by Wilbur Smith
Again he stopped by the rail and looked towards the west. There was a cloud on the horizon, a tiny dark figure of it. And he watched it with hope that it might herald the start of the afternoon sea breeze. Yet it seemed unnatural. As he watched, it moved. He could swear it moved. Now his whole attention was fastened upon it. Realization began to flicker in him, building up until it was certainty.
A ship. By God, a ship!
He ran to the poop ladder, and slid down into the waist, across it to the mast.
The crew and the bearers watched him with awakening interest. Some of them got to their feet.
Sebastian jumped on to the boom, balancing there a moment before he started to shin up the mast. Using the mainsail hoops like the rungs of a ladder, he reached the masthead and clung there, peering eagerly into the west.
There she was – no doubt about it. He could see the tips of the triple stacks, each with its feather of dark smoke, and he began to cheer.
Below him the rail was lined with his men, all peering out in the direction they took from him. Sebastian slid down the mast, the friction burning his hands in his haste. His feet hit the deck and he ran to Flynn. ‘A ship. A big ship coming up fast.’ Flynn rolled his head and looked at him vaguely. ‘Listen to me, Flynn. There’ll be a doctor aboard. We’ll get you to a port in no time.’
‘That’s good, Bassie.’ Flynn’s brain clicked back into focus. ‘You’ve done real good.’
She came up over the horizon with astonishing rapidity, and her silhouette changed as she altered course towards them. But not before Sebastian had seen the gun turrets.
‘A warship!’ he shouted. To his mind this proved her British – only one nation ruled the waves. ‘They’ve seen us!’ He waved his hands above his head.
Bows on, each second growing in size, grey and big, she bore down upon the little dhow.
Gradually the cheering of the crew faltered and subsided into an uneasy silence. Magnified by the still, hot air, huge on the velvety gloss of the ocean, lifting a bow wave of pearling white, the warship came on. No check in her speed, the ensign at her masthead streaming away from them so they could not see the colours.
‘What are they going to do?’ Sebastian asked aloud, and was answered by Flynn’s voice. Sebastian glanced around. Balancing on his good leg with one arm draped around Mohammed’s neck, Flynn was hopping across the deck towards him.
‘I’ll tell you what they’re going to do! They’re going to hit us smack-bang up the arse!’ Flynn roared. ‘That’s the Blücher! That’s a German cruiser!’
‘They can’t do that!’ Sebastian protested.
‘You’d like to bet? She’s coming straight from the Rufiji delta – and my guess is she’s had a chat with Fleischer. He’s probably aboard her.’ Flynn swayed against Mohammed, gasping with the pain of his leg before he went on. ‘They’re going to ram us, and then machine-gun anyone still floating.’
‘We’ve got to make a life raft.’
‘No time, Bassie. Look at her come!’
Less than five miles away, but swiftly narrowing the distance, the Blücher’s tall bows knifed towards them. Wildly Sebastian looked around the crowded deck, and he saw the pile of cork floats they had cut from the fish nets.
Drawing his knife, he ran to one of the sacks of coconuts and cut the twine that closed the mouth. He slipped the knife back into its sheath, stooped, and up-ended the sack, spilling coconuts on to the deck. Then with the empty sack in his hand he ran to the pile of floats and dropped on his knees. In frantic haste he shovelled them into the sack, half filling it before he looked up again. The Blücher was two miles away, a tall tower of murderous grey steel.
With a length of rope Sebastian tied the sack closed and dragged it to where Flynn stood supported by Mohammed.
‘What are you doing?’ Flynn demanded.
‘Fixing you up! Lift your arms!’ Flynn obeyed and Sebastian tied the free end of the rope around his chest at the level of his armpits. He paused to unlace and kick off his boots before speaking again. ‘Mohammed, you stay with him. Hang on to the sack and don’t let go.’ He left them, trotting on bare feet to find his rifle propped against the poop. Buckling on his cartridge belt, he hurried back to the rail.
Sebastian Oldsmith was about to engage a nine-inch battle cruiser with a double-barrelled Gibbs .500.
She was close now, hanging over them like a high cliff of steel. Even Sebastian. could not miss a battle cruiser at two hundred yards, and the heavy bullets clanged against the armoured hull, ringing loudly above the hissing rush of the bow wave.
While he reloaded, Sebastian looked up at the line of heads in the bows of the Blücher; grinning faces below the white caps with their little swallow-tailed black ribbons. ‘You bloody swine,’ he shouted at them. Hatred stronger than he had ever dreamed possible choked his voice. ‘You filthy, bloody swine.’ He lifted the rifle and fired without effect, and the Blücher hit the dhow.
It struck with a crash and the crackling roar of rending timber. It crushed her side and cut through in the screaming of dying men and the squeal of planking against steel.
It trod the dhow under, breaking her back, forcing her far below the surface. At the initial shock, Sebastian was hurled overboard, the rifle thrown from his hands. He struck the armoured plate of the cruiser a glancing blow and then dropped into the sea beside her. The thrust of the bow wave tumbled him aside, else he would have been dragged along the hull and his body shredded against the steel plate.
He surfaced just in time to suck a lungful of air before the turbulence of the great screws caught him and plucked him under again, driving him deep so the pressure stabbed like red-hot needles in his eardrums. He felt himself swirled end over end, buffered, shaken vigorously as the water tore at his body.
Colour flashed and zigzagged behind his closed eyelids. There was a suffocating pain in his chest and his lungs pumped, urgently craving air, but he sealed his lips and kicked out with his legs, clawing at the water with his hands.
The churning wake of the cruiser released its grip upon him, and he was shot to the surface with such force that he broke clear to the waist before dropping back to drink air greedily. He unbuckled the heavy cartridge belt and let it sink before he looked about him.
The surface of the sea was scattered with floating debris, and a few bobbing human heads. Near him a section of torn planking rose in a burst of trapped air bubbles. Sebastian struck out for it and clung there, his legs hanging in the clear green water.
‘Flynn,’ he gasped. ‘Flynn, where are you?’
A quarter of a mile away, the Blücher was circling slowly, long and menacing and shark-like, and he stared at it in hatred and in fear.
‘Master!’ Mohammed’s voice behind him.
Sebastian turned quickly and saw the black face and the red face beside the floating sack of corks a hundred yards away. ‘Flynn!’
‘Good-bye, Bassie,’ Flynn called. ‘The old Hun is coming back to finish us off. Look! They’ve got machine guns set up on the bridge. See you on the other side, boy.’
Quickly Sebastian looked back at the cruiser and saw the clusters of white uniforms on the angle of her bridge. ‘Ja, there are still some of them alive.’ Through borrowed binoculars, Fleischer scanned the littered area of the wreck. ‘You will use the Maxims, of course, Captain? It will be quicker than picking them off with rifles.’
Captain von Kleine did not answer. He stood tall on his bridge, slightly round-shouldered, staring out at the wreckage with his hands clasped behind him. ‘There is something sad in the death of a ship,’ he murmured. ‘Even such a dirty little one as this.’ Suddenly he straightened his shoulders and turned to Fleischer. ‘Your launch is waiting for you at the mouth of the Rufiji. I will take you there, Commissioner.’
‘But first the business of the survivors.’
Von Kleine’s expression hardened. ‘Commissioner, I sank that dhow in what I believed to be my duty. But now I am not sure that my judgement was
not clouded by anger. I will not trespass further on my conscience by machine-gunning swimming civilians.’
‘You will then pick them up. I must arrest them and give them trial.’
‘I am not a policeman,’ he paused and his expression softened a little. ‘That one who fired the rifle at us. I think he must be a brave man. He is a criminal, perhaps, but I am not so old in the ways of the world that I do not love courage merely for its own sake. I would not like to know I have saved this man for the noose. Let the sea be the judge and the executioner.’ He turned to his lieutenant. ‘Kyller, prepare to drop one of the life rafts.’ The lieutenant stared at him in disbelief. ‘You heard me?’
‘Yes, my Captain.’
‘Then do it.’ Ignoring Fleischer’s squawks of protest, von Kleine crossed to the pilot. ‘Alter course to pass the survivors at a distance of fifty metres.’
‘Here she comes.’ Flynn grinned tightly, without humour, and watched the cruiser swing ponderously towards them.
The cries of the swimmers around him, pleading mercy, were plaintive as the voices of sea birds – tiny on the immensity of the ocean.
‘Flynn. Look at the bridge!’ Sebastian’s voice floated across to him. ‘See him there. The grey uniform.’
Tears from the sting of sea salt in his wound, and the distortion of fever had blurred Flynn’s vision, yet he could make out the spot of grey among the speckling of white uniforms on the bridge of the cruiser.
‘Who is it?’
‘You were right. It’s Fleischer,’ Sebastian shouted back, and Flynn began to curse.
‘Hey, you filthy, fat butcher,’ he bellowed, trying to drag himself up onto the floating sack of corks. ‘Hey, you whore’s chamber pot.’ His voice carried above the murmur of the cruiser’s engines running at dead-slow. ‘Come on, you blood-smeared little pig.’
The tall hull of the cruiser was close now, so close he could see the bulky figure in grey turn to the tall white-uniformed officer beside him, gesticulating in what was clearly entreaty.
The officer turned away, and moved to the rail of the bridge. He leaned out and waved to a group of seamen on the deck below him.
‘That’s right. Tell them to shoot. Let’s get it over with. Tell them …’
A large square object was lifted over the rail by the gang below the bridge. It dropped and fell with a splash alongside.
Flynn’s voice dried up, and he watched in disbelief as the white-clad officer lifted his right arm in a gesture that might have been a salute. The beat of the cruiser’s engines mounted as it increased speed, and she swung away towards the west.
Flynn O’Flynn began to laugh, the cackling hysteria of relief and delirium. He rolled off the sack of corks and his head dropped forward, so the warm green water smothered his laughter. Mohammed took a handful of the grey hair and lifted his face to prevent him drowning.
– 14 –
Sebastian reached the raft, and grasped the rope that hung in loops around its sides. He paused to regain his breath before hauling himself up to lie gasping, the blood-warm sea-water streaming from his sodden clothing, and watched the shape of the battle cruiser recede into the west.
‘Master! Help me!’
The voice roused him and he sat up. Mohammed was struggling, dragging Flynn and the sack through the water. Among the floating wreckage a dozen others of the crew and the bearers were flapping their way towards the raft; the weaker swimmers were already failing, their cries becoming more pitiful, and their splashing more frenzied.
There were oars roped to the slatted deck of the raft. Quickly Sebastian cut one loose with his hunting knife and began rowing towards the pair. His progress was slow, for the raft was an ungainly bitch that balked and swung away from the thrust of the oar.
An Arab crewman reached the raft and scrambled aboard, then another, and another. Each of them freed an oar and helped with the rowing. They passed the body of one of the bearers floating just below the surface, both its legs cut off above the knees and the bones sticking out of the ragged meat of the stumps. This was not the only one – there was other human flotsam among the scattered wreckage, and the pinky-brown stains that drifted away on the current attracted the sharks.
The Arab beside Sebastian saw the first one and called out, pointing with the oar.
It came hunting, its fin waggling from side to side as it tacked up against the current, so that they could sense its excitation, the cold, unthinking excitement of Euselachii hunger. Below the surface, distorted and dark, showed the tapering length of its body. Not a big one. Perhaps nine feet in length and four hundred pounds in weight, but big enough to chop a leg with one bite. No longer guided by the drift of blood-taste, picking up the vibrations of the swimmers, it straightened and came in on its first run.
‘Shark!’ Sebastian yelled at Flynn and Mohammed where they foundered ten yards away. And both of them panicked; no longer making for the raft, they tried to clamber on to the sack of corks. Terror has no logic. Their only concern was to lift their dangling legs from the water, but the sack was too small, too unstable and their panic attracted the shark’s attention. It veered towards them, showing the full height of its curved triangular fin, each sweep of its tail breaking the surface as it drove in.
‘This way,’ shouted Sebastian. ‘Come to the raft!’ He was hacking at the water with the oar, while beside him the Arabs worked in equal dedication. ‘This way, Flynn. For God’s sake, this way.’
His voice penetrated their panic, and once more they struck out for the raft. But the shark was closing fast, long and dappled by sunlight through the surface ripple.
The sack was still tied to Flynn’s body, and its resistance to the water slowed them as it dragged behind. The shark swerved and made its first pass; it seemed to hump up out of the water, and its mouth opened. The upper jaw bulged out, the lower jaw gaped, and the multiple rows of teeth came erect like the quills of a porcupine, and it hit the sack. Locking its jaws into the coarse jute material, worrying it, still humped out of the water, shaking its blunt head clumsily, scattering a spray of water drops that flew like shattered glass in the sun.
‘Grab here!’ commanded Sebastian, leaning out to offer the blade of the oar to the pair in the water. They clutched at it with the strength of fear, and Sebastian drew them in.
But the sack and the shark were still attached to Flynn, its threshing threatening to break Flynn’s hold on the life-line around the raft.
Dropping to his knees, Sebastian fumbled the knife from its sheath and sawed at the rope. It parted. The shark, still worrying the sack, worked away from the raft and Sebastian helped the Arabs to drag first Flynn, and then Mohammed, over the side.
They were not finished yet. There were still half a dozen men in the water.
Realizing its error at last, the shark relinquished its hold on the sack. It backed away. For a moment it hung motionless, puzzled, then it circled out towards the nearest sound of splashing. One of the gun-boys, clawing at the water in exhausted dog-paddle. The shark hit him in the side, and pulled him under. Moments later he reappeared, his mouth an open pink cave as he screamed, the water about him clouded dark red-brown by his own blood. Again he was pulled under as the shark hit his legs, but again he floated. This time face down, wriggling feebly, and the shark circled him, dashing in to chop off a mouthful of his flesh, backing away to gulp it down before coming in again.
Then there was another shark, two more, ten, so many that Sebastian could not count them, as they circled and dived in ecstatic greed, until the sea around the raft trembled and swirled in agitation.
Sebastian and his Arabs managed to drag two more of the crew into the raft and they had a third half out of the water when a six-foot white-pointer shot up from the depths, and fastened on his thigh with such violence that it almost jerked all of them overboard. But they steadied themselves and held on to the man’s arms, frozen in this gruesome tug-of-war, while the shark worried the leg, so dog-like in its determination that Se
bastian expected it to growl.
Little Mohammed staggered to his feet, snatched up an oar and swung it against the pointed snout with all his strength. They had dragged the shark’s head from the water, and the oar fell on it with a series of rubbery thumps, but the shark held on. Fresh, bright blood squirted and trickled from the leg in its jaws, running down the shark’s glistening snake-like head into the open slits of its gill covers.
‘Hold him!’ gasped Sebastian, and drew his knife. The raft rocking crazily under him, he leaned over the man’s outstretched body and drove the knife blade into the shark’s expressionless little eye. It popped in a burst of clear fluid, and the shark stiffened and trembled. Sebastian withdrew the blade and stabbed into the other eye. With a convulsive gulp the shark opened its jaws and slid back into the sea to meander blindly away.
There were no more swimmers. The little group on the raft huddled together and watched the shark pack milling hungrily, seeming to sniff at the tainted water as they gathered the last morsels of meat.
The shark victim hosed the deck with his severed femoral artery and died before any of them could rouse themselves to apply a tourniquet.
‘Push him over,’ grunted Flynn.
‘No,’ Sebastian shook his head.
‘Chrissake, we’re crowded enough as it is. Chuck the poor bastard over.’
‘Later on, not now.’ Sebastian could not stand to watch the sharks squabble over the corpse.
‘Mohammed, get a couple of your lads on the oars. I want to pick up as many of those coconuts as we can.’