Dutchy pushed out his lips in negation. "They'd have aircraft over if they were, certainly destroyers. I'd say we've just run out of ships."
A minute later the crow's nest gave him the lie.
She was small, about five hundred tons, but with an importance far outweighing her size, if what Dutchy could see in his glasses were what they seemed to be.
"Forty-four gallon drums," he said. "Stacked chock-a-block all along the deck. The same below, I should think. Close her, Pilot."
Jackal closed the Jap slowly, like a hunter sure of her prey; and to find that this was no mesmerised rabbit.
The Jap captain could have been a retired naval officer, expert in ship recognition. Or perhaps she came in so close that the wind billowed her "funnel". But as Bludger Ben prepared to fire a burst across her bows, and Dutchy was ready with his loud-hailer to order abandon ship, the little vessel broke into sparkles of orange light.
The balmy late-afternoon air was suddenly filled with hornets. Directly below Dutchy two men of A-mounting flung backward and then lay twisted and still on the deck.
"Take cover!" Dutchy roared. Then, scorning the loud-hailer, he directed his voice at Bludger.
"Pom-pom, let him have it!"
Bludger obliged.
That Jap was foolish. Urged by the sparkles of his machine-guns Jackal's men dived for the shelter of steel. There was little he could accomplish. But then courage is not renowned for its weighing of the odds. And these were indeed weighty.
The range was very close. If he'd been drunk Bludger could not have missed. The target was about two hundred feet long, something the tonnage of a small corvette, with her upper deck crammed. If there is one material loved by explosive pom-pom shells it is high-octane petrol, contained in the thin metal of forty-four gallon drums.
The first redness showed amidships. Though low, the sun's light was still quite strong, yet that red competed vividly against it. Bludger trained right, towards the flickering machine-guns near the bridge, swinging slowly his dreadful scythe.
He never reached the machine guns. In the next second he could not see them. For long seconds afterwards he could see nothing; his retinas seared by the enormous flash of red.
It leaped at them, outward and upward. They felt the heat like a furnace door opened in their faces. There was practically no smoke, just the eye-hurting red, climbing, feeding, reaching higher and higher as the flaming stuff poured through burned decks and cascaded over the lower cargo.
"Take her out," Dutchy gasped.
Jackal swung away from her prey, as though ashamed. The others had been easy but their men had had a chance. This was ghastly. And this one had had the incredible guts to fight back.
With the stern to the flaming pyre and the heat reduced, Matheson muttered:
"That's the worst one. Poor bastards..."
"All right, all right!" Dutchy snapped, defensively belligerent. Almost gratefully he stabbed a finger at the foc's'le. "Look down there. That should ease your bloody conscience."
Matheson looked, down at the two figures laid out in the protection of the gun-mounting, needing no protection now.
"Two good men," Dutchy snarled. "Their mothers will be very worried about those Japs. Well now they're your worry. They won't last in this heat. Get them buried at once. And if you feel like crying, cry over them!"
"Yes, sir," Matheson said, lowly. "Just the same, it was..."
"Get on with it!"
"Aye aye, sir."
The sun was resting its edge on the horizon when the pipes shrilled and the canvas-shrouded shapes slid down the uptilted planks. The ship was moving slowly. Two circles showed on the face of the sea, briefly, and then the swell smoothed them out, leaving nothing. From his pom-pom Bludger watched. His words indicated a less refined sensitivity than Matheson's.
"Bastards," he growled. "A minute sooner and I'd have had that bloody machine-gun. Bastards," he said again. "Ginger Walker had two kids."
The smiling face of Norm Claxton was now sober.
"It wasn't your fault, so pack it up."
"Funny," Olaf said, his eyes bleak. "All the others we got, no trouble at all. Yet that little bitch of a thing..."
And that was it. They had seen men die before, they had had messmates killed beside them, they were not amateurs in these things. But this was different. Things had been so easy, so consistently easy, and suddenly there was death, the old reminder, back amongst them. Against a cruiser, or Zeros... But Ginger Walker and Bill Thompson shouldn't have died, not against that cockle of a craft. It started them, it reminded them, it made them wonder...
Dutchy Holland was not wondering. He was faced by fact, in the form of Baxter's fuel report. There was no real cause for concern, but indubitably their fuel state was reduced, and the day had brought small recompense. To justify the danger of remaining in the area he had to produce additions to that tally. The longer they stayed, the greater the risk of detection, and he had to balance the risk with results.
Dusk was softly all about them when he said to Matheson:
"Tonight we'll patrol. We can't afford to waste ten hours holed-up."
"Yes, sir. But will they try the strait at night?"
"I don't see why not. There's deep water and it's five miles wide at the narrowest. It's familiar country for Japs. Post extra lookouts on B and X decks. Tell radar to search mainly to the westward. We'll patrol up and down past the strait thirty miles clear."
"Aye aye, sir."
That night Dutchy had Samson bring his stretcher up to the bridge. He ate his dinner there. The first watch relieved at eight o'clock and the middle at midnight. Dutchy was still there at two o'clock, and still awake. He was not tired, for there were reserves to be drawn on, the reserves of harsh experience in destroyers, and not yet even tapped.
And nothing to reward his vigil.
At two-thirty, drinking strong black coffee, he was beginning to think that Matheson might have been right. Basilan Strait was the main door opening from Manila for the run across to the Saranganis and up to Davao, but tonight nothing had attempted it. In his patrol position, with radar operating normally, he was certain he would have contacted anything which tried.
But damn it all, he growled to himself, the passage was quite safe at slow speeds on a calm night like this. But then Jap merchant ships would not be fitted with radar which, ranging on the mountains of Zamboanga to the north and Basilan Island to the south would have made the passage so easy. It looked as if be had wasted sleep and fuel for nothing.
Dutchy finished his coffee. Longing for a smoke, denied it, he reached out to place the cup on a small shelf secured to the forrard windbreak. His band halted in mid-reach. Sharp, the voice-pipe buzzed.
Dutchy slammed the cup down and jumped to the voice-pipe.
"Bridge!" he snapped into the always-open mouth.
"Radar contact, sir, bearing Red eight-five. Ship, large one by the look of her. We're plotting it now."
"Right. Range?"
"Twenty miles, sir."
"Good man. Keep on it."
Dutchy walked back to the binnacle. He was smiling faintly and contentedly. They were abreast the strait. That bearing on the port beam pointed directly at it. Young Bertie was wrong. Something had come through. It could be a cruiser, but that was unlikely. A cruiser would be escorted, and if radar had the main target it would have picked up escorting destroyers. She was a merchantman all right, big to be so definitely contracted at that range. Big and fat, and that eastward course, loaded.
The buzzer sounded.
"We've got her now sir. Speed twelve knots, course unchanged, still coming towards."
"Very well, No other contacts?"
"She's on her own. sir."
Dutchy came up from the voice-pipe. To the officer of the watch he said:
"Close the ship for action."
Towards three o'clock in the morning a sleeping man's metabolic rate is low. He is, in a sense, hibernating, with the transfor
mation of food to mechanical energy reduced considerably, for his body does not need it. He is, in short, somewhat less on the ball than a heavyweight boxer entering the ring. And the atmosphere of Jackal's `tween-decks, darkened as they were and with all scuttles tightly shut, did nothing to help towards mental alertness.
They woke. They heard the demanding clangour and automatically their sleep-drugged minds strove to ignore it, to sink down again into blissful disregard. The clangour continued, loud and pitiless. Then the almost-as-strident voices of petty-officers were heard in the land. Uncareful hands tugged at hammock nettings. Hammocks bounced. Blear-eyed faces lifted up, followed by reluctant legs which groped for mess-tables. They dressed, still dopey. But they did not forget life-jackets, nor steel helmets. Then they tumbled up onto the dark decks and sour-natured they closed-up at the guns and tubes and depth-charges. And in a minute or two, fanned by a cool breeze and the imminence of danger, they were wholly alert.
"Still closing, sir," the plot reported in answer to Dutchy's query, "still at twelve knots, course unchanged."
"Right, Starshell, Number One, when he's in close."
Certainly the Jap had no radar, and probably at this ungodly hour his lookouts were half asleep. He came on steadily towards the long dark shape of his Nemesis. Jackal's gun's were loaded, and laid by radar, and behind the four quiet mountings men waited with shells in their arms. In the silence of the bridge a telephone howled.
A seaman answered it "Captain, sir. Engineer wants to speak to you."
"What the hell..." Dutchy growled. He took the phone. "Yes? I'm about to open fire."
"Sorry, sir," Baxter said, his voice thin through the wire. "You're on to a merchantman?"
Dutchy was in no mood for persiflage. Even without glasses he could see the looming bulk, and the Sashing white at its bow.
"Yes. What's up?"
"Fuel, sir. We're all right but topping-up wouldn't hurt. In fact it'd be damn handy. How about we milk her? I could get enough before daylight."
"Now you tell me," Dutchy snarled. But the engineer had a good point. "All right. But it depends how she reacts."
He replaced that phone and plucked out another.
"Director? Captain. If possible we want her oil. Fix the bridge and then cease fire."
"Understood, sir. Starshell?"
"Now," said Dutchy.
B-gun was the starshell mounting. There was a scuffle of feet, the metallic slide of the rammer, the thud of the breech, and silence. Then a roar and a lance of flame, and presently above the Jap incandescence burst. B-gun fired again and again, and before the third flare exploded the other three guns were savaging at her bridge.
This was the first night action of their piratical mission. The red splashes were satisfyingly vivid in the white "light of the flares. Matheson saw that the bridge was burning.
"My God," he said, between broadsides, "that gave him a hell of a shock."
Dutchy failed to answer the obvious. His words were for the yeoman.
"Burn the ten-inch. Train it down his length. Watch out for a gun."
The thick white finger of the signalling lamp stabbed out, trained slowly to the left. Dutchy saw no gun, but plenty of men. Shocked and dazed by the abruptness of their disaster, the Jap crew were concerned solely with boats. The shells slammed into the bridge and abaft it the crew worked furiously to get the boats lowered. "Nice," Dutchy said, "very nice. She's losing way."
Don't blame `em, Matheson thought through his own satisfaction. Those stokers down below would be expecting a torpedo any second.
"Cease firing," Dutchy ordered. "Keep that starshell going. Bring her in closer, Pilot." He took up the microphone of the loud-hailer. "Ahoy there." Magnified, his gravelly voice rang across the gap. "Heave-to and abandon ship or I'll blow you open."
He would never know whether his shells or his words enjoined obedience. But in a few minutes the Jap was stopped, her bridge burning and her body rolling gently in the swell. In the mixture of red and white light they saw men scrabbling down lifelines, and boats pulling urgently from her side; and through all this evidence of abandonment the yeoman trained his baleful eye from right to left and back again.
Dutchy took the engine-room phone.
"All right, Chief, she's yours. I think they've abandoned but I'll send an armed party with you. Smack it about."
"Will do."
Dutchy took the con himself. Moving very slowly, his guns trained on the big ship's decks, his mind warily alert for tricks, he edged her in. Nothing happened. The Buffer jumped from her foc's'le across to the Jap's low well-deck aft and in a minute Jackal was secured alongside with a head-rope.
The Buffer leaned his tommy-gun against a hatch cover and yelled back: "All quiet, sir."
First, two men armed with rifles and fixed bayonets, and then Baxter's stokers swarmed aboard. The seamen prowled warily about the apparently deserted deck and the stokers hauled in the six-inch fuelling line. Baxter grunted with satisfaction when he saw that the Jap's fuelling connection was standard size; he'd had visions of having to turn one to fit.
The lines were connected. Baxter was about to order his transfer pump started when, quickly, the Buffer said:
"Hold it."
Baxter swung about and stared where the Buffer was looking. A figure was approaching from the direction of the bridge. The Buffer quietly took up his tommy gun.
"You there," he ordered. "That's far enough."
The figure halted. In the moonlight it seemed to be swaying a little. Then slowly it came on. The Buffer switched to automatic.
"You steal my oil."
The voice was hoarse, through anger or weakness they could not tell.
"Who are you?" Baxter asked curtly. "Why aren't you in the boats?"
"I am the captain." Then they knew anger was the reason. "You are swine. You are dirty swine. You fire, and no warning. That is wrong. That is terrible. All my men on the bridge-killed. English pigs."
Baxter had no time for polemics with an enemy who had proved himself less than meticulous with the niceties of warfare.
"Heil Hirohito," he grinned tightly, and turned to wave to the stoker waiting aboard Jackal,
Suddenly, the (Jap's hand moved. It disappeared inside his open shirt. They would never know whether he was after a gun or a knife or a handkerchief, or simply intent on holding a wounded torso. The Buffer was not inclined to wait and find out. The stabs of orange were bright in the moonlight. The tommy gun's voice was a short harsh yammer. The Jap went backward as though jerked from behind. He hit the deck in a crumpled coil, and he did not move again.
In all his experience of killing this was the first time the Buffer had killed a man face to face. He stared down at the still form, thinking how easy it was, before realisation rushed in.
"A gun," he said, jerkily, "I thought he was going for a gun."
"Forget it," Baxter snapped. "Heave him over the side if he worries you."
"Yessir."
The Buffer moved forward and a raspy voice called:
"You want any help?"
"Everything under control, sir," Baxter answered. He looked up at the dim form of Dutchy's head and shoulders above the windbreak of the bridge. "I'm ready to start the transfer..."
His voice cut off. Miraculously, the dim form had leaped into vivid clarity. For a second Baxter could see quite plainly the grimace on Dutchy's mouth, the painful squint of his eyes. Then Dutchy was jerking his head away, shouting orders, and Baxter swung about-to see, and squint himself against the blue glare of the distant searchlight.
"Disconnect," Baxter heard. "Get that hose inboard!" Baxter raised a hand, plain in the ominous glare. "Move!" he said to his stokers.
It took only seconds; fear is an efficient prod. Jackal was moving ahead as the Buffer, the last man, jumped for her low waist, as the fuelling pipe dragged in over the gunnel. The alarm was clanging.
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Two of them," Matheson said tersely. "Destroye
rs. They've got us with that blasted searchlight."
"Then do something about it," Dutchy snapped "Hard-a-starb'd. Pilot! Take her south."
Jackal picked up her feet and ran.
In less than a minute Matheson fixed the searchlight. There were no red splashes from the falling shells but the baring eye went out. The Japs realised what a handy aiming point it made for a director's filtered sight. Jackal ceased her bellowing and extended her sinews.
The time was a little after three a.m. The place was a little to the south of Basilan Strait. Samurati's hounds had found, but could they hold?
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