by Wilbur Smith
Aden, blockade for slavers."
"Where is she?" Gareth's expression changed swiftly and he strode to
the rail.
"She's coming fast masthead watching her. She'll be over the horizon
pretty damn quick." Papadopoulos turned from Gareth and roared a
series of orders at his crew.
Immediately they swarmed down on to the main deck and gathered about
the first car it was Priscilla the Pig swaying gently on her suspension
as the schooner plunged ahead.
"I say," Gareth exclaimed. "What are you up to?"
"They catch me with arms aboard, big trouble," Papadopoulos explained.
"No arms, no trouble," and he watched his men fall on the lines that
secured the big white-painted vehicle. "We do same trick with slaves,
they go down pretty damn fast with the chains."
"Now, just hold on a shake. I paid you a fortune to transport this
cargo."
"Where that fortune now,
Major?" Papadopoulos shouted down at him derisively. "I got nothing
in my pants how about you?" and the Captain turned away to urge his
men on.
The turret of Priscilla the Pig opened suddenly and from it emerged the
head and shoulders of Jake Barton with his hair blowing in the wind and
a Vickers machine gun in his arms. He braced himself in the turret
with the thick water jacketed barrel of the Vickers across the crook of
his left arm, and the pistol grip firmly enclosed in his other hand.
Across his shoulder was draped a heavy necklace of belted ammunition.
He fired a roaring clattering burst, the tracer streaking in fiery
white balls of flame a mere twelve inches over the Captain's head.
The
Greek threw himself flat on his deck, howling with terror, and his crew
scattered like a flock of startled hens, while Jake looked down on them
benignly from his post in the turret.
"I think we should understand each other, Captain.
Nobody is going to touch these machines. The only way you are going to
save your ship is by out sailing the Englishman, Jake called mildly.
"She can make thirty knots," protested the Captain, still face down on
the deck.
"The longer you talk the less time you have," Jake told him.
"It'll be dark in twenty minutes. Turn away, and make a stern chase of
it until it is dark Papadopoulos rose uncertainly to his feet, and
stood blinking his one eye rapidly and miserably wringing his hands.
"Kindly move your arse," said Jake affably, and fired another burst of
machine-gun bullets over his head.
The Captain dropped once again to the deck, howling the orders to bring
the HirondelLe around on a course directly away from the closing
British warship.
As the schooner came around on to her new course, Jake called
Gareth across to him, and handed him the machine gun. "I want this
bunch of bastards covered while I work with the Greek. You, Vicky
and
Greg can batten down the hatches on the cars in the meantime."
"Where did you get that gun?" Gareth asked. "I thought they were all
cased."
"I like to keep a little insurance at all times, "Jake grinned, and
Gareth selected two cheroots from his case, lit them both, and passed
one up to Jake.
"Compliments of the management" he said. "I'm beginning to know why I
picked you as a partner." Jake stuck the cheroot in the side of his
mouth, exhaled a long blue feather of smoke and grinned jauntily.
"If you've got any pull with your Royal Navy, lad, then get ready to
use it." Jake stood in the deep canvas crows-nest at the cross trees
of the main mast, and swayed with a gut-swooping rhythm through the arc
of the swinging mast as he tried to keep the grey silhouette that
closed them rapidly in the field of the telescope.
Although the warship was only ten miles off, already her shape was
fading into the deepening dusk, for the sea breeze had chopped the
surface to a wave-flecked immensity and the sun behind Jake was
touching the watery horizon and throwing the east into mysterious blue
shade.
Suddenly a bright prick of light began winking rapidly from the hazy
shape of the warship , and Jake read the urgent p query.
"What ship?" and Jake grinned and tried to judge how conspicuous the
schooner, with her mass of canvas, was to the destroyer, and to decide
the moment when he would trade speed for invisibility.
The destroyer was signalling again.
"Heave to or I will fire upon you."
"Bloody pirates," Jake growled indignantly, and cupped his hand to
bellow down at the bridge.
"Get the canvas off her." On the deck far below, he saw the
Greek's face, pale in the dusk looking up at him, then heard his orders
repeated and watched the motley crew climb swiftly aloft.
Jake glanced back towards the tiny dark shape of the destroyer on the
limitless dark sea and saw the angry red flash of her forward gun bloom
in the dark. He remembered that flash so well and his skin crawled
with the insects of fear as he waited out the long seconds while the
shell climbed high into the sombre sky and then fell towards the
schooner.
He heard it come, passing overhead in a rising shriek, before it
pitched into the sea half a mile ahead of Hirondelle.
A swift, blooming pillar of spray gleamed in the last rays of the sun
like pink Carrara marble and then was blown swiftly away on the wind.
The crewmen froze in the rigging, petrified by the howling passage of
the shot, and then suddenly they were galvanized into frantic babbling
activity and the gleaming white canvas disappeared as swiftly as a wild
goose furls its wings when it settles on the lake surface.
Jake looked back at the destroyer and searched for seconds before he
found her. He wondered what they would make of the disappearance of
the sails. They might believe the Hirondelle had obeyed the order to
heave to, not guessing that she was under propeller power as well.
Certainly she would have disappeared from their view, her low dark hull
no longer beaconed by the towering white pyramid of canvas. He waited
impatiently for the last few minutes until the warship itself was no
longer visible from the masthead before bellowing down to the Greek the
orders that sent Hirondelle swinging away into the wind and pounding
back into the head sea along her original track, side-stepping the
headlong charge of the destroyer.
Jake held that course while the tropical night fell over the Gulf like
a warm thick blanket, pricked only by the cold white stars. He
strained his eyes into the impenetrable blackness, chilled by "the fear
that the destroyer Captain might have double-guessed him and
anticipated his turn. At any moment, he expected to see the towering
steel hull emerge at close range from the night and flood the schooner
with the brilliant white beams of her battle lights and hear the
squawking peremptory challenge of her bull horn.
Then suddenly, with a violent lift of relief, he saw the cold white
fingers of the lights far behind at least six miles away at the spot
&
nbsp; where the destroyer had seen him taking in sail. The Captain had
bought the dummy, believing that Hirondelle had heaved to and waited
for him to come up.
Jake threw back his head and laughed with relief before he caught
himself and began shouting new orders down to the deck, swinging the
schooner once again across the wind on the reciprocal of the warship's
course, and beginning the long delicate contest of skill in which the
Hirondelle ducked and weaved on to her old course, while the warship
plunged blindly back and forth across the darkened Gulf, searching
desperately with the mile-long beams of the battle lights for the dark
and stinking hull of the slaver or switching them off and running under
full power with all her ports darkened in the hope of taking
HirondeUe unawares.
Once the destroyer Captain almost succeeded, but Jake caught the
flashing phosphorescence of her bow-wave a mile off. Desperately he
yelled at the Greek to heave to and they lay silent and unseen while
the low greyhound-wasted warship slid swiftly across their bows, her
engines beating like a gigantic pulse, and was swallowed once again by
the night. The nervous sweat that bathed Jake's shirt dried icy cold
in the night wind as he put HirondeUe cautiously on course again.
Two hours later he saw the lights of the destroyer again, a glow of
white light far astern, that pulsed like summer sheet lightning as the
arc lamps traversed back and forth.
Then there was only the stars and many hours later the first steely
light of dawn growing steadily and expanding the circle of the dark sea
around the schooner.
Chilled to the bone by the night wind and the long hours of inactivity,
Jake swept the horizon back and forth as the light strengthened, and
only when he knew that it was empty of any trace of the warship did he
close the telescope, climb stiffly from the crows-nest and begin the
long slow journey down the rigging to the deck below.
Papadopoulos greeted him like a brother, reaching up to hug him and
breathe garlic in his face, and Vicky had the chop-box open and the
primus stove hissing. She brought him an enamel mug of steaming black
coffee and looked at him with a new respect tinged with admiration.
Gareth opened the hatch of the turret from which during the whole night
he had commanded the crew with a loaded Vickers machine gun and came to
fetch the other mug of coffee from Vicky and gave Jake a cheroot as
they moved to the rail together.
"I keep underestimating you," he grinned, as he cupped his hands around
the flaring match he offered Jake. "Just because you are big I keep
thinking you are stupid."
"You'll get over it, "Jake promised him. Instinctively they both
glanced across the deck at where Vicky was breaking eggs into the pan
and they understood each other very clearly.
She shook them both awake a little before noon. They were sprawled on
their blankets in the shade under one of the cars trying to catch up on
the sleep they had missed that night. However, they followed Vicky
without protest to the bows and the three of them peered ahead at the
low lioncoloured coast line, upon which the surf creamed softly and
over which the hard aching blue shield of the sky blazed with an
intensity that hurt the eyes.
There was no clear dividing line between earth and sky.
It was blurred by the low mist of dust and heat that wavered and
rippled like the yellow mane of the lion. Vicky wondered whether she
had ever seen such an uninviting scene, and decided she had not. She
began to compose the words with which she would describe it to her tens
of thousands of readers.
Gregorius came up to join the group. He had discarded the western
dress and donned instead the traditional sham ma and tight breeches.
He had become the man of Africa once again, and the smooth
chocolate-brown face, with its halo of dark thick curls, was lit by the
passion of the returning exile.
"You cannot see the mountains the haze is too thick," he explained.
"But sometimes in the dawn when the air is cooler-" and he stared into
the west, with his longing expressed clearly in the liquid flashing
eyes and upon the full sculptured lips.
The schooner crept inshore, gliding over the shallows where the water
was like that of a mountain stream, so clear that they could make out
every detail of the reef thirty feet down and watch the shoals of coral
fish below like bejewelled clouds through the crystal waters.
Papadopoulos turned the HirondeUe to approach the shore at an oblique
angle so that the details of the coast resolved themselves gradually
and they saw the golden red beaches broken by headlands and points of
jagged rock, and beyond it the land rose gradually, barren and awful,
speckled only with the low scrubby spino Cristi and car riel grass.
For an hour they ran parallel with the shore, a thousand yards off, and
the group by the rail stood and stared at it with fascination.
Only Jake had left the group and was making the preparations to begin
unloading, but he also came back to the rail when abruptly a deep bay
opened ahead of them.
"The Bay of Chains," said Gregorius, and it was clear how it had got
its name, for, huddled under the cliffs of one headland and protected
from the prevailing winds and the run of the surf by the horn of land,
were the ruins of the ancient slave city of Month.
Gregorius pointed it out to them, for it did not look like a city.
It was merely an area of broken rock and stone blocks running down to
the water's edge. They were close enough now to make out the roughly
geometrical layout of smothered streets and roofless buildings.
Hirondeue dropped anchor and snubbed up gently. Jake finished his
final preparations for unloading and crossed to where Gareth stood by
the rail.
"One of us will have to swim a line ashore."
"Spin you for it,"
suggested Gareth, and before Jake could protest he had the coin in his
hand.
"Heads!" jake looked resigned.
"Bad luck, old son. Give the sharks my love." Gareth smiled and
stroked his mustache.
Jake balanced on the clumsy pontoon raft as it was lifted by the donkey
engine and lowered over the side, dangling on the heavy lines. and
floated alongside as It settled on to the surface un-gracefully as a
pregnant hippo.
Jake grinned up at Vicky who was leaning over the rail, watching with
interest.
"Unless you want to be blinded with splendour, you'd better close your
eyes." For a moment she did not understand, but then as he started to
strip off his shirt and unbutton his pants, she turned modestly away.
With the end of a coil of light line tied about his waist Jake plunged
naked into the sea and struck out for the shore. Vicky's curiosity got
the better of her at this stage, and she glanced slyly overboard. There
was something so childlike and defenceless about a man with his
trousers off, she thought, as she considered Jake's bobbing white
thought, and then realized that Gareth Swales was watching her with one
mockingly raised eyebrow, as he paid out the coil of line that snaked
after Jake. She blushed pinkly under her tan and hurried away to make
sure her typewriter and personal duffel bag were packed away into Miss
Wobbly.
Jake touched bottom and waded ashore to secure the line to one of the
stone blocks, and already the first car was on on its wooden blocks,
and, with the winch clattering, was being lifted over the side.
With each man performing his own task skilfully, one at a time the cars
were lowered on to the bobbing raft. There its wheels were hastily
lashed and it was hauled carefully towards the beach by the land
line.
As soon as the raft ran aground on the sloping yellow sand, Jake
started the engine while Gregorius clamped the footboards into place.
Then with the engine revving noisily and the raft swaying dangerously,
it rolled over the footboards and up the slope to park well above the
high-water mark. Then the raft was hauled back alongside the schooner
for its next load.
Although they worked as swiftly as safety would allow, the hours sped
away just as swiftly, and it was late afternoon when the last load of
fuel drums and wooden cases, with Vicky Camberwell sitting on top of
the precarious load, made the short crossing to the beach.
Almost the instant it left the ship's side, the diesel thumped into
life, the anchor chain rattled in over the bows and Papadopoulos gave
the order to cast off the line of the raft.
By the time Vicky jumped down on the crunchy sand, the Hirondelle was
moving steadily out between the horns of the bay, and spreading her
wings of white canvas to the evening breeze. The four of them stood
upon the beach in the lowering dusk and watched her go. None of them
waved, and yet they all felt a loss at her going. Stinking slaver,
with a crew of pirates, yet she had been their link with the outer
world. HirondeUe cleared the cliffs and caught the full drive of the
wind, heeled eagerly and went away, with her wake leaving a long oily
slick across the surface long after she had disappeared into the
Gulf.
Jake broke the spell of silence and loneliness that held them.
"All right, my children. Let's make camp." They had landed on the