“These were your suggestions, not mine,” she said tranquilly. “Impossible to hide it on or around the island, and I agree. My suggestion is that you should hide it under the water.”
“What!” Nicolson half sat up, stared at her in the darkness.
“Make some sort of diversion at one end of the island,” she said quickly. “Sail the boat round the other end to that little bay in the north, fill it with stones, pull out the plug or whatever you call it, sink it in pretty deep water and then after the Japs have gone—–”
“Of course!” Nicolson’s voice was a slow, considering whisper. “Of course it would work! My God, Gudrun, you’ve got it, you’ve got it!” His voice almost a shout now, he sat up with a jerk, caught the protesting, laughing girl in a bear hug of sheer joy and splendidly renewed hope, scrambled to his feet and ran across to the other side of the hollow. “Captain! Fourth! Bo’sun! Wake up, wake up all of you!”
Luck was with them at last, and it went off without a hitch. There had been some argument about the nature of the diversion — some held that the captain of the submarine, or the man who had taken over since the captain’s death, would be suspicious of a straightforward diversion, but Nicolson insisted that any man stupid enough to send a landing party straight ashore to where the boats had been instead of making a flank attack, was unlikely to be acute enough not to fall for the deception, and his insistence carried the day. Moreover, the wind, which had backed to the north, lent strength to his arguments, and the events proved him right.
Vannier acted as decoy and carried out his part intelligently and with perfect timing. For about ten minutes he moved-^ around the shore of the south-west tip of the island, flashing his hooded torch furtively and at infrequent intervals. He had Nicolson’s night glasses with him, and as soon as he saw the dark shadow of the submarine begin to creep silently forward on her batteries he laid aside the torch altogether and took shelter behind a boulder. Two minutes later, with the submarine directly abreast of him and not more than a hundred yards off-shore, he stood up, twisted off the release fork of one of number two lifeboat’s smoke floats and hurled it as far out to sea as he could: within thirty seconds the light northerly breeze had carried the dense orange smoke out to the submarine, smoke that swirled chokingly round the men in the conning-tower and made them blind.
Four to five minutes is the normal burning time for a smoke-float, but it was more tban enough. Four men and muffled oars had number two lifeboat well round to the northern side of the island a full minute before the canister hissed softly to extinction. The submarine remained where it was, motionless. Nicolson eased the lifeboat quietly alongside a steep shelf in the deep bight to the north, and found Farnholme, Ahmed the priest, Willoughby and Gordon waiting for them, a huge pile of smooth round stones lying ready at their feet.
Willoughby had insisted on removing the aircases — the idea of driving holes into them had wounded his engineer’s soul. It would take time with the limited tools at their disposal, require light for working by, would inevitably cause too much noise — and the submarine commander might at any moment take it into his head to make a quick cruise round the island, lighting his way with flares. But the risk had to be taken.
Quickly the plugs were pulled out of the garboard strake, the men working at breakneck speed, and in almost complete silence, loading the bottom-boards with the stones passed down from tile shelf, carefully avoiding blocking the gushing plug holes. After two minutes Nicolson spoke softly to Farnholme, and the Brigadier went running off up the hill: only seconds later he was firing spaced shots in the direction of the submarine, the flat, explosive crack of the carbine roughly synchronising with and covering the metallic rings from the north side of the island as Nicolson and the others removed the shuttering of the buoyancy tanks and withdrew the yellow metal aircases, but leaving enough of the tanks in place to give the boat a strong positive buoyancy.
More stones into the boat, more water through the plug holes, and the level inside and out was just the same, lipping the lowest part of the gunwale, and then a few last stones and she was gone, slipping gently below the surface of the sea, steadied by fore and aft painters, settling in fifteen feet of water, on an even keel and a fine, shingly bottom. As they returned to the hollow on the bill, they saw a rocket parachute flare soaring up from the eastern tip of the island, curving away to the north-east. Vannier had timed it well, and if the submarine investigated there it would find it as quiet and empty of life as was now the other end. It would also have the effect of confusing them utterly, filling their minds with half a dozen conflicting suspicions, and, when morning came, would lend colour to the obvious conclusion that the survivors on the island had outwitted them and made off during the night.
And that was the conclusion to which they unmistakably came in the morning — a grey, overcast dawn with a strengthening wind and no sign of the sun. As soon as it was light, the carefully hidden watchers on the island, securely screened behind thick bushes, could see the figures manning the con-ning-tower raising binoculars to their eyes — the submarine had moved much farther out during the night — and gesticulating at each other. Shortly afterwards the sound of the diesel motors could be heard, and the submarine moved off, circling quickly round the island. Abreast the remaining lifeboat once more it came to a stop and the A.A. gun lined up on the boat and started firing — artificers must have repaired the damaged firing mechanism during the night. Only six shots in all were fired, but they were enough to reduce the boat to a holed and splintered wreck, and immediately after the last shell had exploded in the shallows the heavy diesels throbbed again and the submarine moved off due west, travelling at high speed, and investigated the two little islands there. Half an hour later it was lost to sight over the southern horizon.
CHAPTER TEN
THE LIFEBOAT lay motionless and dead on the motionless mirror of the sea. Nothing moved, nothing stirred, not the faintest ghost of a catspaw to ruffle the shining, steel-blue metal of the ocean that reflected every tiniest detail of the clincher sides with faithful and merciless accuracy. A dead boat on a dead sea, in a dead and empty world. An empty sea, a vast, shimmering plain of nothingness that stretched away endlessly on every side until it blurred in the far distance into the hazed rim of a vast and empty sky. No cloud in sight, and none for three days past. An empty and a terrible sky, majestic in its cruel indifference, and all the emptier for the blinding sun that beat down like an open furnace on the sweltering sea beneath.
A dead boat, too, it seemed, but not empty. It seemed full, rather, packed to capacity, but the impression was misleading. Under such pitiful shade as the remaining tatters of sail provided, men and women lay sprawled or stretched their full length on the benches, thwarts and bottom-boards, spent beyond words and prostrate with the heat, some in coma, some in nightmare sleep, others half-asleep, half-waking, making no movement at all, carefully hoarding what little spark of life was left them and the will to keep it burning. They were waiting for the sun to go down.
Of all that emaciated, sun-blackened shipload of survivors, only two could be seen to be alive. They were in as bad case as the others, gaunt-cheeked, hollow-eyes, with cracked and purpled lips and ugly red suppurating blisters where their saltwater and heat-rotted clothes had laid open patches of untan-ned skin to the burning sun. Both men were right aft in the boat, and they could be seen to be alive only because they were sitting upright in the sternsheets. But for all the movement they made they too might have been dead, or carved from stone. One man sat with his arm leaning on the tiller, though there had been neither wind to fill the torn sails nor men with strength to man the oars for almost four days: the other had a gun in his hand, unwavering, rock-like, and only his eyes showed that he was alive.
There were twenty people in the boat. There had been twenty-two when they had set sail from that little island in the South China Sea six days ago, but only twenty now. Two had died. There never had been any hope for Corporal Fraser, he had already been weakened and ravaged with fever long before the cannon shell from the Zero had all but blown his left arm off as he had fought back at it with his puny rifle from the wheelhouse top of the Viroma. There had been no medical supplies, no anaesthetics at all left, but he had hung on for a lifetime of four days and had died only forty-eight hours ago, cheerfully and in great agony, his arm blackened right to the shoulder. Captain Findhorn had said as much of the burial service as he could remember, almost his last conscious act before he had fallen into the restless, muttering coma from which it seemed unlikely that he would ever emerge.