by James Philip
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ he had confessed sheepishly. “Further downstream the river runs through several larger towns, and Salamanca before it flows into the Douro somewhere quite close or opposite the border. I don’t know which. I don’t know how far we will be able to get by boat. Farther downstream the river is dammed and we can’t risk crossing those waters in these punts. We’ll have to start walking again or ideally, find somewhere to hole up for a while until we’ve all got our strength back…’
Melody thought that was woolly thinking.
Every day they remained in Spain they were in deadly peril.
‘The Douro marks the border between Spain and Portugal at one point,’ she had offered, trying to be helpful.
‘Oh, right. I didn’t know that.’
Wisely, the man had taken back the gun he had given Melody before she inadvertently wounded or killed somebody, and kept his submachine gun hidden beneath a blanket in the bottom of his punt. Strangers carrying expensive-looking modern foreign-made guns was a sure-fire way of attracting unhealthy attention on these upper navigable reaches of the Tormes.
‘We’ll have to find serious boats if we’re still on the river in a couple of days,’ Stanton had cautioned Melody, very confidentially, seemingly contradicting his previous thoughts on the subject. ‘Or maybe, before, depending on how fast the stream is flowing.’
Normally, Melody would have asked what she could do to help, or even tried to take charge of the situation. Tonight, she was too tired and actually, notwithstanding Albert Stanton was primarily a very good journalist, and probably not a natural warrior-type, she was pretty sure he was a lot better at using a gun than she was and right now, that was what actually mattered the most if she and Henrietta, not to mention little Pedro, were going to get through this alive.
The lights of the village slowly receded into the gloom.
High above their heads the stars were coming out, twinkling like diamonds in the infinite firmament. Hungry, a little faint and aching all over Melody guessed that this was one of those moments when it would have been good to have been religious, except that was a horse which had bolted years ago. God had not been with her when she still believed, or when she had needed Him most. She had trusted Him then and he had not been there for her, or actually, there at all, if she was going to be rigorously forensic about it.
As it was, she elected to wonder at the marvels of the natural universe because if she reflected on the day just passed, its deaths and its terrors, she suspected she was going to break down and her friends needed her to be strong. They all needed to be strong for each other: they were alone, truly strangers in a strange land who might have been drifting on a boundless sea as upon a river in the heart of Spain...
Chapter 40
Wednesday 5th April
Little Inagua Island
Abe had abandoned all hope of reaching the safety of either Cockburn Town or Grand Turk Island after the first very German-looking, low-wing monoplane seaplane wearing garish Spanish roundels and dazzle camouflage had rocketed past his elderly stead blazing away with its wing root-mounted machine guns.
That had not been a good moment.
Neither he – or Ted Forrest – who had gone silent and was presently slumped unconscious, or dead, his head lolling forward in the rear cockpit had seen the bastards coming.
If either of the enemy aircraft had been flown by men who knew what they were doing, or perhaps, those men had been slightly less over-excited by the prospect of shooting up the Sea Fox – a sitting duck by any standard – Abe was under no illusion he would be dead by now.
The slipstream was ripping through the gashes in the cockpit around Abe. The contents of the first aid kit beneath his chair seemed to have been scattered around his feet, the fire axe had disappeared, it too was probably skittering around the bottom of the fuselage, or had fallen out.
As it was, even if the aircraft had not been trying to fall out of the sky and his flying controls felt as if they had been shot to pieces, he would have been looking for somewhere, anywhere other than Cuban or Dominican territory to put down on.
Inevitably, without Ted Forest’s guidance he had got lost, ended up flying far too far to the east. Or at least, that was his best guess assuming that the featureless, low-lying island in the haze directly ahead of him was in fact Little Inagua. Somewhere to the south, relatively nearby, there ought to be a much bigger, inhabited land mass but that was immaterial because the Sea Fox was not going to stay in the air long enough to crash anywhere other than the island in front of him. And it was a moot point if the aircraft would hold together long enough to reach that!
Had Abe had the time or the spare mental capacity he might have decided that this was the worst day of his life. True, he had had a few tough, ‘hairy’ scrapes: that first time he landed a Bristol VII on White Bear Lake had been terrifying at the time; being separated from Kate and his son, handcuffed and beaten up crossing the border to re-enter New York had not been much fun; nor, in retrospect had that stunt nearly diving down the Achilles’s funnel been his finest hour. However, all in all, nothing really compared to the fix he was in now.
He was afraid Ted was dead; refused to think about it overlong.
The priority was to survive the coming crash and to do what he could for his friend…
Then, without warning, the engine seized.
Okay, that’s just one more damned thing!
Nothing I can do about it…
The sight of the Achilles nearly stopped in the water haemorrhaging bunker oil as fires consumed her after superstructure, boat deck and catapult amidst a constant rain of huge shell splashes was indelibly imprinted on his psyche. The forward main battery guns of the dying cruiser belched defiance still, her starboard twin 3-inch auto-cannons blasted away at her tormentors regardless of the reality that its projectiles would bounce off the armoured hides of the two big – both were twice Achilles’s size – German cruisers prowling between three and four miles from their doomed prey.
Somehow, Achilles’s battle flag still streamed, torn and ripped by splinters, singed by the fires raging on the deck below, from her main mast stays.
Do your worst; this ship will never surrender…
Abe had watched as yet another salvo bracketed Achilles, and another, this time accompanied by a sickening crimson flash among the massive waterspouts as an 8-inch round scythed into the cruiser’s vitals beneath the funnel.
Shortly afterwards, they had flown over two big destroyers, just like the killers screening the Karlsruhe fifty miles to the south east. They were obviously closing in to administer the coup de grace with torpedoes and there was nothing, absolutely nothing Abe could do about it. His frustration had been physically agonising in those seconds before the first of those German seaplanes flashed past with their guns blazing.
It was only the ridiculously fast closing speed of those Stettin Wasserflugzeug Funktioniert (Stettin Seaplane Works) – SWF – Model 157s, licenced copies of the successful BMK 57F scout with their retractable undercarriages removed and replaced with fixed floats, which had saved the lumbering Sea Fox. The enemy aircraft had come in at such a rate of knots they had barrelled past their quarry within two, or at most, three seconds of coming into the effective range of their 0.31-inch Krupp Kleinwaffenfabrik (Krupp Small Arms Factory) machine guns.
Abe had lost control of the aircraft and it had dived into the persistent haze long enough for the two BMK 157s to resume their combat air patrol above the big ships ruthlessly pounding the Achilles to death at what, for their big naval rifles, was practically point-blank range.
The Sea Fox’s intercom was lifeless and fluid from – only Abe’s smashed-up instruments, he fervently hoped – had spotted his goggles and flying jacket. Fortuitously, since instrumentation was fairly basic on a Sea Fox, most pilots were thoroughly accustomed to flying the type by the seat of their pants anyway.
Abe knew the engine had seized – not died of fuel starvation -
because the two-bladed propeller was static, un-feathered and adding further drag to the powerless machine, accelerating its descent.
The Sea Fox wobbled over one white-capped reef, then another and was suddenly skimming the surface of the lagoon with the grey-brown, green-tinged land still horribly distant. Resisting every instinct to pull the stick back Abe pushed it gently forward, hoping against hope that the sea plane did not just dive straight into the water.
He sensed a fleeting moment of response through the stick.
The ground fast approaching seemed rough, rocky, patchily covered with scrub and arid bushes, Flamingos burst from somewhere to his left and…was that a donkey, no, a small herd of donkeys over to the right?
It would have ended very badly – or rather, even more badly than it actually did – if unknown to Abe the two BMK 157s had shot away most of the Sea Fox’s relatively flimsy fixed undercarriage. One of the reasons the aircraft was wallowing about was that one strut and wheel was completely gone and the other was flapping about in the slipstream, and it was this which tore off the instant the aircraft hit the ground about twenty yards beyond the jagged coral of the beach.
Abe had had to piece the sequence of events together later.
At the time all he had been aware of was the rending, cracking sound of the starboard wing and several feet of the rear fuselage detaching from the rest of the airframe, as the wreck skidded sideways and the air filled with dust, and lumps of airframe and pulverised stones.
Briefly, he had been knocked out.
He had come too with the stench of petrol in his face hanging half out of his cockpit. The aircraft had come to rest on its right-hand side and in a second, he had fallen out onto the bone-hard ground, picked himself up and like an automaton started dragging Ted Forrest out of his seat.
His friend had obviously been thrown forward into the mount for the 0.303 machine gun but there was too much blood to be explained away by a mere broken nose.
Laying the unconscious man in the shadow of the wreck Abe tried not to panic. Ted Forrest had a nasty-looking, gory scalp wound; he could see the yellow-white of the exposed skull through the shredded fabric of his leather flying helmet. That might have been what knocked him out thirty or forty minutes ago. Abe had lost track of time, that was what happened when you were surviving minute by minute.
No, no, no…
He made no attempt to remove his friend’s helmet.
For all he knew it might be all that was holding an undisplaced skull fracture in place.
There was blood in Ted’s flying suit, soaking the left side of his furs. Almost as an afterthought, Abe realised his friend’s left calf was broken.
That would have to wait.
His friend was still breathing.
Pulse okay…
He looked awfully pale though…
He scrabbled in the chaos of the rear cockpit to retrieve the second small emergency medical kit. He would check what was left of the pilot’s med kit later but did not entertain high hopes of salvaging anything useful.
Checking that the second kit was correctly stowed was the navigator-observer-gunner’s job…
He found it, dislodged from its broken bracket it was wedged beneath the attaché case carrying the Old Man’s despatches, and the boffins’ reports from the spying cruise north of Santo Domingo last week.
Abe injected the contents of the first of the three intact ampoules of morphine into his friend’s thigh – he prayed at least one or two of the ampoules in the broken front cockpit kit had survived - and started to peel off his jacket, ignoring for the moment the still angrily weeping head wound. In the scale of things that injury was possibly, superficial.
He unbuckled the injured man’s pistol belt, pausing to divest himself of his own gun before he explored beneath his friend’s shirt, his hands coming away bloody.
A through and through: entry below the rib cage and exit above Ted’s right hip.
His friend groaned, blinked at him uncomprehendingly.
“What…”
“We crashed,” Abe said tersely.
“Oh, right…”
“You’re a little bit bust up but it’s nothing I can’t fix.”
Ted Forrest’s stare was a little glazed.
“What happened to your shoulder, Abe?”
Bizarrely, it was not until then that Abe recollected feeling something ‘pluck’ or more accurately, ‘kick’ at his left shoulder when those 157s roared past…
Or had that happened in the attack on the Karlsruhe?
It did not matter, he would figure it out later…
Some of the blood he had assumed was Ted’s was actually his, dripping persistently down his left arm.
Even though he knew it was a really bad idea he gingerly flexed his injured shoulder. Everything seemed to work, albeit stiffly. No bones broken, maybe he had got lucky.
“They just winged me, old man,” he assured his friend. “I’ll give the wound a good wash in the sea when I’ve looked after you.”
Abe used all the sulphonamide powder in the emergency kit packing the neat entry wound and not quite so discrete exit wound above his friend’s hip, tore up his vest and tied a makeshift binding around the inadequate sterile bandages. Next, he carefully eased off Ted Forrest’s helmet, breathing a heartfelt sigh of relief when he discovered that the gash was nowhere near as lengthy, nor deep apart from a one-inch section of the wound, as he had feared.
Ted hardly winced as he clumsily sewed up the scalp wound.
Abe was exhausted, somewhat knocked about himself and as he had been repeatedly reminded during his studies at the Queen Eleanor Medical Centre in Albany, by much wiser practitioners than he suspected he was going to be any time soon, it was always much harder psychologically, tending to a badly injured patient whom one knew, or was close to. He had only known Ted for a few weeks but they had lived intensely in those weeks and ‘clicked’ from day one, become like brothers and after today, would forever be linked by their mutual travails.
Eventually he examined his friend’s broken left leg.
He returned to the wreck and salvaged three lengths of detached wing-struts, hacking at them with the small hand-fire axe which he had discovered embedded in the side of the fuselage roughly rib-high, or snapping them over his knee to get them to approximately the right length, and recovered several lengths of wire – previously, stressing the wings – and knelt beside the semi-conscious man on the ground.
He put the axe aside.
That would come in handy later if they lived long enough to worry about butchering meat, or gutting fish to eat.
“I’m sorry, Ted,” he apologised, choking on the words. “We’ve only got two more shots of morphine and you’re going to need both of those to get through the next twenty-four hours. Your left calf is broken, there’s no skin break or so far as I can see major soft-tissue trauma, certainly nothing we need to worry about now,” he paused, “but I have to pull you about something rotten if I’m going to set the bone before the leg has a chance to go bad on us.”
He had placed a wadge of doped canvas torn from the shredded right wing between his friend’s teeth: Ted Forrest’s scream would haunt him forever.
Afterwards, Abe must have passed out because when he regained consciousness, he was lying close to his friend, whom he had obviously made as comfortable as possible at some stage.
‘Comfort’ being a relative thing in their circumstances.
The other thing he had done but had no memory of doing was to recover the signalling flare gun and three cartridges from the rear cockpit, both water bottles from the wreck – discovering that one had a large hole in it – and the attaché case stuffed full of documents, which in lieu of another suitable pillow he had placed under Ted’s head.
Abe shivered despite the warmth of the late afternoon.
That would be shock settling in…
The sun was setting, and a breeze picking up from the west.
Abe had sp
read his own flying jacket over his friend to try to keep him warm.
He crawled over to him.
The other man blinked at him.
“This is a bit of a pickle,” Ted Forrest decided feebly. “What’s the plan, skipper?”
Abe drew immense strength from the fleeting suggestion of a grin on the badly injured man’s drawn features.
He checked his friend’s pulse.
Steady…
Tested his brow for feverishness.
Cool to the touch.
Keeping Ted warm tonight was going to be a problem because he had probably lost a lot of blood before the crash…
First things first!
“I need to clean myself up, old man. Re-charge our water canteen, that sort of thing.”
He doubted if there were any natural springs on the island.
Praying for rain holes was the best he could hope for.
Abe’s left shoulder pulsed with pain and every time he moved, needles of fire lanced down his arm. He nearly fainted more than once as he went down to the water and tried to clean the wound. Eventually, he simply immersed himself in the shallow water and allowed the brine to soak the through and through holes, miraculously just above the level of his clavicle. Half-an-inch lower and the bullet would have shattered his collar bone, which would not have been good news…
He lay in the water until the cold started to get into his bones, staggered ashore, stood awhile dripping.
Suddenly, he was desperately tired.
He just wanted to lay down and sleep…
No…
Where did I put that gun?
There were two forms in the gathering darkness close to the wreck of the Sea Fox, and nearer still to where Ted lay.
‘What the…”
Then the moment of panic passed.
One of the dark shapes shook its head and…brayed.
I did see donkeys just before the crash!
EPILOGUE
Chapter 41
17:45 (London Time)