There was no immediate reply, and Nicolson answered for the others. “I don’t think so, sir. I was the only one exposed at the time.”
“Good enough — and no retaliation just now,” Findhorn warned. “No reason for anybody to get his head blown off.” He lowered his voice with evident relief. “Mr. Nicolson, this baffles me completely. The Zeros didn’t touch us when we left the Virotna: the sub didn’t try to sink us: and the seaplane left us alone even after we’d thumped their pals. And now they’re trying their best to massacre us. It doesn’t make any kind of sense at all to me,”
“Still less to me,” Nicolson admitted. He winced involuntarily as a bullet thudded into the earth a couple of feet above his head. •” And we can’t stay here and do an ostrich act, sir. This is a cover for an attack on the boats. Pointless otherwise.”
Findhorn nodded heavily in the darkness. “What do you want to do? I’m afraid I’m a dead loss, Johnny.”
“As long as you’re not just dead,” Nicolson said grimly. “Permission to take some men down to the shore, sir. We must stop them.”
“I know, I know . . . Good luck, boy.”
Seconds later, in a brief lull in the firing, Nicolson and six men slithered over the edge of the bank and started downhill. They hadn’t gone five paces when Nicolson whispered in Vannier’s ear, caught the Brigadier by the arm and retraced his steps with him to the eastern edge of the hollow. They lay down on the edge, peering into the darkness. Nicolson put his mouth to the Brigadier’s ear. “Remember, we play for keeps.”
He could just sense Farnholme nodding in the darkness.
They didn’t have to wait long. Within fifteen seconds they heard the first faint, cautious slither, followed at once by Findhorn’s voice, sharp and hoarse, jerking out a question. There was no reply, just another ominous movement, a swift rush of feet, the sudden click as Nicolson’s torch switched on, the brief glimpse of two running stooping figures with upraised arms, the stuttering crash of Farnholme’s automatic carbine, the heavy thud of falling bodies and then the silence and the darkness together.
“Bloody fool that I am! I’d forgotten all about these.” Nicolson was crawling about the hollow, torch hooded in his hand, tearing away weapons still clenched in dead hands. He let the light play on them for a moment. “The two hatchets from number two lifeboat, sir. They’d have made a pretty mess at close quarters.” He shone his torch at the other end of the hollow. Siran was still sitting there, his face smooth and expressionless. Nicolson knew that he was guilty, guilty as hell, that he had sent his three men to do the hatchet-work — literally — while he remained safely behind. He also knew that the bland, inscrutable face would remain that way as Siran denied all knowledge of the attack: dead men couldn’t talk, and the three men were quite dead. There was no time to waste.
“Come here, Siran.” Nicolson’s voice was as expressionless as Siran’s face. “The rest won’t give any trouble, sir.” Siran rose to his feet, walked the few paces forward and toppled to the ground like a falling tree trunk as Nicolson struck him viciously behind the ear with the butt of his Navy Colt. The blow had carried sufficient weight to crush the skull, and it had sounded like it, but Nicolson was on his way even before Siran had fallen, Farnholme at his heels. The whole episode hadn’t taken thirty seconds from start to finish.
They ran at full speed, uncaringly, down the slope, stumbling, slipping, recovering and racing on again. Thirty yards’ from the beach they heard a sudden flurry of shots, screams of pain, oaths, high-pitched voices shouting some insane gibberish, another volley of shots then the sounds of more blows, of struggling and violent splashing as men fought hand to hand in the water. Ten yards from the water’s edge, well ahead of Farnholme by this time, and still pounding along at the full stretch of his legs, Nicolson switched on his torch. He had a confused impression of men struggling furiously in the shallow water round the boats, caught a brief glimpse of an officer poised above a fallen McKinnon with a sword or bayonet swung back for a decapitation stroke and then leapt, one arm round the officer’s throat and the gun exploding in his back, before he landed cat-like on his feet. Again his torch swung up, steadied for a moment on Walters and a Japanese sailor thrashing and splashing as they rolled over and over in the mud-stained water: nothing to be done there — as easy to kill the one as the other. The beam lifted, and stopped again.
One of the lifeboats, well aground, was lying almost parallel to the shore. Two Japanese sailors, knee-deep in the water and sharply profiled in the harsh glare of the torch, were standing close by the stern, one of them stooping with bent head, the other upright, arm upraised, his right hand far behind his head. For a long second of time, all volition inhibited by the light that blinded their shrinking eyes, the two men held their respective positions, a frozen sequence from some nightmare ballet: and then, in perfect unison, petrified stillness yielded to convulsive action, the stooped man straightening with his right hand clutching something snatched from the net bag tied to his belt, the other dropping his left shoulder and lunging forward as his throwing arm came flashing over, and Nicolson, even as he brought his Colt up, his finger tightening on the trigger, knew that he was already too late.
Too late for Nicolson, too late for the Japanese sailors. For a second time they stiffened into immobility, brought up short by the savage jerk of some invisible hand, then they began to move again, slowly, this time, very slowly, pivoting forward with an almost ponderous deliberation on rooted, lifeless legs: Nicolson’s torch had switched off and the crash of Farnholme’s carbine was only an echoing memory as they fell on their faces, one full length into the water, the other jack-knifing heavily over the gunwale of the lifeboat and crashing on to the sternsheets, the sound of his falling lost in a flat explosive crack and sheet of blinding white as the grenade exploded in his hand.
After the bright light of the bursting grenade the darkness was doubly dark. Darkness everywhere, on land, over the sea and in the sky, complete and, for the moment, impenetrable. Away to the south-west a last few stars winked faintly in an indigo sky, but they too were going, extinguished one by one as the unseen blanket of cloud closed with the horizon. Dark, and very silent; there was no sound, no movement at all.
Nicolson risked one quick sweep with his lighted torch, then clicked off the switch. His men were all there, all on their feet, and the enemy were the enemy no longer, just little dead men lying still in the shadows. They had had next to no chance at all: they had expected no attack, deeming the Viroma’s crew safely pinned in the hollow by the submarine’s covering fire: they had been silhouetted against the sea, always lighter by night than the land: and they had been caught at a crippling disadvantage in the moment of stepping from their rubber boats into the sea.
“Anybody hurt?” Nicolson kept his voice low.
“Walters is, sir.” Vannier matched his tone with Nicolson’s. “Pretty badly, I think.”
“Let me see.” Nicolson moved across to the source of the voice, hooded the torch with his fingers and clicked the switch. Vannier was cradling Walters’s left Wrist in his hand: it was a gaping, gory wound just below the ball of the thumb, and half the wrist was severed. Vannier already had a handkerchief twisted as a tourniquet, and the bright red blood was pulsing only very slowly from the wound. Nicolson switched off the light.
“Knife?”
“Bayonet.” Walters’s voice was a good deal steadier than Vannier’s had been. He prodded something lying still and shapeless at his feet in the water. “I took it from him.”
“So I gathered,” Nicolson said dryly. “Your wrist’s a mess. Get Miss Drachmann to fix it for you. It’ll be some time before you can use that hand, I’m afraid.” Which was one way of saying ‘never,’ Nicolson thought bitterly to himself. The clenching tendons had been severed clean through, and it was a certainty that the radial nerve had .gone also. Paralysis, in any event.
“Better than the heart,” Walters said cheerfully. “I really need that.”
“Get up there as fast as you can. The rest of you go with him — and don’t forget to announce yourselves. For all the captain knows we lost — and he’s got a gun lying handy. Bo’sun, you stay with me.” He broke off suddenly as he heard splashing in the vicinity of the nearest lifeboat. “Who’s there?”