“Sebastian!” I yelled. “Leave him, leave him!”
But he couldn’t hear and kept pounding the lifeless head into the steel deck again and again, smashing it to a bloody mess. I came up behind him and touched him on the shoulder.
“It’s finished, Sebastian,” I said in a quieter voice. “It’s over.”
He dropped the crushed and splintered skull that had once been a man’s and staggered back, head lowered, eyes wide with shock at what he had done, and wiped the blood and gore from his hands on his faded jeans as he walked slowly back to where Judy lay.
Another head appeared above the gunwale, this one with water dripping down its face, a hand grasping one of the diving knives Judy had dropped overboard from the dinghy two days before. There was a look of awe on Rick’s face as he surveyed the carnage, eyes staring with horror, with shock.
He turned back to the gunwale, looked down to the dinghy and said to Henry: “You won’t need that, mate.”
I heard the chipping hammer fall back into the dinghy.
They both came on deck then, picking their way through the bodies, faces pale. Rick bent down and took hold of Hassan’s shotgun, the one he had taken from Sebastian in the middle of the night.
“Jesus,” he murmured, so softly I could barely hear the word. “Jesus,” he said again.
“What’s wrong with Judy?” Henry asked, and then limped over to where she lay cradled in Sebastian’s bear-like arms.
“She got hit with a few of the shotgun pellets,” I said. “What happened to your leg?”
He turned around. “That bastard got me,” he said and pointed to the bloody mess Sebastian had left in the scuppers. “He was climbing up to the trawler when the first shot went off. I grabbed him by the ankle. We struggled for a few seconds and fell into the bottom of the dinghy. One of us knocked Rick over the top of the chest. I think it was me. The second shot went off and I thought the black bugger had been hit; but the next thing I knew, he was up on his feet and swinging that bloody knife. I felt the thing slice through my hip as Rick and I leapt overboard.” He put his hand to his leg and winced with pain. “The wet-suit copped most of the blow, but it sure stings like bloody hell.”
“You all right?” I asked Rick.
“Yeah, mate. What happened to her?”
“She got the one meant for me,” I replied.
“You mean she tried to shield you?” he said with a look of utter incredulity. “Judy?”
“No,” I said. “I think she was just trying to get over to the side she thought was going to win. The silly bitch simply got in the way.”
“Is she going to be okay?” Henry asked, his face the palest shade of white I had ever seen, tears starting at the corners of both eyes.
“Knowing Judy,” I said. “The selfish bitch will come up smelling of roses. She’ll be abusing us all in a day or so.”
“You reckon?” Rick asked.
“Sure. Now cut this bloody rope off my wrists; and don’t let go of that gun, whatever you do. We’ve still got Sebastian to worry about. After seeing what he did to that poor bastard over there, I don’t want to have to take him on empty-handed.”
Two slices of the knife and I was free again.
“Okay,” I said. “Now cut Sebastian loose, and then Judy, and we’ll patch her up.”
But as Rick took her from Sebastian’s encircling arms and cut the cords binding her wrists, it was clear to each of us that there would be no patching up. Judy would never smell of roses again.
There was wet blood on her lips, and more trickled out and rolled down her chin in a narrow line. I lifted the T-shirt and looked at the ten or more tiny grey holes covering her breasts where the pellets had blasted into her soft body. She had been no more than ten feet away when the Indian had pulled the trigger, the shortened barrel spreading the shot wide.
She was dying. I knew it and Henry and Rick knew it too. I laid her back in Sebastian’s arms and the tears falling down his face told us that he knew it too. Her eyes struggled to open.
“Andy,” she croaked, and I leant down to hear the faint words. “Andy?”
“Yes, Jude?”
“You always were the clever bastard.”
She coughed, and blood-foam speckled my face.
Yes, Judy, I thought, too clever for you, you little tart. But I didn’t say it, for it might have stayed with me for the rest of my life; and nothing I said could change her now. There was no more need to score points, no need to tell her that she had picked the wrong side.
Sebastian looked up at me, then across to the others.
“Please,” he begged. “Please.”
“There’s nothing we can do, mate,” Rick said to him quietly. “It’s over. Hold her tight now.”
“Andy?” the soft rasping voice called again.
“Yes, Jude?”
“Did they get the chest?”
“Yes. It’s in the dinghy.”
“Bring it,” she demanded. She coughed again, and then added, strangely for her; “Please.”
We left her with Sebastian and walked back to the stern, Rick still holding the sawn-off shotgun.
“Don’t let go of that thing,” I said to him quietly. “He might go berserk at any moment.”
“Right.”
“Henry,” I said.
“Ye ... yes?” he replied, tears welling up.
“Throw those bloody cane knives overboard as soon as you get a chance.”
“Right.”
They climbed down into the dinghy, Henry wiping a hand across his eyes, and lifted the chest up to me. It was smaller than it had looked down amongst the coral, blacker, and dirtier. I held it steady on the gunwale as they climbed back on board, and we carried it back to where she lay.
“Here it is, Jude,” I said and watched as her glazed eyes tried to focus on the black iron box, her head rolling unsteadily on her shoulders.
“Open it,” she ordered, hidden strength surfacing once more. “I want my gold.”
I looked at Rick and he looked at Henry.
“Open it,” Henry said.
Rick jumped down into the hold and returned with a hammer, crowbar and chisel. I grabbed the chisel, holding it along the tar-sealed joint of the lid while he tapped it with the hammer, slowly peeling away the hardened black bitumen that von Luckner had hoped would keep his treasure dry.
It was left to me to deliver the final stroke. I rammed the crowbar in under the lid and paused. There was silence on the Sally May’s back deck; the rattling of Judy’s breathing the only sound to break the stillness.
I looked at the others. How had it come to this, the greed, the terror, this blood-bath, the deaths?
“Open the fuckin’ thing!” Sebastian roared.
I rammed down on the crowbar, cracking the lock and sending the heavy lid flying up and over, crashing free from its weakened hinges to thud into the deck.
There were no shining yellow coins; no bars of bullion bearing the Prussian eagle, nor the American one; and no pile of glistening jewels; no bank-notes; nothing but six bundles of oil-cloth that cracked at the touch.
Henry lifted them out, one at a time, treating each separate one with the reverence it deserved: von Luckner’s treasure; the precious things the Sea Devil had hidden so secretly; to be raised when he could serve the Kaiser once more.
They lay on the deck at her feet.
I bent down and ripped apart the first bundle and then the next and the next until all six were revealed.
“Is it gold?” she whispered, staring with unseeing eyes, her words fainter now as the reserve of energy was almost spent.
“Yes,” I replied. “And diamonds, and pearls.”
Then I looked at what lay at her feet.
One sextant; a chronometer; a large brass-mounted compass; the rusted remains of an old Luger Parabellum pistol; the rotten pulp of what had once been charts of the Pacific Ocean; and a small brass box that had been sealed and was still watertight, containing nothing
but papers covered with lines of bold handwritten Germanic script.
The Count Felix von Luckner’s treasure.
Twenty-Two
“It’s mine, Sebastian,” she breathed. “All mine.”
A smile came to her face then. It wasn’t greed, avarice, or even pleasure; perhaps a glow of achievement. All she had ever dreamed of was now hers for the taking. There would be no more seduction, no more fawning and smiling, no more hoping that if she was nice enough she might get what she wanted.
“Yes, Jude,” I said softly. “It’s all yours.”
Her eyes seemed to come alive again as she looked up at us all, settling finally on Sebastian, trying to say his name, but never finishing the word as she slipped quietly away.
The big man cradled her more tightly in his arms, tears running unashamedly down his weather-beaten face.
Rick turned, head bowed, staring again at the carnage on deck, at the blood, at the smashed bones, and at the blackened navigation instruments and papers by our feet. “Jesus Christ!” he cried, and shuffled off to the saloon.
Henry wiped the back of one hand across a sniffling nose and followed him. I was left with the mess about me.
“Come on Sebastian,” I said, laying my hand on his shoulder. “Put her down now.”
He looked up at me, said nothing, and placed her gently on the warm steel deck. I brought up two more pieces of the old canvas from the storage hold: the small one to cover Judy and the larger for the three Indians. Sebastian helped me drag the men together into a pile, not caring how he did it, kicking them into a compact heap with his feet. We hid them from sight, from prying eyes that might have been on the cliff-top.
“What now?” Rick asked of no-one in particular as the three of us sat around the dining table. Sebastian had taken himself down to the fo’c’sle, still in shock.
“Sink their fishing boat,” I said. “And then get the hell out of here.”
“What about ...?” Henry asked, his voice so quiet we had to bend forward to listen. “What about the ... bodies?”
“Rick?” I asked.
“Dump them over the side like we did with the others,” he replied. “There’s nothing else we can do.”
“What?” Henry asked again. “All of them? Judy too?”
“Yes,” Rick said, turning his head towards the fo’c’sle, as if half expecting Sebastian to come bellowing and roaring up the ladder. “Judy as well.”
“It’s the only way, Henry,” I said. “Who would believe what really happened?”
He nodded, reluctant.
Nobody would have seen the darkened fishing boat come up on us in the middle of the night. Hassan would have seen to that. If anybody questioned us later we could say that we found it drifting during the late afternoon, nobody on board, and half full of water. We had tied it alongside and tried to pump it out, but the inflow of water was too much for our small pump and we had cut it free only minutes before it sank.
Rick went down and bashed a few holes through the bottom of the hull with the crowbar, just in case anybody was curious enough to check our story. She drifted off and sank within half an hour, the heavy diesel motor taking her down to one hundred and fifty feet.
Sebastian was the problem. Could he be trusted to keep quiet, or would we have to consider the unspoken alternative? We left the question unanswered, raised anchor, and headed south.
His mood had changed by the time we committed the bodies to the deep late that afternoon: the three Indians without ceremony, their own anchor and chain wound around their bodies and wired on tight. Henry had managed to sew Judy up in canvas, and we said a prayer as she went over: The Lord’s Prayer, what we each could remember of it.
“It’s over,” Sebastian said, as she slipped beneath the waves. “She didn’t really want me, did she.”
“No, mate,” Rick said sadly. “I don’t think even she knew what she wanted.”
We dropped him not far off from the coast of Kadavu, the fourth largest of the Fiji Islands, some fifty miles south of the capital of Suva; creeping in as close as we dared in the middle of the night and setting him adrift in his rubber boat. He agreed that it was the only thing to do. He would tell the story of how his yacht had been smashed on to the reef at Wakaya by the hurricane, and of how he and Judy had taken to the inflatable, and how she had been swept off by a big wave only an hour or so later.
They would have to believe his story. There had been other small boats smashed to pieces by Bebe, and people drowned.
We watched as he paddled towards the shore; and then set a westerly course for Cairns. We had no clearance from Fiji, but Bebe would take care of that as well. Bebe had taken care of most of our problems. It’s an ill wind that blows no good.
The iron chest and the sodden folded pulp that had been von Luckner’s charts went overboard as the sun crested the horizon, bringing a new day. We should have left them with the jumble of rocks where the dog now slept, but we had been in too much of a hurry to leave.
We drew straws for von Luckner’s treasure. Rick took the pistol and the chronometer; Henry the brass-mounted compass. My share was the sextant and the small brass box with its contents of neatly folded papers.
******
It was a full month before I finally managed to translate those five sheets of writing. Von Luckner had addressed the first four to Leutnant Kling, explaining that they and the rest of the contents of the chest would be delivered into his hands by Leutnant Kircheiss or Uncle Max, if anything should have happened to him. The four pages set out, as far as I could ascertain, locations of small villages along the east and west coasts of South America, and the names of people who were sympathetic to the Kaiser’s cause, agents who would supply the replacement for the wrecked Seeadler with stores and, more importantly, information about Allied shipping. He told Kling of how he had destroyed his official secret orders and was setting out only those vital details required to continue what they had begun.
It was a four page document worth a fortune to the Allies in 1917; a treasure in the real sense of the word.
But it was the fifth page of writing that troubles me most. It’s small, no more than six inches by four, and addressed to the Admiral commanding the Imperial German Navy, recommending three men for decoration.
Uncle Max had been silent about some of the perils they had encountered, shying off at a certain point and always seeming embarrassed and maybe a little sorrowful when I tried to push him further. He had never told of the deed that von Luckner described in thin spidery writing alongside Uncle Max’s name on that small piece of paper. Perhaps he didn’t know about the Pour le Merite the Sea Devil wanted him to have, the highest award for individual gallantry in action that the Kaiser could bestow.
The paper sits on the table before me, alongside my typed translation. Uncle Max’s memory deserves that medal, and perhaps it could be awarded even now. My mother would be proud, as would those who occasionally write from strange foreign places; but if I publish, I am damned, and so are the others: Rick, Henry, and Sebastian.
I burnt the details of the agents, and their South American towns. They are things best forgotten; but I can’t bring myself to destroy Uncle Max’s honour.
My eyes drift up to the sextant on the mantelpiece, the brass now polished, the hardened steel still pitted and jagged. The triangular framework of metal sits there: quiet, silent and cold; reminding me each day of what fools men can be.
******
A pound of brass and steel: six lives.
Author’s Note
Although I have played with history in introducing Uncle Max and the bay guarded by the stone dog, and the even more mysterious chest, all other details concerning the Count Felix von Luckner and the Seeadler would appear to be true.
But is that chest merely fiction ...?
I have read a number of books and passages written of and about von Luckner, but have never found any hint of gold coins, diamonds or other valuables being hoarded and then hidd
en at Wakaya. I have read the report of the Acting Inspector General of Constabulary of Fiji to the Honourable Colonial Secretary on the Capture of 6 combatant Prisoners of War at Wakaya that stated, amongst other matters, that the prisoners had a box that they said contained £489 made up of Bank of England notes and gold. In the statement made by Graf Felix von Lucknel (sic) to the Acting Inspector General, von Luckner claimed that the money was his.
Roy Alexander, in his book, The Cruise of The Raider Wolf, states that von Luckner set sail in the Kronprinzessin Cecile carrying “.... A machine gun with 5000 rounds, six rifles, six revolvers, and – not least – one thousand pounds in gold.”
Whenever I heard von Luckner’s name mentioned in the presence of the older identities in Fiji, there were two words which always surfaced – Treasure and Wakaya.
Perhaps gold still does await the finder.
REVIEW
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The more reviews my books receive, the more I am encouraged to keep writing. So please?
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Rob Mitchell.
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The Stone Dog Page 29