Cry Wolf Part 8

The agreed fare for transporting the cars and the four pa.s.sengers had totalled two hundred and fifty of sterling.

The Captain's losses had just exceeded that figure, and Gareth smiled winningly at Papadopoulos and smoothed the golden moustaches.

"What do you say we give it a break now, Papa old sport, go up on deck and stretch the legs, what?" Having recovered the pa.s.sage money, Gareth had accomplished the task he had set himself, and he was now anxious to return to the open deck where Vicky Camberwell and Jake were becoming much too friendly for his peace of mind.

Every time Gareth had been forced by nature to make a brief journey to the p.o.o.p rail, he had seen the two of them together and they seemed to be laughing a great deal, which was always a bad sign. Vicky was in the forefront of any action, pa.s.sing tools to Jake and offering general encouragement, as he worked at fine-tuning the cars and making last minute preparations for the desert crossing or the two of them sat with Gregorius while amidst great hilarity he gave them basic lessons in the Amharic language. He wondered distractedly what else they were up to.

However, Gareth was a man sure of his priorities and his first concern was to recover his money from Papadopoulos.

Having done so, he could now return to sheep-d.o.g.g.i.ng Vicky Camberwell.

"It's been a lot of fun, Papa." He half rose from the table, folding the grimy wad of banknotes into his back pocket and gathering the pile of coins with his free hand.

Captain Papadopoulos reached into the depths of the Arabic gown he wore and produced a knife with an ornately carved handle and a viciously curved blade. He balanced it lightly in the palm of his hand and his single eye glittered coldly at Gareth.

"Deal!" he said, and Gareth smiled blandly and sank back into his seat. He picked up the cards and cut them with a ripping sound and the knife disappeared into Papadopoulos's gown once more as he watched the shuffle intently.

"Actually, I do feel like a few more hands," Gareth murmured.

"Just getting warmed up, hey?" The slaver altered course as she cleared the tip of the great horn of Africa and rounded Cape Guardafui. Before her lay the long gut of the Gulf of Aden and a run of five hundred miles westwards to French Somaliland.

The Hindu mate came down and whispered fearfully to his Captain.

"What troubles the fellow?" Gareth asked.

"He worries about the English blockade."

"A "So do I" Gareth answered. "Shouldn't we go up on deck? Deal,"said Papadopoulos.

Below them they heard the steady thumping beat of the big diesel engine begin, and the vibration of the propeller shaft spinning in its bed. The mate had her under sail and power now, and the motion of the ship changed immediately, the thrust of the propeller combining with the push of the full spread of her canvas, and she flew towards the vivid purple and pink flush of sky and piled c.u.mulus cloud behind which the sun was beginning to set.

The mate had set a course which would take him swiftly down the middle of the Gulf, out of sight of Africa on his port side and Arabia on the starboard. The HirondeUe was making twenty-five knots, for the sea breeze was on her best point of sailing and a day and two nights would see them in and out again. He sent one of his best men -to the masthead with a telescope and he wondered which the English viewed more sternly young black girls in chains or Vickers machine guns in wooden cases. Mournfully he concluded that either of them would be lethal and he shrilled at his masthead to keep a strict watch.

The sun was sinking with agonizing slowness, almost dead ahead and the wind rose steadily, driving the Hirondelle on deeper into the gut.

Jake Barton wriggled out of the engine hatch of Miss Wobbly and grinned at Vicky Camberwell who sat on the sponson above him swinging her long legs idly, with the wind in her hair and the tan she had picked up in the last few days gilding her arms and flushing at her cheeks. She had lost the dark rings of worry and the paleness of fatigue, and looked now like a schoolgirl, young and carefree and gay.

"That's the best I can do," said Jake, beginning to scour the black grease from his arms with Scrubbs Ammonia.

"She's running so sweetly, I could take her out at Le Mans." Her knees were at the level of Jake's eyes and her skirts had tucked up high. He felt his heart stop as he glanced down the smooth length of her thigh. Her skin had a l.u.s.tre and sheen, as though made of some precious and rare substance.

Vicky saw the direction of his gaze and brought her knees together sharply, although a smile touched her lips. She jumped down lightly on to the deck, steadying herself against the Hirondelle's rolling action with a touch on the muscled hardness of his arm. Vicky thoroughly enjoyed the admiration of an attractive male and Gareth had been closeted in the Captain's cabin these last five days. She smiled up at Jake. He was tall but the bush of dark hair that curled around his ears gave him the look of a small boy which was again quickly dispelled by the strong jaw line and the fine networks of creases that radiated from the outer corners of his eyes.

She realized suddenly that he was on the point of stooping to kiss her, and she felt a delicious indecision the slightest encouragement would set Jake on a violent collision course with Gareth and might seriously endanger the whole expedition and the story she wanted so badly. At that moment she noticed, as if for the first time, that Jake's mouth was wide and rutI and his lips were delicately shaped for the bigness and hairiness of him. His chin and cheeks were blued with a day's growth of beard and she knew it would feel rough and electric against her own peach-smooth cheeks. Suddenly she wanted to feel that, and she lifted her chin slightly and knew that he would read that want in the sparkle of her eyes.

The masthead shrieked like a startled gull and instantly the Hirondelle was plunged into frantic activity. The Mohammedan mate echoed his shrieks, but at a higher volume, and his grubby robes flapped around him in the wind. His eyes rolled in his dark brown skull and his toothless moutth opened so wide that Jake could see the little pink glottis dangling in the back of his throat.

"What is it? "Vicky demanded, her hand still on Jake's arm.

"Trouble," he answered grimly, and they turned as the door of the p.o.o.p cabin flew open and Papadopoulos rushed out with his queue twitching like the tail of a lioness and his single eye blinking rapidly. He still clutched a fan of cards in his right hand.

"One more card and I make gin!" he howled bitterly, and threw the cards into the wind and grabbed the mate by the front of his gown, shouting into his open but now silent mouth.

The mate pointed aloft and Papadopoulos dropped him and hailed the masthead in Arabic, and Jake listened to the swift exchange.

"A British destroyer sounds like "Dauntless"," he muttered.

"You speak Arabic?" Vicky asked, and Jake stilled the question irritably and listened again.

"The destroyer has seen us. She's altering course to intercept."

Jake looked quickly at the smouldering globe of the sun, the crinkles around his eyes puckering up thoughtfully as he listened to the heated argument in Arabic taking place on the p.o.o.p deck.

"Are you two having fun?" Gareth Swales asked, smiling but with a glitter in his eyes as he glanced significantly at Vicky's hand still on Jake's arm. He had come out of the cabin as silently as a panther.

Vicky dropped her hand guiltily and immediately wished she had not. She owed Gareth Swales no debts and she answered his stare defiantly, before turning back to Jake and finding him gone.

"What is it, Papa?" Gareth called up at the p.o.o.p-deck, and the Captain snarled, "Your Royal mucking Navy that's what it is." And he shook his fist at the northern horizon. "The Dauntless she based at 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 d.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.n 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 b.a.l.l.s 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.

n.o.body 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 a.r.s.e," 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 pa.s.sed 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 p.r.i.c.k 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 ma.s.s 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."

"b.l.o.o.d.y 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 sh.e.l.l climbed high into the sombre sky and then fell towards the schooner.

He heard it come, pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sage 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, p.r.i.c.ked 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 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 phosph.o.r.escence 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 pa.s.sion 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 insh.o.r.e, 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 sh.o.r.e 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 gra.s.s.

For an hour they ran parallel with the sh.o.r.e, 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 ash.o.r.e."

"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.