he yanked the 45 from his holster and jacked a round into the chamber.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he shouted. The screaming had stopped, but there was still a lot of shouting and confusion around the work site.
“One of the ’Cats was just walking across the gangplank to the boat,” Danny Porter said excitedly, “when this jet of water, like a highpressure hose, knocked him off into the water! As soon as he fell in, something . . . got him!”
Irvin looked at him incredulously, then eased a little closer to the basin they’d begun excavating around S-19. There was a lot of water down there, and nothing they could do about it. Some soaked in through the sand and more came in with the tide when the sea was running high. Sometimes the boat actually floated. “What was it?” Irvin asked.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Danny demanded. “There’s all kinds of weird, murdering critters running around on this place! It’s a miracle we survived here as long as we did before, and we were idiots to come back to it!” Danny brought his voice under control. “And if that ain’t enough, we’ve got that thing scaring the water out of everybody!” He pointed at the mist-shrouded volcano in the distance. When they’d been marooned on Talaud Island, the volcano occasionally rumbled and made the ground shake, but for the past few weeks, it had been venting almost constantly. Sometimes it belched heavy clouds of ash that settled on them and got into everything when the wind was right. Sometimes it just made creepy noises. A time or two, they’d had spectacular light shows in the middle of the night. Nobody in their group really knew squat about volcanoes, aside from a few historical accounts, but the overwhelming consensus was that the Talaud volcano was building up to something big.
The problem was, they were stuck there—marooned again, in a sense. Simms’s consort had been little more than a freighter, and once she’d off-loaded the equipment, machinery, fuel oil for the steam boiler, and the hopefully required diesel, she’d sailed for Manila for more supplies. Simms had remained, lending her crew to the labor and as a safety measure in case, for any reason, they had to abandon the expedition. But even Simms and Captain Lelaa were gone now. They’d sailed two days before to rendezvous with a little squadron of feluccas led by Saan-Kakja’s brother to intercept and at least pinpoint Ajax’s position.
Irvin understood why Lelaa had to go, but it left him and his crew in a pickle. Simms had taken the newly repaired transmitter, and the set on the boat was irreparable. Tex was trying to build another set like Riggs’s design from the parts at hand, but it was slow going. In the meantime, they were at the mercy of all the terrors Walker had once rescued them from—the dangerous predators including the nocturnal tree git-yas, as Flynn had called them, bizarre creatures that looked and acted like a cross between a Grik and a sloth that dropped on unwary prey from above. There were other things, almost ghostly things no one had ever really seen or had a shot at, that could snatch a man and run faster than anything ought to be capable of. Then there was the mountain, of course. Now . . .
“Did anybody get a look at it at all?” Laumer asked of the creature that got the ’Cat.
“Well, it was kind of blotchy,” Sid Franks volunteered. As the carpenter, he would now have to repair the damaged gangplank. The jet of water had enough force to blow off the handrail. “It swirled up when it . . .” He stopped, staring at the water.
“So whatever it is, it’s still in there?” There were nods and Irvin sighed. “
Must be a sea creature. Came out of the water last night when nobody was looking and moved in.” He shrugged. “Only one thing for it.” He turned to Midshipman Hardee, who, along with a ’Cat who’d been dubbed Spook, had increasingly taken on their ordnance duties. “We have to get rid of this thing before we can get any more work done today. Get some of the grenades and all the small arms. Make sure you issue them to guys who know how to use them.”
The armed guards who protected the workers from the denizens of the jungle were summoned, and with the distribution of the four other Krags and the single Thompson (all the small arms had been retrieved from the submarine on Walker’s previous visit) a total of eight riflemen, one submachine gunner (Danny), and Irvin Laumer armed with his pistol prepared to face whatever was in the water. Six grenadiers had simple, ingenious devices quite similar to the grenades the Americans were accustomed to. They were virtually identical in form and function, although the fuses weren’t as reliable. There could be as many as ten seconds or as few as two before the things went off, so there was never any goofing around after the spoon flew.
Irvin nodded at the first ’Cat grenadier. The idea was to chase the creature aft, toward the screws, where the water was shallower. There they hoped to get some shots at it. The grenades weren’t powerful enough to damage the pressure hull of the submarine, but Irvin told them not to throw the things too close to it anyway. With a returning nod, the first ’Cat pulled the pin and dropped his weapon in the water. A few seconds later, a geyser of spume and white smoke erupted into the air with a dull thump, and this was the signal for the next grenade. A high, splashing column of water that dissipated downwind followed another ker-plunk. A third grenade went off. Then a fourth. Suddenly, out of the spume of the fifth grenade, something . . . terrifying . . . scrambled up out of the excavation directly at Tex Sheider. At first glance, it looked like a mottled black-and-green spider, but it had a tail sort of like a lobster and long, thin claws to match, making it at least ten feet long. One of the claws clutched the partially shredded body of the ’Cat workman.
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