by Wilbur Smith
Instead he went to Rosa and took her possessively in his arms.
‘Do you love me?’ he asked.
‘What?’ she shouted above the bellow of the engine.
‘Do you love me?’ he roared.
‘Of course I do, you fool,’ she shouted back and smiled up into his face before going up on tip-toe to kiss him while the slipstream of the propeller howled around them. Her embrace had passion in it that had not been there these many months, and Sebastian wondered sickly how much of it had been engendered by an outside agency.
‘You can do that when you get back.’ Flynn prised him loose from Rosa’s grip, and boosted him up into the cockpit. The machine jerked forward and Sebastian clutched desperately to retain his balance, then glanced back. Rosa was waving and smiling, he was not certain if the smile was directed at him or at the helmeted head in the cockpit behind him, but his jealousy was swamped by the primeval instinct of survival.
Clutching with both hands at the sides of the cockpit, even his toes curling in their boots as though to grip the floorboards of the cockpit, Sebastian stared ahead.
The beach disappeared beneath the fuselage in a solid white blur; the palm trees whipped past on one side, the sea on the other; the wind tore at his face and tears streamed back along his cheeks, the machine bumped and bucked and jounced, and then leaped upwards under him, dropped back to bounce once more and then was airborne. The earth fell away gently beneath them as they soared, and Sebastian’s spirits soared with them. His misgivings melted away.
Sebastian remembered at last to pull the goggles down over his eyes to protect them from the stinging wind, and godlike he looked down through them at a world that was small and tranquil.
When at last he looked back over his shoulder at the pilot, this strange and wonderful shared experience of immortality had lifted him above the petty passions of mere men, and they smiled at each other.
The pilot pointed out over the right wing tip, and Sebastian followed the direction of his arm.
Far, far out on the crenellated blue blanket of the sea, tiny beneath vast fluffy piles of thunderhead cloud, he saw the grey shape of the British cruiser Renounce with the pale white feather of its wake fanning on the surface of the ocean behind it.
He nodded and smiled at his companion. Again the pilot pointed, this time ahead.
Still misty in the blue haze of distance, haphazard as the unfitted pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the islands of the Rufiji delta were spilled and scattered between ocean and mainland.
In the rackety little cockpit, Sebastian squatted over his pack and took from it binoculars, pencil and map-case.
– 60 –
It was hot. Moist itchy hot. Even in the shade beneath the festooned camouflage-nets the decks of Blücher were smothered with hot sticky waves of swamp air. The sweat that oozed and trickled down the glistening bodies of the half-naked men who slaved on her foredeck gave them no relief, for the air was too humid to evaporate the moisture. They moved like sleep-walkers, with slow mechanical determination, manhandling the thick sheet of steel plate into its slings beneath the high arm of the crane.
Even the flow of obscenity from the lips of Lochtkamper, the engineering commander, had dried up like a spring in drought season. He worked with his men, like them stripped to the waist, and the tattoos on his upper arms and across his chest heaved and bulged as they rode on an undulating sea of muscles.
‘Rest,’ he grunted; and they straightened up from their labour, mouths gaping as they sucked in the stale air, massaging aching backs, glowering at the sheet of steel with true hatred.
‘Captain.’ Lochtkamper became aware of von Kleine for the first time. He stood against the forward gun-turret, tall in full whites, the blond beard half concealing the cross of black enamel and silver that hung at his throat. Lochtkamper crossed to him.
‘It goes well?’ von Kleine asked, and the engineer shook his head.
‘Not as well as I had hoped.’ He wiped one huge hand across his forehead, leaving a smudge of grease and rust scale on his own face. ‘Slow,’ he said. ‘Too slow.’
‘You have encountered difficulties?’
‘Everywhere,’ growled the engineer, and he looked around at the heat mist and the mangroves, at the sluggish black waters and the mud banks. ‘Nothing works here – the welding equipment, the winch engines, even the men – everything sickens in this obscene heat.’
‘How much longer?’
‘I do not know, Captain. I truly do not know.’
Von Kleine would not press him. If any man could get Blücher seaworthy, it would be this man. When Lochtkamper slept at all, it was here on the foredeck, curled like a dog on a mattress thrown on the planking. He slept a few exhausted hours amid the whine and groan of the winches, the blue hissing glare of the welding torches and the drum splitting hammering of the riveters, then he was up again bullying, leading, coaxing and threatening.
‘Another three weeks,’ Lochtkamper estimated reluctantly. ‘A month at the most – if all goes as it does now.’
They were both silent, standing together, two men from different worlds drawn together by a common goal, united by respect for each other’s ability.
A mile up the channel, movement caught their attention. It was one of the launches returning to the cruiser, yet it looked like a hayrick under its bulky cargo. It came slowly against the sluggish current, sitting so low in the water that only a few inches of freeboard showed, while its load was a great shaggy hump on which sat a dozen black men.
Von Kleine and Lochtkamper watched it approaching.
‘I still do not know about that obscene wood, Captain.’ Lochtkamper shook his big untidy head again. ‘It is so soft, so much ash, it could clog the furnace.’
‘There is nothing else we can do,’ von Kleine reminded him.
When Blücher entered the Rufiji, her coal-bunkers were almost empty. There was enough fuel for perhaps four thousand miles of steaming. Hardly enough to carry her in a straight run down into latitude 45° south, where her mother ship, Esther, waited to refuel her, and fill her magazines with shell.
There was not the faintest chance of obtaining coal. Instead von Kleine had set Commissioner Fleischer and his thousand native porters to cutting cordwood from the forests, that grew at the apex of the delta. It was a duty that Commissioner Fleischer had opposed with every argument and excuse he could muster. He felt that in delivering safely to Captain von Kleine the steel plating from Dar es Salaam, he had discharged any obligation that he might have towards the Blücher. His eloquence availed him not at all – Lochtkamper had fashioned two hundred primitive axe heads from the steel plate, and von Kleine had sent Lieutenant Kyller up-river with Fleischer to help him keep his enthusiasm for wood-cutting burning brightly.
For three weeks now, the Blücher’s launches had been plying steadily back and forth. Up to the present they had delivered some five hundred tons of timber. The problem was finding storage for this unwieldy cargo once the coal-bunkers were filled.
‘We will have to begin deck loading the cordwood soon,’ von Kleine muttered, and Lochtkamper opened his mouth to reply when the alarm bells began to clamour an emergency, and the loudhailer boomed.
‘Captain to the bridge. Captain to the bridge.’
Von Kleine turned and ran.
On the companion ladder he collided with one of his lieutenants. They caught at each other for balance and the lieutenant shouted into von Kleine’s face.
‘Captain – an aircraft. Flying low. Coming this way. Portuguese makings.’
‘Damn it to hell!’ Von Kleine pushed past him, and bounded up the ladder. He burst on to the bridge, panting.
‘Where is it?’ he shouted.
The officer of the watch dropped his binoculars and turned to von Kleine with relief.
‘There it is, sir!’ He pointed through a hole in the tangled screen of camouflage that hung like a veranda roof over the bridge.
Von Kleine snatched the binocul
ars from him and, as he trained them on the distant winged shape in the mist haze above the mangroves, he issued his orders.
‘Warn the men ashore. Everybody under cover,’ he barked. ‘All guns trained to maximum elevation. Pom-poms loaded with shrapnel Machine-gun crews closed up – but no firing until my orders.’
He held the aircraft in the round field of the field glasses.
‘Portuguese, all right,’ he grunted; the green and red insignia showed clearly against the brown body of the aircraft.
‘She’s searching …’ The aircraft was sweeping back and forth, banking over and turning back at the end of each leg of her search pattern, like a farmer ploughing a field. Von Kleine could make out the head and shoulders of a man crouched forward in the squat round nose of the aircraft. ‘ … Now well find out how effective is our camouflage.’
So the enemy have guessed at last. They must have reported the convoy of steel plate – or perhaps the chopping of the cordwood has alerted them, he thought, watching the aircraft tacking slowly towards him. We could not hope to go undetected for ever – but I did not expect them to send an aircraft.
Then suddenly the thought struck him so hard that he gasped with the danger of it. He whirled and ran to the forward rail of the bridge and peered out through the camouflage net.
Still half a mile distant, trundling slowly down the centre of the channel with the wide rippling V of her wake spread on the current behind her, clumsy as a pregnant hippo with her load of cordwood, the launch was aimed straight at Blücher. From the air she would be as conspicuous as a fat tick on a white sheet.
‘The launch …’ shouted von Kleine, hail her. Older her to run for the bank – get her under cover.’
But he knew it was useless. By the time she was within hail, it would be too late. He thought of ordering his forward. turrets to fire on the launch and sink her – but discarded the idea immediately, the fall of shell would immediately draw the enemy’s attention.
Impatiently he stood gripping the rail of the bridge, and mouthing his anger and his frustration at the approaching launch.
– 61 –
Sebastian hung over the edge of the cockpit. The wind buffeted him, flapping his jacket wildly about his body, whipping his hair into a black tangle. With his usual dexterity Sebastian had managed to drop the binoculars overboard. They were the property of Flynn Patrick O’Flynn, and Sebastian. knew that he would be expected to pay for them. This spoiled Sebestian’s enjoyment of the flight to some extent, he already owed Flynn a little over three hundred pounds. Rosa would have something to say also. However, the loss of the binoculars was no handicap, the aircraft was flying too low and was so unstable that the unaided eye was much more effective.
From a height of five hundred feet the mangrove forest looked like a fluffy overstuffed mattress, a sickly fever green in colour, with the channels and the water-ways between them dark gun-metal veins that flashed the sunlight back like a heliograph. The clouds of white egrets that rose in alarm as the aircraft approached looked like drifts of torn paper scraps. A fish eagle hung suspended in silent night ahead of them, the wide span of its wings flared at the tips like the fingers of a hand. It dipped away, sliding past the aircraft’s wing tip so close that Sebastian saw the fierce yellow eyes in its white hooded head.
Sebastian laughed with delight, and then grabbed at the side of the cockpit to steady himself, as the machine rocked violently under him. This was the pilot’s method of attracting Sebastian’s attention, and Sebastian. wished he would think up some other way of doing it.
He looked back angrily shouting in the howl of wind and engine.
‘Watch it! You stupid dago.’
Da Silva was gesticulating wildly, his pink mouth working under the black moustache, his eyes wild behind the panes of his goggles, his right hand stabbing urgently out over the starboard wing.
Sebastian saw it immediately on the wide water-way, the launch was so glaringly conspicuous that he wondered why he had not seen it before, then he recalled that his attention had been concentrated on the terrain directly beneath the aircraft – and he excused himself.
Yet there was little to justify da Silva’s excitement, he thought, This was no battle cruiser, it was a tiny vessel of perhaps twenty-five feet. Quickly he ran his eyes down the channel, following it to the open sea in the blue distance. It was empty.
He glanced back at the pilot and shook his head. But da Silva’s excitement had, if anything, increased. He was making another frenzied hand-signal that Sebastian. could not understand. To save argument Sebastian nodded in agreement, and instantly the machine dropped away under him so that Sebastian’s belly was left behind and he clutched desperately at the side of the cockpit once more.
In a shallow turning dive. da Silva took the machine down and then levelled out with the landing-wheels almost brushing the tops of the mangroves. They rushed towards the channel, and as the last mangroves whipped away under them da Silva eased the nose down still bother and they dropped to within a few feet of the surface of the water. It was a display of fine flying that was completely wasted on Sebastian. He was cursing da Silva quietly, his eyes starting from their sockets.
A mile ahead of them across the open water bobbed the overladen launch. It was only a few feet below their own level, and they raced towards it with the wash of the propeller blowing a squall of ripples across the surface behind them.
‘My God!’ The blasphemy was wrung from Sebastian in his distress. ‘He’s going to fly right into it!’
It was an opinion that seemed to be shared by the crew of the launch. As the machine roared in on them, they began to abandon ship. Sebastian saw two men leap from the high piled load of timber and hit the water with small white splashes.
At the last second da Silva lifted the plane and they hopped over the launch. For a fleeting instant Sebastian stared at a range of fifteen feet into the face of the German naval officer who crouched down over the tiller bar at the stern of the launch. They were then past and climbing sharply, banking and turning back.
Sebastian saw the launch had rounded to, and that her crew were clambering aboard and splashing around her sides. Once more the aircraft dropped towards the channel, but da Silva had throttled back and the engine was burbling under half power. He levelled out fifty feet above the water, and flew sedately, keeping away from the launch and well towards the northern side of the channel.
‘What are you doing?’ Sebastian mouthed the question at da Silva. In reply the pilot made a sweeping gesture with his right hand at the thick bank of mangroves alongside.
Puzzled, Sebastian stared into the mangroves. What was the fool doing, surely he didn’t think that …
There was a hump of high ground on the bank, a hump that rose perhaps one hundred and fifty feet above the level of the river. They came up to it.
Like a hunter following a wounded buffalo, moving carelessly through thin scattered bush which could not possibly give cover to such a large animal, and then suddenly coming face to face with it – so close, that he sees the minute detail of crenellation on the massive bosses of the horns, sees the blood dripping from moist black nostrils, and the dull furnace glare of the piggy little eyes – in the same fashion Sebastian found the Blücher.
She was so close he could see the pattern of rivets on her plating, the joints in the planking of her foredeck, the individual strands of the canopy of camouflage netting spread over her. He saw the men on her bridge, and the gun-crews behind the pom-poms and the Maxim machine guns on the balconies of her upperworks. From her squatting turrets her big guns gaped at him with hungry mouths, revolving to follow the flight of the machine.
She was monstrous, grey and sinister among the mangroves, crouching in her lair, and Sebastian cried aloud in surprise and alarm, a sound without shape or coherence, and at the same moment the engine of the aeroplane bellowed in full power, as da Silva thrust the throttle wide and hauled the joystick back into his crotch.
As the
aircraft rocketed upwards, the deck of the Blücher erupted in a thunderous volcano of flame. Flame flew in great bell-shaped ejaculations from the muzzles of her nine-inch guns. Flame spat viciously from the multi-barrelled pom-poms and the machine guns on her upperworks.
Around the little aircraft the air boiled and hissed, disrupted, churned into violent turbulence by the passage of the big shells.
Something struck the plane, and she was whirled upwards like a burning leaf from a garden bonfire. Wing over wing she rolled, her engine surging mildly, her rigging groaning and creaking at the strain.
Sebastian was flung forward, the bridge of his nose cracked against the edge of the cockpit and instantly twin jets of blood spurted from his nostrils to douse the front of his jacket.
The machine stood on her tail, propeller clawing ineffectively at the air, engine wailing in over rev. Then she dropped away on one wing and one side swooped sickeningly downwards.
Da Silva fought her, feeling the sloppiness of the stall in her controls come alive again as she regained air-speed. The fluffy tops of the mangroves rushed up to meet him, and desperately he tried to ease her off. She was trying to respond, the fabric wrinkling along her wings as they flexed to the enormous pressure. He felt her lurch again as she touched the top branches, heard above the howl of the engine the faint crackling brush of the vegetation against her belly. Then suddenly, miraculously, she was clear; flying straight and level, climbing slowly up and away from the hungry swamp.
She was sluggish and heavy, and there was something loose under her. It banged and thumped and slapped in the slipstream, jarring the whole fuselage. Da Silva could not dare to manoeuvre her. He held her on the course she had chosen, easing her nose slightly upwards, slowly gaining precious altitude.
At a thousand feet he brought her round in a wide gentle turn to the south, and banging and thumping, one wing heavy, she staggered drunkenly through the sky towards her rendezvous with Flynn O’Flynn.