“They will be the first to go — and they will take a long time going.” Captain Yamata might have been discussing arrangements for a garden party. “Colonel Kiseki is a connoisseur, an artist in this sort of thing — it is an education for lesser men such as myself to watch him. He thinks mental suffering is no less important than physical pain.” Yamata was warming to his subject, and finding it more than pleasant. “For instance, his main attention will be directed towards Mr. Nicolson here.”
“Inevitably,” Van Effen murmured.
“Inevitably. So he will ignore Mr. Nicolson — at first, that is. He will concentrate instead on the child. But he may spare the boy, I don’t know, he has a strange weakness for very small children.” Yamata frowned, then his face cleared. “So he will pass on to the girl here — the one with the scarred face. Siran tells me she and Nicolson are very friendly, to say the least.” He looked at Gudrun for a long moment of time, and the expression on his face woke murder in Nicolson’s heart. “Colonel Kiseki has rather a special way with the ladies — especially the young one: a rather ingenious combination of the green bamboo bed and the water treatment. You have heard of them, perhaps, Colonel?”
“I have heard of them.” For the first time that evening Van Effen smiled. It wasn’t a pleasant smile, and Nicolson felt fear for the first time, the overwhelming certainty of ultimate defeat. Van Effen was toying with him, the cat with the mouse, sadistically lending false encouragement while waiting for the moment to pounce. “Yes, indeed I have heard of them. It should be a most interesting performance. I presume I shall be permitted to watch the — ah — festivities?”
“You shall be our guest of honour, my dear Colonel,” Yamata purred.
“Excellent, excellent. As you say, it should be most educative.” Van Effen looked at him quiz/ically, waved a lackadaisical hand towards the prisoners. “You think it likely that Colonel Kiseki will — ah — interview them all? Even the wounded?”
“They murdered his son,” Yamata answered flatly.
“Quite so. They murdered his son.” Van Effen looked again at the prisoners, and his eyes were bleak and cold. “But one of them also tried to murder me. I don’t think Colonel Kiseki would miss just one of them, would he?”
Yamata raised his eyebrows. “I’m not quite certain that . . .”
“One of them tried to kill me,” Van Effen said harshly. “I have a personal score to settle. I would take it as a great favour, Captain Yamata, to be able to settle that score now.”
Yamata looked away from the soldier who was pouring the diamonds back into the torn bag and stroked his chin. Nicolson could once more feel the blood pounding in his pulse, forced himself to breathe quietly, normally. He doubted if anyone else knew what was going on.
“I suppose it is the least you are entitled to — we owe you a very great deal. But the colonel—–” Suddenly the doubt and uncertainty cleared from Yamata’s face, and he smiled. “But of course! You are a senior allied officer. An order from you—–”
“Thank you, Captain Yamata,” Van Effen interrupted. “Consider it given.” He whirled round, limped quickly into the middle of the prisoners, bent down, twisted his hand in Gordon’s shirt-front and jerked him viciously to his feet. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this, you little rat. Get across there.” He ignored Gordon’s struggles, his fear-maddened face and incoherent protestations of innocence, marched him across to an empty space at the back of the council house, at a point directly opposite the door, and flung him into a huddled heap, sprawled almost his length against the back wall of the hut, one arm raised in pathetic defence, unreasoning panic limned in every line of his unlovely face.
Van Effen ignored the panic, the protestations and the man, turned quickly round and limped across towards the elders’ platform, towards the Japanese soldier who stood with his own rifle under one arm and Farnholme’s machine-carbine under the other. With the careless assurance of a man who expects neither question nor resistance, Van Effen firmly relieved the soldier of the machine-carbine, checked that it was fully loaded, slipped the catch to automatic and hobbled back again towards Gordon who still lay where he had left him, eyes unnaturally wide and staring, moaning softly, long, quivering indrawn breaths were the only sound in the room. Every eye in the room was on Van Effen and Gordon, eyes that reflected various states of pity or anger or anticipation or just blank incomprehension. Nicolson’s face was quite expressionless, Yamata’s almost so, but the tongue running slowly over his lips gave him away. But no one spoke, no one moved, no one thought to speak or move. A man was about to be killed, to be murdered, but some indefinable factor in that electric atmosphere prevented any protest, any interruption, from anyone inside that house. And when the interruption did come, a sudden, jarring shock that shattered the spell as a stone might shatter a delicate crystal, it came from the kam-pong outside.
The high-pitched yell in Japanese jerked every head towards the door. Immediately afterwards came the sound of a short, sharp scuffle, a cry, a revolting, hollow sound like a giant cleaver splitting a water-melon, a momentary, weirdly ominous silence, then a roar and a rush of smoke and flame and the doorway and most of the wall were engulfed, with incredible speed, in a leaping, crackling wall of flame.
Captain Yamata took two steps towards the doorway, opened his mouth to shout an order and died with his mouth still open, the slugs from Van Effen’s carbine tearing half his chest away. The staccato hammering of the machine-gun inside the room was almost deafening, completely blotting out the roar of the flames. The sergeant still on the platform died next, then a soldier beside him, then a great red flower spread outwards from the centre of Siran’s face, and still Van Effen crouched low over the slowly swinging barrel of his carbine, his hand locked on the trigger, his face that of a man carved from stone. He staggered when the first Japanese rifle bullet caught him high up on the shoulder, stumbled and fell to one knee as a second bullet smashed into his side with the force of a battering ram, but still no flicker of expression crossed his face and the ivory-knuckled trigger finger only tightened the more. That much and that only Nicolson saw before he catapulted himself backwards and crashed into the legs of a soldier lining his tommy-gun on the man by the far wall. They went down together in a writhing, twisting, furiously struggling heap, then Nicolson was smashing the butt of the tommy-gun again and again into the dark blur of the face before him and was on his feet once more, knocking aside a gleaming bayonet blade and kicking viciously for an unprotected groin. Even as he closed with the man, hooked fingers locking round a scrawny throat, he was conscious that Walters and Evans and Willoughby were on their feet also, fighting like madmen in the weird half-light compounded of the red glare of the flames and the choking acrid smoke that filled the room. He was conscious, too, that Van Effen’s machine-carbine had fallen silent, that another machine-gun, with a different cyclic rate, was firing through the licking, resinous flames that all but curtained off the doorway. And then he had forgotten all about these things, another man had seized him from behind and locked an elbow round his throat, strangling him in a grim and savage silence. There was a red mist, a mist shot through with sparks and flame, swimming before his eyes, and he knew it was his own blood pounding in his head and not the furiously burning walls of the council house. His strength was going, he was just sliding away into the darkness, when he vaguely heard the man behind him cry out in agony, and then McKinnon had him by the arm, leading him at a stumbling run out through the blazing doorway. But they were too late — too late at least for Nicolson. The blazing overhead beam falling from the roof caught him only a glancing blow on head and shoulder, but it was enough, in his weakened state more than enough, and the darkness closed over him.
He came to almost a minute later, lying huddled against the wall of the nearest upwind hut from the council house. He was dimly aware of men standing and moving around him, of Miss Plenderleith wiping blood and soot from his face, of the great tongue of flame licking thirty or forty feet vertically upwards into a dark and starless sky as the coucil house, a wall and most of the roof already gone, burnt torch-like to destruction.