South By Java Head (32 page)

"Yes, I am in charge." Even to himself, his voice sounded weak and husky. He looked at the bayonet, tried to gauge his chances of knocking it aside, recognised that it was hopeless. Even if he did, there were another dozen waiting men ready to shoot him down. "Take that damned thing away from my neck."
"Ah, of course! How forgetful of me." The officer removed his bayonet, stepped back a pace and then kicked Nicolson viciously in the side, just above the kidney. "Captain Yamata, at your service," he murmured silkily. "An officer in His Imperial Majesty's Nipponese Army. Be careful how you speak to a Japanese officer in future. On your feet, you swine." He raised his voice to a shout. "All of you, on your feet!"
Slowly, shakily, grey-faced beneath his dark tan and almost retching with the agony in his side, Nicolson rose to his feet. All around the hut others, too, were shaking off the dark fog of sleep and pushing up dazedly off the floor, and those who were too slow, too sick or too badly hurt were jerked cruelly upright regardless of their moans and cries and hustled out towards the door. Gudrun Drachmann, Nicolson saw, was one of those who were roughly handled; she had bent over to roll a still sleeping Peter in a blanket and gather him in her arms, and the guard had jerked them both up with a violence that must nearly have dislocated the girl's arm: the sharp cry of pain was hardly uttered before she had bitten it off in tight-lipped silence. Even in his pain and despair Nicolson found himself looking at her, looking and wondering, wondering at her patience and courage and the selfless unceasing devotion with which she had looked after the child for so many long days and endless nights, and as he looked and wondered he was conscious of a sudden and almost overwhelming sense of pity, conscious that he would have done anything to save this girl from further harm and hurt degradation, a feeling, he had to confess to himself with slow surprise, that he could never remember having had for any other than Caroline. He had known this girl for only ten days, and he knew her better than he would have known most in a dozen lifetimes: the quality and the intensity of their experiences and suffering in the past ten days had had the peculiar power and effect of selecting, highlighting and magnifying with a 'brutal and revealing clarity faults and merits, vices and virtues that might otherwise have remained concealed or dormant for years. But adversity and privation had been a catalyst that had brought the best and the worst into unmistakable view and, like Lachie McKinnon, Gudrun Drachmann had emerged shining and untarnished out of the furnace of pain and suffering and the extremest hardships. For a moment and incredibly, Nicolson forgot where he was, forgot the bitter past and empty future and looked again at the girl and he knew for the first time that he was deceiving himself, and doing it deliberately. It wasn't pity, it wasn't just compassion he felt for this slow-smiling scarred girl with a skin like a rose at dusk and the blue eyes of northern seas: or if it had been, it would never be again. Never again. Nicolson shook his head slowly and smiled tc himself, then grunted with pain as Yamata drove the heel of his rifle between his shoulder blades and sent him staggering towards the door.
It was almost pitch dark outside, but light enough for Nicolson to see where the soldiers were taking them -- towards the brightly-lit elders' meeting-place, the big square council house where they had eaten earlier, on the other side of the kampong. It was also light enough for Nicolson to see something else -- the faint outline of Telak, motionless in the gloom. Ignoring the officer behind him, ignoring the certainty of another teeth-rattling blow, Nicolson stopped, less than a foot away from him. Telak might have been a man carved from stone. He made no movement, no gesture at all, just stood still in the darkness, like a man far lost in thought.
"How much did they pay you, Telak?" Nicolson's voice was hardly more than a whisper.
Seconds passed and Telak did not speak. Nicolson tensed himself for another blow on the back, but no blow came. Then Telak spoke, his words so faraway a murmur that Nicolson had to bend forward, involuntarily, to hear him.
"They paid me well, Mr. Nicolson." He took a pace forward and half-turned, so that his side and profile were suddenly caught in the light streaming from the door of the hut. His left cheek, neck, arm and upper chest were a ghastly mass of sword or bayonet cuts, it was impossible to tell where one began and the other ended; the blood seemed to mask the whole side of his body and, even as Nicolson watched, he could see it drip soundlessly on to the hard-beaten earth of the kampong. "They paid me well," Telak repeated tonelessly. "My father is dead, Trikah is dead. Many of our men are dead. We were betrayed and they took us by surprise."
Nicolson stared at him without speaking, all thought temporarily blocked by the sight of Telak -- a Telak, he could see now, with another Japanese bayonet only inches from his back. Not one bayonet, but two: Telak would have fought well before they struck him down. And then thought did come, pity and shock that this should have happened, and so soon, to men who had so selflessly befriended them, then, swift on the heels of that thought, bitter regret for the words that he himself had just uttered, for the horribly unjust accusation that must have been the last few grains of salt in the wounds of Telak's sorrow and suffering. Nicolson opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out, only a gasp of pain as a rifle butt again thudded into his back, a gasp synchronised with Yamata's low, evil laugh in the darkness.
Rifle now reversed, the Japanese officer drove Nicolson across the kampong at the jabbing point of his bayonet. Ahead of him, Nicolson could see the others being herded through the sharply-limned rectangle of light that was the entrance to the council house. Some were already inside. Miss Plenderleith was just passing through, with Lena at her back, then Gudrun with Peter, followed closely by the bo'sun and Van Effen. Then Gudrun, approaching the door, stumbled over something on the ground, overbalanced with the weight of the little boy in her arms, and almost fell. Her guard caught her savagely by the shoulder and pushed. Perhaps he meant to push her through the door, but if he did his direction was bad, for girl and child together crashed heavily into the lintel of the doorway. Almost twenty feet away Nicolson could hear the thud of a head or heads against unyielding wood, the girl's exclamation of pain and young Peter's shrill, high-pitched cry of fear and hurt. McKinnon, only a few feet behind the girl shouted something unintelligible -- his native Gaelic, Nicolson guessed -- took two quick steps forward and leapt for the back of the guard who had pushed the girl: but the swinging rifle butt of the soldier behind was even faster and the bo'sun never saw it coming....
The council house, brightly lit now with half a dozen oil-lamps, was a large, lofty room, twenty feet in width by thirty in length, with the entrance door in the middle of one of the longer sides. To the right hand side of the door, taking up nearly all the width of the room, was the elder's platform, with another door behind it leading out to the kampong. All the rest of the big wooden house, facing the door and to the left of it, was completely bare, hard-packed earth and nothing else. On this bare earth the prisoners sat in a small, tight semicircle. All except McKinnon -- Nicolson could just see him from where he sat, the shoulders, the lifeless, outflung arms and the back of the dark, curly head cruelly illumined by the harsh bar of light streaming out from the doorway of the council house, the rest of his body shadowed in the darkness.
But Nicolson had only an occasional glance to spare for the bo'sun, none at all for the watchful guards who lounged behind them or with their backs to the doorway. He had eyes at the moment only for the platform, for the men on the platform, thoughts only for his own stupidity and folly and squeamish-ness, for the carelessness that had led them all, Gudrun and Peter and Findhorn and all the rest of them, to this dark end.
Captain Yamata was sitting on the platform, on a low bench, and next to him was Siran. A grinning, triumphant Siran who no longer bothered to conceal his emotions with an expressionless face, a Siran obviously on the best of terms with the broadly smiling Yamata, a Siran who from time to time removed a long black cheroot from his gleaming teeth and blew a contemptuous cloud of smoke in the direction of Nicolson. Nicolson stared back with bleak unwavering eyes, his face drained of all expression. There was murder in his heart.
It was all too painfully obvious what had happened. Siran had pretended to go north from the beach where they had land -- a subterfuge, Nicolson thought savagely, that any child should have expected. He must have gone some little way to the north, hidden, waited until the litter-bearers had moved off, followed them, bypassed the village, moved on to Bantuk and warned the garrison there. It had all been so inevitable, so clearly what Siran had been almost bound to do that any fool should have foreseen it and taken precautions against it. The precautions consisting of killing Siran. But he, Nicolson, had criminally failed to take these precautions. He knew now that if he ever again had the chance he would shoot Siran with as little emotion as he would a snake or an old tin can. He knew also that he would never have the chance again.
Slowly, with as much difficulty as if he were fighting against the power of magnetism, Nicolson dragged his gaze away from Siran's face and looked round the others sitting on the floor beside him. Gudrun, Peter, Miss Plenderleith, Findhorn, Willoughby, Vannier -- they were all there, all tired and sick and suffering, nearly all quiet and resigned and unafraid. His bitterness was almost intolerable. They had all trusted him, trusted him completely, implicitly depended upon him to do all in his power to bring them all safely home again. They had trusted him, and now no one of them would ever see home again... He looked away towards the platform. Captain Yamata was on his feet, one hand hooked in his belt, the other resting on the hilt of his sword.
"I shall not delay you long." His voice was calm and precise. "We leave for Bantuk in ten minutes. We leave to see my commanding officer, Colonel Kiseki, who is very anxious to see you all: Colonel Kiseki had a son who commanded the captured American torpedo boat sent to meet you." He was aware of the sudden quick looks between the prisoners, the sharp indrawing of breath and he smiled faintly. "Denial will serve you nothing. Captain Siran here will make an excellent witness. Colonel Kiseki is mad with grief. It would have been better for you -- for all of you, each last one of you -- had you never been born.
"Ten minutes," he went on smoothly. "Not more. There is something we must have first, it will not take long, and then we will go." He smiled again, looked slowly round the prisoners squatting on the floor beneath him. "And while we wait, I am sure you would all care to meet someone whom you think you know but do not know at all. Someone who is a very good friend of our glorious Empire, someone who, I feel sure, our glorious Emperor will wish to thank in person. Concealment is no longer necessary, sir."
There was a sudden movement among the prisoners, then one of them was on his feet, advancing towards the platform, speaking fluently in Japanese and shaking the bowing Captain Yamata by the hand. Nicolson struggled half-way to his feet, consternation and disbelief in every line of his face, then fell heavily to the ground as a rifle butt caught him across the shoulder. For a moment his neck and arm seemed as if they were on fire, but he barely noticed it.
"Van Effen! What the devil do you think-----"
"Not Van Effen, my dear Mr. Nicolson," Van Effen protested. "Not 'Van 'but 'von'. I'm sick and tired of masquerading as a damned Hollander." He smiled faintly and bowed. "I am at your service, Mr. Nicolson. Lieutenant-Colonel Alexis von Effen, German counter-espionage."
Nicolson stared at him, stared without speaking, nor was he alone in his shocked astonishment. Every eye in the council house was on Van Effen, eyes held there involuntarily while stunned minds fought to orientate themselves, to grasp the situation as it was, and memories and incidents of the past ten days slowly coalesced into comprehension and the tentative beginnings of understanding. The seconds dragged interminably by and formed themselves into a minute, and then almost another minute, and there were no more tentative wonderings and deepening suspicions. There was only certainty, stone cold certainty that Colonel Alexis von Effen was really who he claimed to be. There could be no doubt at all.
It was Van Effen who finally broke the silence. He turned his head slightly and looked out the door, then glanced again at his late comrades in distress. There was a smile on his face, but there was no triumph in it, no rejoicing, no signs of pleasure at all. If anything, the smile was sad.
"And here, gentlemen, comes the reason for all our trials and suffering of the past days, of why the Japanese -- my people's allies, I would remind you -- have pursued and harried us without ceasing. Many of you wondered why we were so important to the Japanese, our tiny group of survivors. Now you will know."
A Japanese soldier walked past the men and women on the floor and dumped a heavy bag between Van Effen and Yamata. They all stared at it, then stared at Miss Plenderleith. It was her bag, and her lips and knuckles were pale as ivory, her eyes half-shut as if in pain. But she made no move and said nothing at all.
At a sign from Van Effen the Japanese soldier took one handle of the bag, while Van Effen took the other. Between them they raised it to shoulder height, then inverted it. Nothing fell to the ground, but the heavily weighted lining dropped through the inverted mouth of the canvas and leather bag and hung down below it as it were filled with lead. Van Effen looked at the Japanese officer. "Captain Yamata?"
"My pleasure, Colonel." Yamata stepped forward, the sword hissing from its sheath. It gleamed once in the bright yellow light from the oil-lamps, then its razored edge sliced cleanly through the tough canvas lining as if it had been so much paper. And then the gleam of the sword was lost, buried, extinguished in the dazzling, scintillating stream of fire that poured from the bag and pooled on the earth beneath in a deep, lambent cone of coruscating brilliance.
"Miss Plenderleith has quite a taste in gee-gaws and trinkets." Van Effen smiled pleasantly and touched the sparkling radiance at his feet with a casual toe. "Diamonds, Mr. Nicolson. The largest collection, I believe, ever seen outside the Union of South Africa. These are valued at just under two million pounds."