South By Java Head (24 page)

They had left thirty-six hours after the submarine, twenty-four hours after the last reconnaissance 'plane had passed over the tiny island and failed to find any sign of life. They had sailed at sunset, in a light following swell and the monsoon blowing steadily from the north. All night long and nearly all of the following day they had run free before the wind, and all this time the skies had remained empty and the only boat they had seen had been a prahu, lying far to the east. In the evening, with the eastern tip of Banka Island just lifting over the red and gold horizon to the west, they had seen a submarine surface not two miles away, then move away steadily to the north. Perhaps it had seen them, perhaps not -- the lifeboat might have been lost against the darkening sea and sky to the east and Nicolson had dropped the tell-tale orange sails -- the lug stamped with the even more damning "VA "-- as soon as the submarine had broken water: either way it showed no suspicion, and was lost to sight before the sun had gone down.
That night they had gone through the Macclesfield Channel. This, they had thought, would be the most dangerous and difficult part of all, and had the wind dropped or backed or veered a few points either way they would have been lost, and found in clear sight of land when morning came. But the trades had held steadily from the north, they had left Liat on the port hand shortly after midnight and cleared the island of Lepar long before sunrise. It was just on noon of that same day that their luck finally ran out.
The wind had dropped then, suddenly and completely, and all day long they lay becalmed, not more than twenty-five miles from Lepar Island. Late in the afternoon a slow, lumbering seaplane -- it might have been the same one as they had seen previously -- appeared out of the west, circled overhead for almost an hour, then moved off without making any attempt to molest them. The sun was just sinking and a faint breeze beginning to spring up, again from the north, when another aeroplane appeared, again out of the west, flying about three thousand feet and straight at them. No seaplane this, but a Zero, and in no mood for either preliminaries or time-wasting. Less than a mile away it had dropped its nose and come screaming down out of the sky, twin cannon at its wing roots stabbing daggers of red in the gathering dusk, cannon-shells stitching parallel patterns of splashes and spouting spray across the placid surface of the sea right up to the centre of the helplessly waiting lifeboat, through it and away beyond. Or perhaps not so helpless -- not while the Brigadier held the machine-carbine in his hands, for the Zero swung round in a tight turn and headed off back against towards the west in the direction of Sumatra, its sleek fuselage black-streaked with pouring engine oil: less than two miles away it met the seaplane returning, and the two planes disappeared together into the pale golden afterwash of sunset. The boat had been holed, severely, in two places but, remarkably, only one person hurt -- Van Effen's thigh had been badly gashed by a jagged splinter of shrapnel.
Not an hour afterwards the wind had started gusting up to force six or seven, and the sudden tropical storm was upon them almost before they had realised what was coming. It lasted for ten hours, ten interminable hours of wind and darkness and rain strangely cold, then interminable hours of yawing and pitching while the exhausted boat's company baled for their lives all night long as pooping seas swept over the sternsheets and swirled over the sides and water gushed continuously through the jury patches in the bottom of the lifeboat -- the supply of wooden plugs in the repair outfit hadn't gone very far. Nicolson sailed south before the storm with the jib down and the lug sail reefed until he had steerage way and just no more. Every mile south was a mile nearer the Sunda Strait, but he could have done nothing else than let the storm drive him along even if he had wished to: holed by the stern and deep down by the stern, a sea anchor streamed aft would have pulled them under, and it was quite impossible to heave to with a bow anchor out: enough speed, enough steerage way to get them round would have meant enough sail to dismast the boat or capsize her on the turn, and without that steerage way the sluggish, waterlogged boat would have broached to and been driven under in the troughs. The long agony of the night had ended as abruptly as it had begun, and it was then that the real agony had started.
And now, leaning on the useless tiller, McKinnon sitting armed and still watchful by his side. Nicolson tried to thrust aside the nagging, dominating pains of thirst and swollen tongue and cracked lips and sunblistered back and to assess the damage caused, the complete change brought about by those terrible days that had elapsed since the storm had ended, endless, torturing hours under the pitiless lash of the sun, a sun at once dreadfully impersonal and malignant beyond belief, a sun that steadily grew more and more intolerable until it drove helpless, uncaring men over the edge of breakdown and collapse, physical, moral and mental.
The old spirit of comradeship had gone, vanished completely as if it had never been. Where earlier every man had sought only to help his neighbour, now most sought only to help themselves, and their indifference to their neighbour's welfare was absolute. As each man received his pitiful portion of water or condensed milk or barley sugar -- the biscuits had come to an end two days ago -- a dozen greedy, hostile eyes followed every movement of thin clawed hands and thirst-cracked lips, intent on making sure that he received his exact ration and not a drop or nibble more. The greed, the starvation lust in bloodshot eyes, the ivory-knuckled clenching of sun-dark wasting hands, became especially terrible to see whenever young Peter was given an extra drink and some of the water dribbled down his chin and dripped on to the hot bench, evaporating almost as it touched. They were at the stage now when even death appeared an almost attractive alternative to the excruciating torture of their thirst. McKinnon had need of the gun in his hand.
The physical change for the worse was, if anything, even more serious than the moral collapse. Captain Findhorn was deep sunk in coma, but a restless pain-filled coma, and Nicolson had taken the precaution of tying him loosely to the gunwale and one of the thwarts. Jenkins, too, was tied down, although still conscious. Conscious, but in a private hell of indescribable agony: there were no bandages, no protection left for the terrible burns he had received just before they had abandoned the Viroma, and the blazing sun had lacerated every inch of exposed flesh until he had gone crazy with the pain. His finger-nails were blood-stained from his insane clawing of raw burning flesh. His wrists were now lashed together, the rope tied to a thwart, not to prevent further pain-maddened scratching but to prevent him from throwing himself overboard, as he had twice tried to do. For long minutes he would sit without moving, then he would fling all his strength against the rope that held his bleeding wrists, his breathing hoarse and quick with agony. Already Nicolson was wondering whether he should just cut him loose, wondering what moral justification he had for condemning the seaman to die a slow lingering death on the rack instead of letting him finish it all, finish it quickly and cleanly, in the waiting waters over the side. For he was going to die anyway: he had the look of death about him.
Evans's gashed arm and Walters's savagely mutilated wrist were becoming steadily worse. All medical supplies were gone, their recuperative powers were gone and salt-water drying in tattered bandages had inflamed the open wounds. Van Effen was in little better case, but his wound had been more recent and he had innate toughness and reserves of stamina far beyond the ordinary: he lay still for hours at a time, reclining on the bottomboards, shoulders braced against a thwart and staring for'ard. He seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep.
And the mental breakdown had gone furthest of all. Vannier and the old second engineer had not yet slid over the edge of sanity, but both showed the same symptoms of increasing lack of contact with reality, the same long periods of withdrawn melancholy silence, the same occasional aimless mutterings to themselves, the brief, apologetic half-smiles if they realised they were being overheard, then the relapse once more into melancholy and silence. Lena, the young Malayan nurse, showed only the melancholy, the utter disinterest, but never talked, to herself or anyone, at any time. The Muslim priest, on the contrary, showed no melancholy, no emotion whatsoever, but was silent all the time: but then he was always silent, so it was impossible to be sure of him one way or the other. It was impossible, too, to be sure about Gordon, one moment widely smiling with staring, unfocused eyes, the next, head sunk in unmoving despair. Nicolson, who had the profoundest distrust for Gordon's calculated cunning and who had tried more than once, without success, to persuade Findhorn to get rid of him, watched him with expressionless face: the symptoms might be real enough, but they might equally well be the symptoms of a man who had read some quasi-medical article on manic-depressives and hadn't quite got the hang of it. But there was, tragically, no doubt about the young soldier, Sinclair: all contact with reality lost, he was quite insane and had all the classic symptoms of acute schizophrenia.
But the collapse, the physical and mental breakdown, was not complete. Not quite. Apart from Nicolson, there were two men who remained quite untouched by weakness and doubt and despair -- the bo'sun and the brigadier. McKinnon was the McKinnon of old, unchangeable, apparently indestructible, still with the slow smile and the soft voice and the gun always in his hand. And the brigadier -- Nicolson looked at him for the hundredth time and shook his head in unconscious wonder. Farnholme was magnificent. The more their circumstances deteriorated into hopelessness, the better the brigadier became. When there was pain to be eased, sick men to be made more comfortable or shielded from the sun, or water to be baled -- it was seldom enough, now, that the floorboards weren't covered, and a random bullet on the island had smashed the manual pump -- the brigadier was there, helping, encouraging, smiling and working without complaint or hope of thanks or reward. For a man of his age -- Farnholme would never see sixty again -- it was a quite incredible performance. Nicolson watched him in a kind of bewildered fascination. The fiery and fatuous Colonel Blimp of the up-and-at-'em-sir school he had met aboard the sinking Kerry Dancer might never have existed. Strangely enough, too, the affected Sandhurst drawl had vanished so completely that Nicolson found himself wondering whether he had imagined it in the first place: but there was no questioning the fact that the military expressions and Victorian oaths that had so heavily larded his conversation only a week ago were now so rare as to occasion comment whenever he used them. Perhaps the most convincing proof of his conversion -- if that was the word -- was the fact that he had not only buried the hatchet with Miss Plenderleith but spent most of his time sitting beside her and talking softly in her ear. She was now very weak, though her tongue had lost none of its power for pungent and acid comment, and she graciously accepted the innumerable small services Farnholme performed for her. They were together now, and Nicolson looked at them, his face expressionless, but smiling to himself. Had they been thirty years younger, he'd have laid odds on the brigadier having designs on Miss Plenderleith. Honourable designs, of course. Something stirred against his knee, and Nicolson glanced down. Gudrun Drachrnann had been sitting there for almost three days now, on the lower cross seat, holding on to the little boy when he jumped about the thwart in front of her -- thanks to the unstinted supplies of food and water he received from Miss Plenderleith and McKinnon, Peter Tallon was the only person on the boat with excess energy to dispose of -- and cradling him in her arms for hours at a time as he slept. She must have suffered severely from cramp, but never complained. Her face was thinned down now, the cheekbones very prominent, and the great scar on her left cheek more livid and uglier every hour as her skin darkened under the burning sun. She was smiling at him now, a small painful smile through sun-cracked lips, then looked away and nodded at Peter. But it was McKinnon who caught the look, interpreted it correctly, smiled in return and lowered the dipper into the little warm, brackish water that was left in the tank. Almost as if by a pre-arranged signal, a dozen heads lifted and followed every movement of the dipper, McKinnon's careful transfer of the water from the dipper to a cup, the eagerness with which the little boy clasped the cup in his pudgy hands and gulped the water down. Then they looked away from the child and the empty cup and looked at McKinnon instead, bloodshot eyes dulled with suffering and hate, but McKinnon just smiled his slow, patient smile and the gun in his hand never moved.
Night, when it came at last, brought relief, but relief only of a very limited nature. The burning heat of the sun was gone, but the air was still very hot and stifling and oppressive, and the pitiful ration of water each had received just as the sun had gone down had only whetted their appetite for more, made their raging thirsts all the more painful and intolerable. For two or three hours after sunset people shifted restlessly in their seats in the lifeboat, and some even tried to talk with others, but the talk didn't last very long: their throats were too parched, their blistered mouths too sore, and always, at the back of everybody's mind must have been the hopeless thought that, unless some miracle occurred, for some of them tonight's would have been the last sunset they would ever see. But nature was merciful, their minds and bodies were exhausted by hunger and thirst and by the day-long energy-sapping power of the sun, and by and by nearly all of them dropped off into a restless muttering sleep.
Nicolson and McKinnon went to sleep too. They hadn't intended to, it had been their purpose to share the night watches, but exhaustion had dug its fingers as deeply into them as any, and they dozed off from time to time, heads nodding on their chests, then waking with a start. Once, waking out of a short sleep, Nicolson thought he heard someone moving around the boat, and called out softly. There was no reply, and when he called out again and was again answered with silence, he reached under his seat and brought out his torch. The battery was almost gone now, but the feeble yellow beam was enough to show him that all was quiet, that nobody was out of his or her place, every black and shapeless shadow lying sprawled lifelessly across thwarts and bottqmboards almost exactly where it had been when the sun had gone down. Not long afterwards, just as he was dozing off again, he could have sworn he heard a splash reaching down through his deep-drugged mists of sleep, and again he reached for his torch. But again there was no one there, no one moving around, no one even moving at all. He counted all the huddled shadows, and the number was right: nineteen, excluding himself.