It blew sideways through Blitcher's watertight bulkheads, crumpling and tearing them like silver paper.
It caught Rosa Oldsmith as she lay across Sebastian's chest,
hugging him. She did not even hear it come.
It caught Herman Fleischer just as he reached the deck, and shredded him to nothingness.
It swept through the engine room and burst the great boilers,
releasing millions of cubic feet of scalding steam to race through the ship.
It blew upwards through the deck, lifting the forward gun-turret off its seating, tossing the hundreds of tons of steel high in a cloud of steam and smoke and debris.
It killed every single human being aboard. It did more than merely kill them, it reduced them to gas and minute particles of flesh or bone. Then still unsatisfied, its fiery unabated, it blew outwards from Blitcher's shattered hulk, a mighty wind that tore the branches from the mangrove forest and stripped it of leaves.
It lifted a column of smoke and flame writhing and twisting into the bright morning sky above the Rufiji delta, and the waves swept out across the river as though from the eye of a hurricane.
They overwhelmed the two launches that were approaching Blitcher,
pouring over them and capsizing them, swirling them over and over and spilling their human cargo into the frightened frothing water.
And the shock waves rolled on across the delta to burst thunderously against the far hills, or to dissipate out on the vastness of the Indian Ocean.
They passed over the British cruiser Renounce as she entered the channel between the mangroves. They rolled overhead like giant cannon-balls across the roof of the sky.
Captain Arthur Joyce leapt to the rail of his bridge, and he saw the column of agonized smoke rise from the swamps ahead of him. A
grotesque living thing, unbelievable in its size, black and silver and shot through with flame.
"They've done it!" shouted Arthur Joyce. "By Jove, they've done it!" He was shaking; his whole body juddering, his face white as ice,
and his eyes which he could not drag from that spinning column of destruction that rose into the sky, filled slowly with tears. He let them overflow his eyelids and run unashamedly down his cheeks.
Two old men walked into a grove of fever trees that stood on the south bank of the Abati river. They stopped beside a pile of gargantuan bones from which the scavengers had picked the flesh,
leaving them scattered and white.
"The tusks are gone, "said Walaka.
"Yes," agreed Mohammed, "the Askari came back and stole them."
Together they walked on through the fever trees and then they stopped again. There was a low mound of earth at the edge of the grove.
Already it had settled and new grass was growing upon it.
"He was a man, "said Walaka.
"Leave me, my cousin. I will stay here a while."
"Stay in peace,
then," said Walaka, and settled the string of his blanket roll more comfortably over his shoulder before he walked on.
Mohammed squatted down beside the grave. He sat there unmoving all that day. Then in the evening Mohammed stood up and walked away towards the south.
The End
Wilbur Smith - Shout At The Devil Page 39