South by Java Head - Alistair MacLean

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sending the same call over and over again: S.O.S., enemy air attack, 0.45 N, 104.24 E, on fire: S.O.S., enemy air attack, 0.45 N, 104.24 E, on fire: S.O.S. …

      His back hurt, hurt abominably. Machine-gun bullets, he did not know how many, but they hurt, badly. But better that, he thought tiredly, than the transmitter. If his back hadn’t been there the transmitter would have been smashed, there would have been no distress signal, no hope at all. A fine Marconi man he would have been with the most important message of his life to send and no way of sending it … But he was sending that message, the most important message of his life, although already his hand was becoming terribly heavy and the transmitting key was starting to jump around from side to side, eluding the fumbling, sightless fingers.

      There was a strange, muted thunder in his ears. He wondered vaguely, if it was the sound of aero engines, or if the flames that enveloped the fore-deck were bearing down on him, or if it was just the roaring of his own blood in his head. Most likely it was his own blood, for the bombers should have gone by now, their work done, and there was no wind to fan the flames. It didn’t matter. Nothing really mattered except that his hand should keep bearing down on that transmitting key, keep sending out the message. And the message went out, time and time again, but it was now only a jumbled, meaningless blur of dots and dashes.

      Willie Loon did not know this. Nothing was very clear to him any longer. Everything was dark and confused and he seemed to be falling, but he could feel the edge of his chair catching him behind the knees and he knew he was still there, still sitting at his transmitter and he smiled at his own foolishness. He thought again of Mr. Johnson and he thought that perhaps Mr. Johnson would not be ashamed of him if he could see him then. He thought of his dark and gentle Anna May, and smiled again, without bitterness. And then there was the cake. Such a lovely cake, made as only she could make it, and he hadn’t even tasted it. He shook his head sadly, cried out once as the sharp scalpel of agony sliced through his shattered head and reached the unseeing eyes.

      For a moment, just for a moment, consciousness returned. His right hand had slipped off the transmitting key. He knew it was desperately urgent that he should move his hand back, but all the power seemed to have gone from his right arm. He moved his left hand across, caught his right wrist and tried to lift it, but it was far too heavy, it might have been nailed to the table. He thought again, dimly, briefly, of Mr. Johnson, and he hoped he had done his best. Then silently, without even a sigh, he slid forward wearily on to the table, his head cradling on his crossed hands, his left elbow crushing down on the cake until the candle leaned over horizontally, the dripping wax pooling on the polished table, the smoke, thick now and very black, spiralling lazily upwards until it flattened against the deckhead, and spread across the tiny cabin. A dark, oily smoke, but it could do nothing to soften the cruel shafts of sunshine or hide the three little neat, red-ringed holes in the back of Willie Loon’s shirt as he lay sprawled tiredly across the table. By and by the candle flickered feebly, flared up once and died.

      Captain Francis Findhorn, O.B.E., Commodore of the British-Arabian Tanker Company and master of the 12,000 ton motor-ship Viroma, gave the barometer a last two taps with his fingernail, looked at it without expression for a moment then walked back quietly to his seat in the port corner of the wheelhouse. Unthinkingly, he reached up to direct the overhead ventilation louver on to his face, winced as the blast of hot, humid air struck at him, then pushed it away again, quickly but without haste. Captain Findhorn never did anything with haste. Even the next simple gesture of taking off his gold-braided white cap and rubbing the dark, thinning hair with his handkerchief was made with an unhurried speed, with so complete a lack of unnecessary and wasted movement that one instinctively knew this calm deliberation, this unstudied economy of motion, to be an inseparable part of the man’s nature.

      There was a soft padding behind him, footsteps crossing the iron-hard teak deck. Captain Findhorn replaced his cap, slewed round in his chair and looked at his chief officer who was standing where he himself had been seconds before, gazing thoughtfully at the barometer. For a few moments Captain Findhorn studied him in silence, thought that his chief officer was a classic refutation of the widely-held belief that light-haired, light-skinned people cannot sunburn well: between the white shirt and the fair flaxen hair, sun-bleached almost to a platinum blond, the back of the neck was a strip of old, dark oak. Then the chief officer had turned round and caught his eye, and Findhorn smiled, briefly.

      “Well, Mr. Nicolson, what do you make of it?” The quartermaster was only feet away: with members of the crew within earshot, the captain was always punctiliousness itself towards his senior officers.

      Nicolson shrugged his shoulders and walked across to the screen door. He had a peculiarly soft-footed, almost catlike gait, as if he were stepping on old, dry sticks and feared he might break them. He looked at the brassy oven of the sky, at the oily copper sheen of the water, at the far horizon to the east where the two met in a shimmer of metallic blue, and finally at the glassy swell that was building up to the northeast, pushing up on their port quarter. He shrugged again, turned and looked at the captain, and for the hundredth time Findhorn found himself marvelling at the clear, ice-blue of his officer’s eyes, doubly striking in the sunburnt darkness of the face. He had never seen eyes like them, remotely like them, anywhere. They always reminded Captain Findhorn of Alpine lakes, and this irritated the captain, for he had a precise, logical mind, and he had never been in the Alps in his life.

      “Not much doubt about it, sir, is there?” The voice was soft, controlled, effortless—the perfect complement to the way he walked and carried himself: but it had a deep, resonant quality that enabled him to be heard through a roomful of talking people or in a high wind with an abnormal ease and clarity. He gestured through the open screen door. “All the signs. The glass is only 28.5, but it was.75 hardly an hour ago. It’s falling like a stone. The wrong time of the year, and I’ve never heard of a tropical storm in these latitudes, but we’re in for a bit of a blow, I’m afraid.”

      “You have a genius for understatement, Mr. Nicolson,” Findhorn said dryly. “And don’t refer disrespectfully to a typhoon as ‘a bit of a blow’. It might hear you.” He paused a moment, smiled and went on softly. “I hope it does, Mr. Nicolson. It’s a Godsend.”

      “It would be all of that,” Nicolson murmured. “And rain. There’ll be plenty of rain?”

      “Buckets of it,” Captain Findhorn said with satisfaction. “Rain, high seas and a ten or eleven wind and there’s nary a son in the Nipponese army or navy will see us this night. What’s our course, Mr. Nicolson?”

      “One-thirty, sir.”

      “We’ll keep it there. The Carimata Straits for us by noon tomorrow, and then there’s always a chance. We’ll turn aside only for their Grand Fleet and we’ll turn back for nothing.” Captain Findhorn’s eyes were calm, untroubled. “Think there’ll be anyone out looking for us, Mr. Nicolson?”

      “Apart from a couple of hundred aircraft pilots and every ship in the China Sea, no.” Nicolson smiled briefly, and the smile touched and whitened the wrinkles at his eyes and was gone. “I doubt if there’s any of our little yellow pals within 500 miles who doesn’t know that we broke out of Singapore last night. We must be the juiciest tit-bit since the Prince of Wales went down, and the size of the flap will be corresponding. They’ll have combed every exit—Macassar, Singapore, Durian and Rhio—and the High Command will be throwing blue fits and chucking themselves on to their swords by the dozen.”

      “But they never thought to check the Tjombol Straits and Temiang?”

      “I suppose they’re reasonably sane and do us the compliment of thinking we are also,” Nicolson said thoughtfully. “No sane man would take a big tanker through these waters at night, not with the draught we’ve got, and not a light in sight.”

      Captain Findhorn inclined his head, half-nod, half-bow. “You have rather a pretty line in compliments yourself, Mr. Nicolson.”

      Nicolson said nothing. He turned away and walked to the other side of the bridge, past the quartermaster and Vannier, the fourth officer. His feet on the deck made no more sound, almost, than the whisper of falling leaves. At the far end of the bridge he stopped, looked through

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