The searchlight beam stabbed out through the darkness and lit up a heavy, rolling sea churned milky white by the torrential rain. For a moment or two the searchlight stayed stationary, the almost solid curtain of rain sheeting palely through its beam, then started to probe forward and almost immediately picked it up—a lifeboat very close to hand, riding on its sea-anchor and plunging violently up and down as it rode the short, steep seas that swept down upon it. But the waves in the heart of a tropical storm have little set pattern, and every so often a twisting cross sea would curve over and break in-board. There were seven or eight men in the boat, stooping and straightening, stooping and straightening as they baled for their lives—a losing struggle, for she was already deep in the water, settling by the minute. One man alone seemed indifferent: he was sitting in the sternsheets, facing the tanker, a forearm across his eyes to ward off the glare of the searchlight. Just above the forearm something white gleamed in the light, a cap, perhaps, but at that distance it was difficult to be sure.
Nicolson dropped down the bridge ladder, ran quickly past the lifeboat, down another ladder to the fore and aft gangway, along to a third ladder that led down to the top of number three tank, and picked his way surely round valves and over the maze of discharge lines, gas lines and steam smothering pipes until he came to the starboard side: Farnholme followed close behind all the way. Just as Nicolson put his hands on the guardrail and leaned out and over, the two floodlights switched on together.
Twelve thousand tons and only a single screw, but Findhorn was handling the big ship, even in those heavy seas, like a destroyer. The lifeboat was less than forty yards away now, already caught in the pool of light from the floods, and coming closer every moment, and the men in the boat, safely into the lee of the Viroma, had stopped baling and were twisted round in their seats, staring up at the men on deck, and making ready to jump for the scrambling net. Nicolson looked closely at the man in the sternsheets: he could see now that it was no cap that the man was wearing on his head but a rough bandage, stained and saturated with blood: and then he saw something else, too, the stiff and unnatural position of the right arm.
Nicolson turned to Farnholme and pointed to the man in the sternsheets. “That your friend sitting at the back there?”
“That’s Van Effen all right,” Farnholme said with satisfaction “What did I tell you?”
“You were right.” Nilcolson paused, then went on: “He seems to have a one-track mind in some things.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that he’s still got a gun in his hand. He’s got it lined up on his pals in front, and he hasn’t taken his eyes off them once while I’ve been watching.”
Farnholme stared, then whistled softly. “You’re dead right, he has.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I really can’t guess at all. But you can take it from me, Mr. Nicolson, that if my friend Van Effen thinks it necessary to have a gun on them, then he has an excellent reason for it.”
Van Effen had. Leaning against a bulkhead in the dining-saloon, a large whisky in his hand and the water pooling from his soaking clothes on to the corticene at his feet, he told it all quickly, concisely and convincingly. Their lifeboat had been fitted with an engine, had carried them quickly clear of the Kerry Dancer after she had gone on fire and they had managed to reach the shelter of a small island miles away to the south just as the storm broke. They had pulled the boat up on to the shingle on the lee side, huddling there for hours until the wind had suddenly dropped: it was shortly afterwards that they had seen the rockets going up to the northwest.
“Those were ours,” Findhorn nodded. “So you decided to make a break for us?”
“I did.” A wintry smile touched the Dutchman’s steady brown eyes as he gestured towards the group of men, dark-eyed and swarthy-skinned, standing huddled in one corner. “Siran and his little friends weren’t keen. They’re not exactly pro-Allied and they knew there weren’t any Jap ships in these waters. Besides, for all we knew these were distress rockets from a sinking ship.” Van Effen downed the rest of his whisky at a gulp and laid the glass carefully on the table beside him. “But I had the gun.”
“So I saw.” It was Nicolson speaking. “And then?”
“We took off, towards the north-west. We ran into a long stretch of confused water, not too rough, and made good time. Then heavy seas hit us and flooded the engine. We just had to sit there and I thought we were finished till I saw your phosphorescence—you can see it a long way off on a night as black as this. If the rain had come five minutes earlier we would never have seen you. But we did, and I had my torch.”
“And your gun,” Findhorn finished. He looked at Van Effen for a long time, his eyes speculative and cold. “It’s a great pity you didn’t use it earlier, Mr. Van Effen.”
The Dutchman smiled wryly. “It is not difficult to follow your meaning, Captain.” He reached up, grimaced, tore the blood-stained strip of linen from his head: a deep gash, purple-bruised round the edges, ran from the corner of his forehead to his ear. “How do you think I got this?”
“It’s not pretty,” Nicolson admitted. “Siran?”
“One of his men. The Kerry Dancer was on fire, the boat—it was the only boat—was out on the falls and Siran here and all that were left of his crew were ready to pile into it.”
“Just their sweet little selves,” Nicolson interrupted grimly.
“Just their sweet little selves,” Van Effen acknowledged. “I had Siran by the throat, bent back over the rail, going to force him to go through the ship. That was a mistake—I should have used my gun. I didn’t know then that all his men were—what is the phrase?—tarred with the same brush. It must have been a belaying pin. I woke up in the bottom of the boat.”
“You what?” Findhorn was incredulous.
“I know.” Van Effen smiled, a little tiredly. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense at all, does it? They should have left me to fry. But there I was—not only alive, but with my head all nicely tied up. Curious, is it not, Captain?”
“Curious is hardly the word.” Findhorn’s voice was flat, without inflection. “You are telling the truth, Mr. Van Effen? A silly question, I suppose—whether you are or not, you’d still say ‘yes’.”
“He is, Captain Findhorn.” Farnholme’s voice sounded oddly confident and, for that moment, not at all like the voice of Brigadier Farnholme. “I am perfectly certain of that.”
“You are?” Findhorn turned to look at him, as had everyone, caught by something peculiar in Farnholme’s tone. “What makes you so sure, Brigadier?”
Farnholme waved a deprecating hand, like a man who finds himself being taken more seriously than he intended. “After all, I know Van Effen better than anybody here. And his story has to be true: if it weren’t true, he wouldn’t be here now. Something of an Irishism, gentlemen, but perhaps you follow?”
Findhorn nodded thoughtfully but made no comment. There was silence for some time in the dining-saloon, a silence broken only by the distant crash of bows in a trough in the seas, the indefinable creaking noises a ship makes when it works with the waves in heavy weather, and the shuffling of the feet of the crew of the Kerry Dancer. Then Findhorn looked at his watch and turned to Nicolson.
“The bridge for us, Mr. Nicolson, I suggest: from the feel of things we’re running into the heavy stuff again. For Captain Siran and his crew, an armed guard for the remainder of the night, I think.” Findhorn’s eyes were as bleak and cold as his voice. “But there’s one little point I’d like to clear up first.”
He walked unhurriedly towards the crew of the Kerry Dancer, balancing himself easily against the heavy rolling of the ship, then halted as Van Effen stretched out his hand.
“I’d watch them if I were you,” the Dutchman said quietly. “Half of them carry more than one knife and they’re not slow with them.”
“You have a gun.” Findhorn put out his hand and took the automatic which Van Effen had stuck in his wai
stband. “May I?” He glanced down at the weapon, saw that the safety catch was still on. “A Colt .38.”
“You know guns, yes?”
“A little.” Soft-footed, Findhorn walked across to the nearest man in the group in the corner. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a brown, smooth, expressionless face: he looked as if he had got out of the habit of using expressions a long time ago. He wore a hairline moustache, black sideburns that reached three inches below his ears, and he had black, empty eyes. “You are Siran?” Findhorn asked, almost indifferently.
“Captain Siran. At your service.” The insolence lay in the faint emphasis on the ‘captain,’ the millimetric inclination of the head. The face remained quite expressionless.
“Formalities bore me.” Findhorn was looking at him with sudden interest. “You are English, aren’t you?”
“Perhaps.” This time the lips curled, less in a smile than in a token of lazy contempt, perfectly done. “Anglo-Saxon, shall we say?”
“It doesn’t matter. You are the captain—were the captain—of the Kerry Dancer. You abandoned your ship—and abandoned all the people that you left behind to die, locked behind steel doors. Maybe they drowned, maybe they were burnt to death: it doesn’t make any difference now. You left them to die.”
“Such melodramatics!” Siran lazily patted a yawn to extinction, a masterpiece of weary insolence. “You forget the traditions of the sea. We did all in our power for those unfortunates.”
Findhorn nodded slowly and turned away, looking over Siran’s six companions. None of them seemed at all happy, but one—a thin-faced man with a cast in one eye—was especially nervous and apprehensive. He shuffled his feet constantly and his hands and fingers seemed to have an independent life of their own. Findhorn walked across and stood in front of him.
“Do you speak English?”
There was no answer, just a furrowing of brows, the raising of shoulders and outspread palms in the universal gesture of incomprehension.
“You picked well, Captain Findhorn,” Van Effen drawled slowly. “He speaks English almost as well as you do.”
Findhorn brought the automatic up quickly, placed it against the man’s mouth and pushed, none too lightly. The man gave way and Findhorn followed. The second step backward brought the man against the bulkhead, palms of his outstretched hands pressing hard against the wall, his one good eye staring down in terror at the gun that touched his teeth.
“Who hammered shut all the clips on the poop-deck door?” Findhorn asked softly. “I’ll give you five seconds.” He pressed more heavily on the gun and the sudden click of the safety catch snicking off was unnaturally loud in the strained silence. “One, two—”
“I did, I did!” His mouth was working and he was almost gibbering with fear. “I closed the door.”
“On whose orders?”
“The captain. He said that—”
“Who shut the fo’c’sle door?”
“Yussif. But Yussif died—”
“On whose orders?” Findhorn asked relentlessly.
“Captain Siran’s orders.” The man was looking at Siran now, sick fear in his eye. “I’ll die for this.”
“Probably,” Findhorn said carelessly. He pushed the gun into his pocket and walked across to Siran. “Interesting little talk, wasn’t it, Captain Siran?”
“The man’s a fool,” Siran said contemptuously. “Any terrified man will say anything with a gun in his face.”
“There were British soldiers—probably your own countrymen—in the fo’c’sle. A score, maybe two dozen, I don’t know, but you couldn’t have them cluttering up your getaway in the only boat.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Siran’s brown face was still the same, still without expression. But his voice was wary now, the calculated insolence gone.
“And there were over twenty people in the aftercastle.”
Siran might not have spoken for all the attention Findhorn paid to him, “Wounded men, dying men, women—and one little child.”
This time Siran said nothing. The smooth face was impassive as ever, but his eyes had narrowed, just perceptibly. When he spoke, however, his voice still held its insolent indifference.
“And just what do you hope to achieve by all this stupid rigmarole, Captain Findhorn?”
“I hope for nothing.” Findhorn’s lined face was grim, the faded eyes bleak and relentless. “It’s not a question of hope, Siran, but of certainty—the certainty of your conviction for murder. In the morning we shall take independent statements from all the members of your own crew and have them signed in the presence of neutral witnesses from my crew. I shall make it my personal responsibility to see to it that you arrive in Australia safely and in good health.” Findhorn picked up his hat and prepared to leave. “You will have a fair trial, Captain Siran, but it shouldn’t last long, and the penalty for murder, of course, is known to us all.”
For the first time, Siran’s mask of impassivity cracked and the faintest shadow of fear touched the dark eyes, but Findhorn wasn’t there to see it. He was already gone, climbing up the companionway to the shrieking bridge of the Viroma.
SIX
Dawn, a cloudless, windless dawn with a lightening eastern sky mother-of-pearl in its opalescent beauty, found the Viroma far to the south-eastwards of the Rhio channel, twenty miles due north of the Rifleman Rock and almost half-way towards the Carimata Straits. The big tanker was travelling under full power, a wisp of hazed blue drifting aft from its funnel, the after-decks shaking in teeth-rattling vibration as Carradale, the chief engineer, pushed the big engine to its limit, and then a little beyond.
The typhoon of that long night was gone, the great winds had vanished as if they had never been. But for the salt-stained decks and upper-works and the long, heaving swell that would not die away for many hours yet, it might all have been a dream. But it had been no dream while it had lasted: a nightmare, perhaps, but no dream, not with Captain Findhorn driving the lurching, staggering tanker through the great quartering seas and cyclonic winds for hour upon endless hour, with no thought for the grievous punishment the Viroma was taking, with no thought for the comfort and welfare of passengers and crew, with no thought for anything but to put as many miles as possible between himself and Singapore before the day broke and the enemy could see them again.
The delicately-hued pastel shades to the east faded and whitened and vanished, all in a matter of minutes, and the big blurred silhouette of the sun climbed swiftly above the horizon, stretching out a broad, shimmering band of dazzling white across the sea, between itself and the Viroma. Not quite an unbroken band, however: something lay in the water, miles away, a big fishing-boat perhaps, or a small coaster, hull down, black as midnight against the rising sun and steaming steadily east, soon diminished to a little black speck in the distance and then nothing at all. Captain Findhorn, on the bridge with Barrett, watched and wondered until it was gone. Perhaps it had seen them, perhaps not. Perhaps it was Japanese, or pro-Japanese, perhaps not. Perhaps it carried a radio, perhaps it didn’t. There was nothing they could do about it anyway.
The sun, as it always does in the open sea, seemed to rise straight up into the sky. By half-past seven it was already hot, hot enough to dry out the rain and sea-soaked decks and upperworks of the Viroma, hot enough for Findhorn to hang up his oilskins and move far out on to the wing of the bridge to bask in its heat and draw in great lungfuls of the fresh morning air—it wouldn’t, he knew, be fresh much longer. Findhorn himself felt fresh enough, if a little tired in his bones: about half-way through the middle watch, when the teeth of the typhoon had lost their edge, Nicolson had persuaded him to go to his cabin and he had slept like a dead man for over three hours.
“Good morning, sir. Quite a change this, isn’t it?” Nicolson’s soft voice, directly behind him, jerked Findhorn out of his reverie. He turned round.
“Morning, Johnny. What are you doing up at this unearthly hour?” Nicolson, Findhorn knew, couldn’t
have had much more than a couple of hours’ sleep, but he had the rested look of a man with at least eight solid hours behind him. Not for the first time Findhorn had to remind himself that, where durability and resilience were concerned, John Nicolson was a man apart.
“Unearthly hour?” Nicolson glanced at his watch. “It’s almost eight o’clock.” He grinned. “Conscience and the calls of duty, sir. I’ve just been making a quick round of our non-paying guests.”
“No complaints?” Findhorn asked humorously.
“I gather that most of them were a bit under the weather during the night, but otherwise no complaints.”
“And those who might have know a damn sight better than to make them,” Findhorn nodded. “How are the sick nurses?”
“The two Chinese girls and the elderly ones are much better. A couple of them were down in the hospital and smoke-room when I was there, changing bandages. All five of the soldiers there were in fine form and hungry as hunters.”
“An excellent sign,” Findhorn interrupted dryly. “How about the two boys in the hospital?”
“Holding their own, the nurses say. I think that they suffer a good deal of pain, which is more than our worthy Brigadier and his pal are doing. You can hear ’em snoring twenty feet away and the engineers’ office smells like a distillery.”
“And Miss Plenderleith?”
“Taking her constitutional, of course. From one end of the fore and aft gangway to the other. The English cherish the delusion that they are a nautical race: Miss Plenderleith is enjoying herself thoroughly. And then there are three soldiers in the dining-saloon—Corporal Fraser and his two men. They’ve got a chair apiece, and they’re all sitting very comfortably with their .3O3s and Brens cradled in their hands. I think they’re praying for Siran or one of his men to take an extra deep breath so that they can have a cast-iron excuse for shooting a lot of big holes through them. Siran and his pals know exactly how these boys are feeling about them; they’re only taking very small breaths indeed and blinking one eye at a time.”
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