Wyatt's Hurricane / Bahama Crisis

by Desmond Bagley

  Dawson said, ‘I hope you’re right, Wyatt. I hope this tidal wave of yours doesn’t come boiling over this ridge. It would drown the lot of us.’ He shook his head and grinned in wonder. ‘Christ, what a position to be in—I must be nuts.’

  ‘Perhaps we’re all light-headed,’ said Causton. ‘We’re seeing something that’s never been tried before—the use of a hurricane to smash an army. What a hell of a story this will be when—and if—I get out of here.’

  ‘It has been done before,’ said Wyatt. ‘Favel quoted a precedent—when Moses crossed the Red Sea with the Egyptians after him.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Causton. ‘I hadn’t thought of that one. It’s a damned good—‘ He pointed suddenly. ‘Look, something’s happening down there.’

  A long line of men had emerged on to the slope, flitting about and on the move all the time, stopping only briefly to fire back at the houses. The machine-gun near-by cleared its throat in a coughing burst, then settled down to a steady chatter, and all the men along the ridge began to shoot, giving covering fire to the last of the rebel army retreating towards them. They had the advantage of height, little though it was, and could fire over the heads of their own men.

  There was a sharp crack from behind as the mortar went off, and seconds later the bomb burst just short of the nearest house. There were more explosions among the houses, and from the rear came a louder report and the whistle of a shell as one of the few remaining guns fired. Again Causton heard that unearthly twittering in the air about him and pulled down his head below the level of the ridge. ‘The bastards haven’t any politesse,’ he said. ‘They’re shooting back.’

  The last of Favel’s men came pouring over the ridge, to stumble and collapse in the shelter of the reverse slope. They had left some of their number behind—Wyatt could see three crumpled heaps half-way up the slope, and he thought of the sacrifices these men must have made to hold back the Government army until the city had been evacuated. The men rested and got back their breath and then, after a drink of water and a quick snack which was waiting for them, they rejoined the line.

  Meanwhile there was a pause. Desultory and sporadic firing came from the houses, which had little or no effect, and the rebels did not fire at all under strict instructions from their officers—there was little enough ammunition left to waste any of it. It was obvious that the Government general was regrouping in the cover of the city for the assault on the ridge.

  In spite of the rapidly cooling air Causton sweated gently. He said, ‘I hope to God we can hold them. When the attack comes it’s going to be a big one. Where’s that damned hurricane of yours, Wyatt?’

  Wyatt’s eyes were on the horizon. ‘It’s coming,’ he said calmly. ‘The wind is rising all the time. There are the rain clouds coming up—the nimbostratus and the fractonimbus. The fighting will stop pretty soon. No one can fight a battle in a hurricane.’

  The wind was now fifty miles an hour, gusting to sixty, and the smoke clouds over St Pierre had been broken down into a diffused haze driving before the wind. This made it difficult to see the sea, but he managed to see the flecks of white out there which indicated even higher winds.

  ‘Here they come,’ said Causton, and flattened himself out as the shooting from the houses suddenly increased to a crescendo. A wave of soldiers in light blue uniforms emerged at the foot of the slope and began to advance, the individual men zigzagging and changing direction abruptly, sometimes dropping on one knee to fire. They came on quickly and when they had advanced a hundred yards another wave broke from the houses to buttress the assault.

  ‘Jesus!’ said Dawson in a choked voice. ‘There must be a couple of thousand of them down there. Why the hell don’t we shoot?’

  Not a shot came from the top of the ridge as the flood of blue-clad men surged up the slope. The wind was now strong enough to hamper them and Wyatt could see the fluttering of their clothing, and twice the black dot of a uniform cap as it was blown away. Some of the men lost their footing and, taken off balance, were pushed by the gusting wind, but still they came on, scuttling at the crouch and continually climbing higher.

  It was not until the first of them were half-way up that a Very light soared up from the top of the ridge, to burst in red stars over the slope. Immediately pandemonium broke loose as the rebels opened up a concentrated fire. The rifles cracked, the machine-guns hammered, and from behind came the deeper cough of the few guns and mortars.

  The oncoming wave of men shivered abruptly and then stopped dead. Causton saw a swathe of them cut down like wheat before the scythe as a defending machine-gun swivelled and chopped them with a moving blade of bullets, and all over that open ground men were falling, either dead, wounded or desperately seeking cover where there was none. He noted that half of Favel’s machine-guns were firing on fixed lines so that the attackers were caught in a net stitched in the air with bullets—they would die if they advanced and they would die if they ran because in either event they would run right into the line of fire of the angled machine-guns.

  Mortar bombs and shells dropped among the trapped men—Favel was firing his last ammunition with extravagant prodigality, staking everything on the coming hurricane. The earth shook and fountained with darkly blossoming trees and the clouds of smoke and dust were snatched by the wind and blown away. A pitifully thin fire came from below, perhaps there were few to shoot or perhaps those alive were too shattered to care.

  For five minutes that seemed an eternity the uproar went on and then, suddenly, as though on command, the line of attackers broke and ebbed away, leaving a wrack of bodies behind to mark the highest level of the assault, a bare hundred yards from the crest of the ridge. And as they ran back in panic, so they still died, hit by rifle bullets, cut in two by the murderous machine-guns and blown to pieces by the mortar bombs. When all was still again the ground was littered with the shattered wreckage of what had been men.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ breathed Dawson. His face was pale and sickly and he let out his breath with a shuddering sigh. ‘They must have lost a quarter of their men.’

  Causton stirred. ‘Serrurier must have taken over,’ he said quietly. ‘Rocambeau would never have made a damn’-fool frontal attack like that—not at this stage of the game.’ He turned and looked back at the mortar team just behind. ‘These boys have shot their bolt—they have no ammunition left. I don’t know if we can stand another attack.’

  ‘There’ll be no more attacks,’ said Wyatt with calm certitude. ‘As far as the fighting goes this war is over.’ He looked down the slope at the tumbled heaps of corpses. ‘I wish I could have said that half an hour ago, but it doesn’t really make any difference. They’ll all die now.’ He withdrew from the ridge and walked away towards the foxhole.

  Down in St Pierre thousands of men would be killed in the next few hours because he had told Favel of the approaching hurricane, and the guilt weighed heavily upon him. But he could not see what else he could have done.

  And there was something else. He could not even look after the safety of a single girl. He did not know where Julie was—whether she was dead or alive or captured by Rocambeau’s men. He had not properly seen her in his pre-occupation with the hurricane, but now he saw her whole, and he found the tears running down his cheeks—not tears of self-pity, or even tears for Julie, but tears of blind rage at his stupidity and impotent futility.

  Wyatt was very young for his years.

  Causton listened to the fire-fight still crackling away to the left. ‘I hope he’s right. When Favel was faced with a similar problem he outflanked the position.’ He jerked his head towards the distant sound of battle. ‘If Serrurier breaks through along there he’ll come along the ridge rolling up these rebels like a carpet.’

  ‘I think Wyatt’s right, though,’ said Dawson. ‘Look out to sea.’

  The city was lost in a writhing grey mist through which the fires burned redly, and the horizon was black. Streamers of low cloud fled overhead like wraiths in the bluster
ing wind which had sharply increased in violence and was already raising its voice in a devil’s yell. Lightning flickered briefly over the sea and a single drop of rain fell on Causton’s hand. He looked up. ‘It does look a bit dirty. God help sailors on a night like this.’

  ‘God help Serrurier and his army,’ said Dawson, staring down at St Pierre.

  Causton looked back to where Wyatt was sitting at the edge of the foxhole. ‘He’s taking it badly—he thinks he’s failed. He hasn’t yet realized that perfection doesn’t exist, the damned young fool. But he’ll learn that life is a matter of horse-trading—a bit of bad for a lot of good.’

  ‘I hope he never does learn,’ said Dawson in a low voice. ‘I learned that lesson and it never did me any good.’ He looked Causton in the eye and, after a moment, Causton looked away.

  II

  Rawsthorne was not a young man and two days of exertion and life in the open had told on him. He could not move fast over the hilly ground—his lungs had long since lost their elasticity and his legs their driving power. The breath in his throat rasped painfully as he tried to keep up a good pace and the muscles of his thighs ached abominably.

  But he was in better shape than Mrs Warmington, whom the years of cream cakes and lack of exercise had softened to a doughy flesh. She panted and floundered behind him, her too generous curves bouncing with the effort, and all the time she moaned her misery in a wailing undertone, an obbligato to the keening of the rising wind.

  In spite of her wounds, Julie was the fittest of the three. Although her legs were stiff and sore because of the bayonet jabs, her muscles were hard and tough and her breath came evenly as she followed Mrs Warmington. The brisk sets of hard-played tennis now paid off and she had no difficulty in this rough scramble over the hills.

  It was Rawsthorne who had made the plan. ‘It’s no use going further west to escape the army,’ he said. ‘The ground is low about St Michel—and we certainly can’t stay here because Rocambeau might be beaten back again. We’ll have to cut across the back of his army and go north over the hills—perhaps as far as the Negrito.’

  ‘How far is that?’ asked Mrs Warmington uneasily.

  ‘Not far,’ said Rawsthorne reassuringly. ‘We’ll have to walk about eight miles before we’re looking into the Negrito Valley.’ He did not say that those eight miles were over rough country, nor that the country would probably be alive with deserters.

  Because Rawsthorne had doubts about his ability to climb the quarry cliff—and private, unexpressed doubts about Mrs Warmington’s expertise as a climber—they went down the track towards the main road, moving stealthily and keeping an eye open for trouble. They did not want to meet the guard who had disappeared in that direction. They left the track at the point where they had originally climbed up to the banana plantation, and Julie got a lump in her throat when she saw the imprint of Eumenides’s shoe still visible in the dust.

  The plantation seemed deserted, but they went with caution all the same, slipping through the rows of plants as quietly as they could. Rawsthorne led them to the hollow where they had dug the foxholes in the hope of finding a remnant of food and, more important, water. But there was nothing at all, just four empty holes and a litter of cans and bottles.

  Julie looked at the hole that had been filled in and felt a great sorrow as she thought of the Greek. First we dig ‘em, then we die in ‘em. Eumenides had fulfilled the prophecy.

  Rawsthorne said, ‘If it wasn’t for the war I would recommend that we stay here.’ He cocked his head on one side. ‘Do you think the fighting is going away or not?’

  Julie listened to the guns and shook her head. ‘It’s difficult to say.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘If Rocambeau is defeated again he’ll be thrown back through here and we’ll be back where we started.’

  Mrs Warmington surveyed the hollow and shuddered. ‘Let’s get away from this horrible place,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘It frightens me.’

  And well it might, thought Julie; you killed a man here.

  ‘We’ll go north,’ said Rawsthorne. ‘Into this little valley and over the next ridge. We must be very careful, though; there may be desperate men about.’

  So they went through the plantation, across the service road and, carefully avoiding the convict barracks, pushed on up the ridge on the other side. At first Rawsthorne kept up a cracking pace, but he did not have the stamina for it and gradually his pace slowed so that even Mrs Warmington could keep up with him. The going was not difficult while they were on cultivated ground and in spite of their slower pace they made good time.

  At the top of the first ridge they left the banana plantations and entered pineapple fields, where all was well as long as they walked between the rows and avoided the sharp, spiky leaves. But then they came to sugar-cane and, finding the thicket too hard to push through, had to cast about to find a road leading in the right direction. It was a narrow dusty track between the high green canes, which rustled and crackled under the press of the breeze. In spite of the breeze and the high feathery clouds which veiled and haloed the sun it was still very hot, and Julie fell into a daze as she mechanically plodded behind Mrs Warmington.

  They saw no one and seemed to be travelling through an empty land. The track dipped and rose but climbed higher all the time, and Julie, when she looked back, saw huts in the distance, but no smoke arose from these small settlements nor was there any sign of life. Where the tracks came out of the cane-fields they came upon more huts, and as soon as he saw them Rawsthorne held up his hand. ‘We must be careful,’ he whispered. ‘Better safe than sorry. Wait here.’

  Mrs Warmington sat down on the spot and clutched her feet. ‘These shoes are crippling me,’ she said.

  ‘Hush!’ said Julie, looking at the huts through the cane. ‘There may be soldiers here—deserters.’

  Mrs Warmington said no more, and Julie thought in astonishment: she is capable of being taught, after all. Then Rawsthorne came back. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘There isn’t a soul here.’

  They emerged from the cane and moved among the huts, looking about. Mrs Warmington stared at the crude rammed earth walls and the straw roofs and sniffed. ‘Pigsties, that’s all these are,’ she announced. ‘They’re not even fit to keep pigs in.’

  Rawsthorne said, ‘I wonder if there’s any water here. I could do with some.’

  ‘Let’s look,’ said Julie, and went into one of the huts. It was sparsely furnished and very primitive, but also very clean. She went into a small cubicle-like room which had obviously been a pantry, to find it like Mother Hubbard’s cupboard—swept bare. Going into another hut, she found it the same and when she came out in the central clearing she found that Rawsthorne had had no luck either.

  ‘These people have run away,’ he said. ‘They’ve either taken all their valuables with them or buried them.’ He held up a bottle. ‘I found some rum, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a thirst-quencher. Still, it may come in useful.’

  ‘Do you think they’ve run away from the war?’ asked Julie. ‘Or the hurricane—like that old man near St Michel?’

  Rawsthorne rubbed his cheek and it made a scratchy sound. ‘That would be difficult to say. Off-hand, I’d say because of the war—it doesn’t really matter.’

  ‘These people must have got their water from somewhere,’ said Julie. ‘What about from down there?’ She indicated a path that ran away downhill along the edge of the cane-field. ‘Shall we see?’

  Rawsthorne hesitated. ‘I don’t think we should hang about here—it’s too dangerous. I think we should push on.’

  From the moment they entered the scrub the going was harder. The ground was poor and stony and the tormented trees clung to the hillside in a frozen frenzy of exposed roots over which they stumbled and fell continually. The hillside was steeper here and what little soil there had been had long since been washed to the bottom lands where the fertile plantations were. Underfoot was rock and dust and a sparse sprink
ling of tough grass clinging in stubborn clumps wherever the stunted trees did not cut off the sun.

  They came to the top of a ridge to find themselves confronted by yet another which was even higher and steeper. Julie looked down into the little depression. ‘I wonder if there’s a stream down there.’

  They found a watercourse in the valley but it was dry with not a drop of moisture in it, so they pushed on again. Mrs Warmington was now becoming very exhausted; she had long since lost her ebullience and her propensity for giving instructions had degenerated into an aptitude for grumbling. Julie prodded her relentlessly and without mercy, never allowing herself to forget the things this woman had done, and Rawsthorne ignored her complaints—he had enough to do in dragging his own ageing body up this terrible dusty hill.

  When they got to the top they found the ground levelling into a plateau and it became less difficult. There was a thin covering of dubious soil and the vegetation was a little lusher. They found another small gathering of huts in a clearing cut out of the scrub—this was deserted too, and again they found no water. Rawsthorne looked about at the small patch of maize and cane, and said, ‘I suppose they rely on rainfall. Well, they’re going to get a lot of it presently—look back there.’

  The southern sky was dark with cloud and the sun was veiled in a thicker grey. It was perceptibly cooler and the breeze had increased to a definite wind. In the distance, seemingly very far away, they could still hear the thudding of the guns, and to Julie it seemed very much less impressive, although whether this was the effect of distance or whether there was less firing she had no way of knowing.

  Rawsthorne was perturbed by the oncoming weather. ‘We can’t stop now. All we have to do is to get over that.’ He pointed to an even higher ridge straight ahead. ‘On the other side of that is the Negrito.’