“I’m not with you, Johnny.” Findhorn was beginning to sound tired again. “Afraid my head’s not at its best for this sort of thing. If you’ve got any idea at all—–”
“I have. Crazy, but it might work.” Nicolson explained rapidly, then beckoned to Vannier, who handed the tiller to the bo’sun and moved across. “Don’t smoke, do you, Fourth?”
“No, sir.” Vannier looked at Nicolson as if he had gone off his head.
“You’re starting tonight.” Nicolson dug into his pocket, fished out a flat tin of Benson and Hedges and a box of matches. He gave them to him, along with a few quick instructions. “Right up in the bows, past Van Effen. Don’t forget, everything depends on you. Brigadier? A moment, if you please.”
Farnholme looked up in surprise, lumbered over a couple of thwarts and sat down beside them. Nicolson looked at him for a second or two in silence and then said seriously: “You really know how to use that automatic carbine, Brigadier?”
“Good God, man, yes!” the Brigadier snorted. “I practically invented the bloody thing.”
“How accurate are you?” Nicolson persisted quietly.
“Bisley,” Farnholme answered briefly. “Champion. As good as that, Mr. Nicolson.”
“Bisley?” Nicolson’s eyebrows reflected his astonishment.
“King’s marksman.” Farnholme’s voice was completely out of character now, as quiet as Nicolson’s own. “Chuck a tin over the side, let it go a hundred feet and I’ll give you a demonstration. Riddle it with this carbine in two seconds.” The tone was matter-of-fact; more, it was convincing.
“No demonstration,” Nicolson said hastily. “That’s the last thing we want. As far as brother Jap is concerned, we haven’t even a fire-cracker between us. This is what I want you to do.” His instructions to Farnholme were rapid and concise, as were those given immediately afterwards to the rest of the boat’s company. There was no time to waste on lengthier explanations, to make sure he was fully understood: the enemy was almost on them.
The sky to the west was still alive and glowing, a kaleidoscopic radiance of red and orange and gold, the barred clouds on the horizon ablaze with fire, but the sun was gone, the east was grey and the sudden darkness of the tropical night was rushing across the sea. The submarine was angling in on their starboard quarter, grim and black and menacing in the gathering twilight, the glassy sea piling up in phosphorescent whiteness on either side of its bows, the diesels dying away to a muted murmur, the dark, evil mouth of the big for’ard gun dipping and moving slowly aft as it matched the relative movement of the little lifeboat, foot by remorseless foot. And then there had come some sharp, unintelligible command from the conning-tower of the submarine; McKinnon cut the engine at a gesture from Nicolson and the iron hull of the submarine scraped harshly along the rubbing piece of the lifeboat.
Nicolson craned his neck and looked swiftly along the deck and conning-tower of the submarine. The big gun for’ard was pointing in their direction, but over their heads, as he had guessed it would: it had already reached maximum depression. The light A.A. gun aft was also lined up at them — lined up into the heart of their boat: he had miscalculated about that one, but it was a chance they had to take. There were three men in the conning-tower, two of them armed — an officer with a pistol and a sailor with what looked like a submachine gun — and five or six sailors at the foot of the conning-tower, only one of them armed. As a reception committee it was dismaying enough, but less than what he had expected. He had thought that the lifeboat’s abrupt, last-minute alteration of course to-port — a movement calculated to bring them alongside the port side of the submarine, leaving them half-shadowed in the gloom to the east while the Japanese were silhouetted against the after-glow of sunset — might have aroused lively suspicion: but it must have been almost inevitably interpreted as a panic-stricken attempt to escape, an attempt no sooner made than its futility realised. A lifeboat offered no threat to anyone and the submarine commander must have thought that he had already taken far more than ample precautions against such puny resistance as they could possibly offer.
The three craft — the submarine and the two lifeboats — were still moving ahead at about two knots when a rope came spinning down from the deck of the submarine and fell across the bows of number one lifeboat. Automatically Vannier caught it and looked back at Nicolson.
“Might as well make fast, Fourth.” Nicolson’s tone was resigned, bitter. “What good’s fists and a couple of jack-knives against this lot?”
“Sensible, so sensible.” The officer leaned over the conning-tower, his arms folded, the barrel of the gun lying along his upper left arm: the English was good, the tone self-satisfied, and the teeth a white gleaming smirk in the dark smudge of the face. “Resistance would be so unpleasant for all of us, would it not?”
“Go to hell!” Nicolson muttered.
“Such incivility! Such lack of courtesy — the true Anglo-Saxon.” The officer shook his head sadly, vastly enjoying himself. Then he suddenly straightened, looked sharply at Nicolson over the barrel of his gun. “Be very careful!” His voice was like the crack of a whip.
Slowly, unhurriedly, Nicolson completed his movement of extracting a cigarette from the packet Willoughby had offered him, as slowly struck a match, lit his own and Willoughby’s cigarettes and sent the match spinning over the side.
“So! Of course!” The officer’s laugh was brief, contemptuous. “The phlegmatic Englishman! Even though his teeth chatter with fear, he must maintain his reputation — especially in front of his crew. And another of them!” Up in the bows of the lifeboat Vannier’s bent head, a cigarette clipped between his lips, was highlit by the flaring match in his hand. “By all the gods, it’s pathetic, really pathetic.” The tone of his voice changed abruptly. “But enough of this — -this foolery. Aboard at once — all of you.” He jabbed his gun at Nicolson. “You first.”
Nicolson stood up, one arm propping himself against the hull of the submarine, the other pressed close by his side.
“What do you intend to do with us, damn you?” His voice was loud, almost a shout, with a nicely-induced tremor in it. “Kill us all? Torture us? Drag us to those damned prison camps in Japan?” He was shouting in earnest now, fear and anger in the voice: Vannier’s match hadn’t gone over the side, and the hissing from the bows was even louder than he had expected. “Why in the name of God don’t you shoot us all now instead of—–”
With breath-taking suddenness there came a hissing roar from the bows of the lifeboat, twin streaks of sparks and smoke and flame lancing upwards into the darkening sky across the submarine’s deck and at an angle of about thirty degrees off the vertical and then two incandescent balls of flame burst into life hundreds of feet above the water as both the lifeboat’s rocket parachute flares ignited almost at the same instant. A man would have had to be far less than human to check the involuntary, quite irresistible, impulse to look at the two rockets exploding into flame far up in the skies, and the Japanese crew of the submarine were only human. To a man, like dolls in the hands of a puppet master, they twisted round to look, and to a man they died that way, their backs half-turned to the lifeboat and their necks craned back as they stared up into the sky.
The crash of automatic carbines, rifles and pistols died away, the echoes rolled off into distant silence across the glassy sea and Nicolson was shouting at everyone to lie flat in the boat. Even as he was shouting, two dead sailors rolled off the sloping deck of the submarine and crashed into the stern of the lifeboat, one of them almost pinning him against the gunwale. The other, lifeless arms and legs flailing, was heading straight for little Peter and the two nurses, but McKinnon got there first. The two heavy splashes sounded almost like one.
One second passed, two, then three. Nicolson was on his knees, staring upwards, fists clenched as he waited in tense expectation. At first he could hear the shuffle of feet and the fast, low-pitched murmur of voices behind the shield of the big gun. Another second passed, and then another. His eyes moved along the submarine deck, perhaps there was someone still alive, still seeking a glorious death for his Emperor — Nicolson had no illusions about the fanatical courage of the Japanese. But now everything was still, still as death. The officer hanging tiredly over the conning-tower, gun still locked in a dangling hand — Nicolson’s pistol had got him, and the other two had fallen inside. Four shapeless forms lay in a grotesque huddle about the foot of the conning-tower. Of the two men who had manned the light A.A. gun there was no sign: Farnholme’s automatic carbine had blasted them over the side.