Wyatt's Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

by Desmond Bagley

  For over half an hour the demoralized survivors of the front line passed through and soon Causton heard scattered shots coming from the rear. The survivors were being whipped back into shape. He stared across the field, expecting to see the assault of Favel’s army, but nothing happened except that the mortar fire lifted briefly and then plunged down again, this time directly on their position. In that small moment of time, when the smoke of battle was drifting away, Causton saw dozens of bodies scattered over the field and heard a few distant cries and wails.

  Then he had no time even to think of anything else as the shells began to rain down in an iron hail. He crouched in his foxhole and dug his fingers into the nauseous detritus as the ground shook and heaved underneath him. It seemed to go on for an eternity although, on later recollection, he supposed it to have lasted for not more than fifteen minutes. But at the time he thought it would never end. Jesus, God! he prayed; let me get out of here.

  The barrage lifted as suddenly as it had started. Causton was stunned and lay for a while in the foxhole before he was able to raise his head. When he did so, he expected to see the first wave of Favel’s assault upon them and strained to peer through the slowly dispersing dust and smoke. But there was still nothing—merely the field empty but for the crumpled bodies.

  Slowly he turned his head. The tin shacks immediately behind the position had been destroyed, some of them totally, and the ground was pitted with craters. The captain’s jeep, its rear wheels blown off, was burning furiously, and of the captain himself there was no sign. Near-by lay the torso of a man—no head, arms or legs—and Causton wondered drearily if it was the sergeant. He stretched his legs painfully and thought that if he was going to run for it, then this was the time to do it.

  From the next foxhole a man emerged, his face grey with dust and fear. His eyes were glazed and blank as he levered himself up and began to stagger away. The sergeant appeared from beneath the level of the ground and shouted at him, but the man took no notice, so the sergeant lifted his rifle and fired and the man collapsed grotesquely.

  Causton sank back as a tirade of mashed French broke from the sergeant’s foxhole. He had to admire the man—this was a tough, professional soldier who would brook no nonsense about desertion in the face of the enemy—but he was confoundedly inconvenient.

  He looked about at the heads which were lifted, did a rough count and was surprised at the number of men who had survived the bombardment. He had read that troops well dug in could survive an enormous amount of punishment in the way of shelling—it had been the thing that had kept the First World War going—but experiencing the fact personally was quite a different thing. He looked across the field but could detect no movement that would presage an assault. Even the small-arms fire had ceased.

  He turned to see the sergeant clamber out of his hole and walk boldly along the line to check on the men. Still not a shot came from across the field and Causton began to wonder what had happened. He looked uneasily at the steely blue sky as though expecting another storm of metal, and scratched his cheek reflectively as he watched the sergeant.

  Suddenly the small-arms fire started up again. A machine-gun opened up shockingly closely and from an unexpected direction. A hail of bullets swept across the position and the sergeant spun like a top, punched by bullets, to fall sprawling and disappear into a foxhole. Causton ducked his head and listened to the heavy fire coming from the left and to the rear.

  The position had been outflanked.

  He heard the yells and the running steps as the rest of the men broke and ran, but he stayed put. He had a hunch they were running into trouble, and anyway be was fed up with being a part of Serrurier’s army; the further that unit and he were separated, the better he would feel. So he lay in the foxhole and played dead.

  The machine-gun fire stopped abruptly, but he lay there for fifteen minutes more before even poking his nose above the level of the ground. When he did so, the first thing he saw was a long line of men emerging from the houses on the other side of the field—Favel’s men were coming over to mop up. Hastily he wormed his way out of the foxhole and crawled on his belly back towards the shacks, expecting to feel the thud of bullets at any moment. But there was plenty of cover since the ground had been churned up by the mortar fire and he found he could crawl from shell-hole to shell-hole with the minimum of exposure.

  Finally he got to the cover of the shacks and looked back. Favel’s men were nearly across the field and he had the notion they would shoot anything that moved and he had better find somewhere safer. He listened to the racket coming from the left flank—someone was putting up a fight there, but that would collapse as soon as these oncoming troops hit them. He began to move to the right, dodging from the cover of one shack to another, and always trying to move back.

  As he went he ripped off the tunic he was wearing and rubbed at his face. Perhaps the sight of a white skin would cause hesitation of the trigger-finger—at least it was worth trying. He saw no sign of the Government army and all the indications were that Favel was on the verge of punching a hole right through the middle—there did not seem much to stop him.

  Presently he had an idea and tried the door of one of the shacks. It had occurred to him that there was no point in running away; after all, he did not want to catch up with Serrurier’s forces, did he? It would be much better to hide and then emerge in the middle of Favel’s army.

  The door was not barred, so he pushed it open with a creak and went inside. The shack was deserted; it consisted merely of two rooms and needed a minimum of inspection to show there was no one there. He looked about and saw a wash-basin on a rickety stand below a fly-blown and peeling mirror, which was flanked on one side by a highly coloured oleograph of the Madonna and on the other by the standard official portrait of Serrurier.

  Hastily he pulled down the idealized photograph of Serrurier and kicked it under the bed. If anyone interrupted him, he did not want them getting any wrong ideas. Then he poured tepid water into the basin and began to wash his face, keeping a sharp ear cocked for anything going on outside. At the end of five minutes he realized in despair that he was still a light-complexioned Negro; the boot-polish was waterproof and would not come off, no matter how hard he rubbed. Many of the inhabitants of San Fernandez were even lighter complexioned and also had European features.

  He was struck by an idea and unbuttoned the front of his shirt to look at his chest. Two days earlier he had been somewhat embarrassed at his pallidity, but now he thanked God that he had not felt the urge to sunbathe. As he stripped off his shirt he prepared for a long wait.

  What brought him out was the sound of an engine. He thought that anyone driving a vehicle around there would be civilized enough not to shoot him on sight, so he came out of the cupboard and into the front room and looked through the window. The Land-Rover that was passing was driven by a white man.

  ‘Hey—you!’ he shouted, and dashed to the door. ‘You there—arrêtez!’

  The man driving the Land-Rover looked back and the vehicle bumped to a halt. Causton ran up and the man looked at him curiously. ‘Who the devil are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Thank God!’ said Causton. ‘You speak English—you are English. My name’s Causton—I suppose you could call me a war correspondent.’

  The man looked at him unbelievingly. ‘You got off the mark pretty quickly, didn’t you? The war only started yesterday afternoon. You don’t look much like a war correspondent—you look more like a nigger minstrel who got on the wrong side of his audience.’

  ‘I’m genuine enough,’ assured Causton.

  The man hefted a submachine-gun which was on the seat next to him. ‘I think Favel had better have a look at you,’ he said. ‘Get in.’

  ‘Just the man I want to see,’ said Causton, climbing into the Land-Rover and keeping a careful eye on the sub-machine-gun. ‘You a friend of his?’

  ‘I suppose you could say so,’ said the man. ‘My name is Manning.’

  II />
  ‘It’s too hot,’ said Mrs Warmington querulously.

  Julie agreed but did not say so aloud—Mrs Warmington was the last person she felt like agreeing with about anything. She wriggled slightly, trying to unstick her blouse from the small of her back, and looked ahead through the windscreen. She saw exactly what she had seen for the last half-hour—a small handcart piled perilously high with trumpery household goods being pushed by an old man and a small boy who obstinately stuck to the crown of the road and refused to draw to the side.

  Rawsthorne irritably changed down again from second gear to first. ‘The engine will boil if we carry on like this in this heat,’ he said.

  ‘We mustn’t stop,’ said Julie in alarm.

  ‘Stopping might prove more difficult than moving,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘Have you looked behind lately?’

  Julie twisted in her seat and looked through the back window of the car, which was now cresting a small rise. Behind, as far as she could see, stretched the long line of refugees fleeing from St Pierre. She had seen this kind of thing on old newsreels but had never expected to see it in actuality. This was a people on the move, trudging wearily from the coming desolation of war, carrying as much of the material minutiæ of their lives as they could on an incredible variety of vehicles. There were perambulators loaded not with babies but with clocks, clothing, pictures, ornaments; there were carts pushed by hand or drawn by donkeys; there were beat-up cars of incredible vintage, buses, trucks and the better cars of the more prosperous.

  But primarily there were people: men and women, old and young, rich and poor, the hale and the sick. These were people who did not laugh or speak, who moved along quietly like driven cattle with grey faces and downcast eyes, whose only visible sign of emotion was the quick, nervous twitch of the head to look back along the road.

  Julie turned as Rawsthorne blasted on the horn at the obstinate old man ahead. ‘The damned fellow won’t move aside,’ he grumbled. ‘If he’d move just a little to the side I could get through.’

  Eumenides said, ‘The road—it drop on side.’ He pointed to the cart. ‘ ’E fright ’e fall.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘That cart is grossly overloaded and there is a steep camber.’

  Julie said, ‘How much farther do we have to go?’

  ‘About two miles.’ Rawsthorne nodded ahead. ‘You see where the road turns round that headland over there? We have to get to the other side.’

  ‘How long do you think it will take?’

  Rawsthorne drew to a halt to avoid ramming the old man. ‘At this rate it will be another two hours.’

  The car crept on by jerks and starts. The refugees on foot were actually moving faster than those in vehicles and Rawsthorne contemplated abandoning the car. But he rejected the idea almost as soon as he thought of it; there was the food and water to be carried, and the blankets, too—those would be much too valuable in the coming week to leave behind with the car. He said, ‘At least this war is having one good result—it’s getting the people out of St Pierre.’

  ‘They won’t all get out,’ said Julie. ‘And what about the armies?’

  ‘It’s damn’ bad luck on Favel,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘Imagine taking a town and then being smashed by a hurricane. I’ve read a lot of military history but I’ve never heard of a parallel to it.’

  ‘It will smash Serrurier, too,’ said Julie.

  ‘Yes, it will,’ said Rawsthorne thoughtfully. ‘I wonder who’ll pick up the pieces.’ He stared ahead. ‘I like Wyatt, but I hope he’s wrong about this hurricane. There’s a chance he might be, you know; he’s relying a lot on his intuition. I’d like Favel to have a fighting chance.’

  ‘I hope he’s wrong, too,’ said Julie sombrely. ‘He’s trapped back there.’

  Rawsthorne glanced at her drawn face, then bit his lip and lapsed into silence. The time dragged on as slowly as the car. Presently he pointed out a group of young men who were passing. They were fit and able-bodied, if poorly dressed; one had a fistful of bank-notes which he was counting, and another was twirling a gleaming necklace on his forefinger. He said meditatively, ‘I wish Causton hadn’t taken your gun, Eumenides; it might have come in handy. Those boys have been looting. They’ve taken money and jewellery but soon they’ll get hungry and try to take food from whoever has it.’

  Eumenides shrugged. ‘Too late; ’e took gun—I look.’

  At last they rounded the headland and Rawsthorne said, ‘Another few hundred yards and we’ll pull off. Look for a convenient place to run the car off the road—what we really need is a side turning.’

  They ground on, still in bottom gear, and after a while Eumenides said, ‘Turn ‘ere.’

  Rawsthorne craned his neck. ‘Yes, this looks all right. I wonder where it leads.’

  ‘Let’s try,’ said Julie. ‘There’s no one going up there.’

  Rawsthorne turned the car on to the unmetalled side road and was immediately able to change up to second gear. They bumped along for a few hundred yards and then came into the wide space of a quarry. ‘Damn!’ he said. ‘It’s a dead end.’

  Julie wriggled in her seat. ‘At least we can get out and stretch our legs before going back. And I think we ought to eat again while we have the chance, too,’ she said.

  The bread was stale, the butter melted and going rancid, the water tepid and, on top of that, the heat had not improved their appetites, but they ate a little while sitting in the shade of the quarry huts and discussed their next move. Mrs Warmington said, ‘I don’t see why we can’t stay here—it’s a quiet place.’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘We can still see the sea from here—to the south. According to Wyatt, the hurricane will come from the south.’

  Mrs Warmington made an impatient noise. ‘I think that young man is a scaremonger; I don’t think there is going to be a hurricane. I looked back when we could still see the Base and there are still ships there at anchor. Commodore Brooks doesn’t think there’ll be a hurricane, so why should we?’

  ‘We can’t take the chance that he’ll be wrong,’ said Julie quietly. She turned to Rawsthorne. ‘We’ll have to go back to the road and try again.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘I don’t really think we can. This track left the road at an acute angle—I don’t see how we could turn the car into the traffic stream. Nobody would stop to let us through.’ He looked up at the quarry face. ‘We’ve got to get on the other side of that.’

  Mrs Warmington snorted. ‘I’m not even going to try to climb that. I’m staying here.’

  Rawsthorne laughed. ‘We don’t have to climb it—we go round it. There’s a convenient place to climb a little farther back down the track.’ He chewed the stale bread distastefully. ‘Wyatt said we must get on the north side of a ridge, didn’t he? Well, that’s what we’re going to do.’

  Eumenides asked abruptly, ‘We leave car?’

  ‘We’ll have to. We’ll take all we need from it, then park it behind these huts. With a bit of luck no one will find it.’

  They finished their brief meal and began to pack up. Julie looked at the wilting Mrs Warmington and forced some humour into her voice. ‘Well, there’s no dish-washing to be done.’ But Mrs Warmington was past caring; she just sat in the shade and gasped, and Julie thought cattily, this is better than a diet for reducing her surplus poundage.

  Rawsthorne ran the car down the track and they unpacked all the supplies. He said, ‘It’s better we do this here; it’s a nice out-of-the-way spot with none of those young thugs snooping at us.’ He looked up the hill. ‘It’s not far to the top—I suppose this ridge isn’t much more than two hundred feet high.’

  He took the car back to the quarry. Mrs Warmington said pettishly, ‘I suppose we must, although I think this is nonsense.’ She turned to Eumenides. ‘Don’t just stand there; pick up something.’

  Julie looked at Mrs Warmington with a glint in her eye. ‘You’ll have to do your share of carrying.’

&n
bsp; Mrs Warmington looked doubtfully at the scrub-covered hill. ‘Oh, but I can’t—my heart, you know.’

  Julie thought that Mrs Warmington’s heart was as sound as a bell and just as hard. ‘The blankets aren’t heavy,’ she said. ‘Take some of those.’ She thrust a bundle of blankets into Mrs Warmington’s unready arms and she dropped her bag. It fell with a dull thud into the dust and they both stooped for it.

  Julie picked it up and found it curiously heavy. ‘Whatever have you got in here?’

  Mrs Warmington snatched the bag from her, dropping the blankets. ‘My jewels, darling. You don’t suppose I’d leave those behind.’

  Julie indicated the blankets. ‘Those might keep you alive—your jewels won’t.’ She stared hard at Mrs Warmington. ‘I suggest you concentrate more on doing work and less on giving orders; you haven’t been right about a damn’ thing so far, and you’re just a dead weight.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mrs Warmington, perhaps alarmed at the expression on Julie’s face. ‘Don’t drive so. You’re too mannish, my dear; it’s no wonder you haven’t caught yourself a husband.’

  Julie ignored her and lifted a cardboard box full of bottled water. As she climbed the hill, she smiled to herself. A few days ago that gibe might have rankled, but not now. At one time she had thought that perhaps she was too self-reliant to appeal to a man; perhaps men did like the clinging ultra-feminine type, which she herself had always regarded as parasitic and not giving value for value received. Well, to hell with it! She was not going to disguise her natural intelligence for any man, and a man who was fooled by that sort of thing wasn’t worth marrying, anyway. She would rather be herself than be a foolish, ineffectual, overstuffed creature like the Warmington woman.