Shout at the Devil - Smith Wilbur. Страница 17

Sebastian Oldsmith was about to engage a nine-inch battle cruiser with a double-barrelled Gibbs.500.

She was close now, hanging over them like a high cliff of steel. Even Sebastian could not miss a battle cruiser at two hundred yards, and the heavy bullets clanged against the armoured hull, ringing loudly above the hissing rush of the bow wave.

While he reloaded, Sebastian looked up at the line of heads in the bows of the Blitcher; grinning faces below the white caps with their little swallow-tailed black ribbons.

"You bloody swine," he shouted at them. Hatred stronger than he had ever dreamed possible choked his voice. "You filthy, bloody swine." He lifted the rifle and fired without effect, and the Blitcher hit the dhow.

It struck with a crash and the crackling roar of rending timber. It crushed her side and cut through in the screaming of dying men and the squeal of planking against steel.

It trod the dhow under, breaking her back, forcing her far below the surface. At the initial shock, Sebastian was hurled overboard, the rifle thrown from his hands. He struck the armoured plate of the cruiser a glancing blow and then dropped into the sea beside her. The thrust of the bow wave tumbled him aside, else he would have been dragged along the hull and his body shredded against the steel plate.

He surfaced just in time to suck a lungful of air before the turbulence of the great screws caught him and plucked him under again, driving him deep so the pressure stabbed like red-hot needles in his eardrums. He felt himself swirled end over end, buffeted, shaken vigorously as the water tore at his body.

Colour flashed and zigzagged behind his closed eyelids.

There was a suffocating pain in his chest and his lungs pumped, urgently craving air, but he sealed his lips " and kicked out with his legs, clawing at the water with his hands.

The churning wake of the cruiser released its grip upon him, and he was shot to the surface with such force that he broke clear to the waist before dropping back to drink air greedily. He unbuckled the heavy cartridge belt and let it sink before he looked about him.

The surface of the sea was scattered with floating debris, and a few bobbing human heads. Near him a section of torn planking rose in a burst of trapped air bubbles. Sebastian struck Out for it and clung there, his legs hanging in the clear green water.

"Flynn," he gasped. "Flynn, where are you?"

A quarter of a mile away, the Blucher was circling slowly, long and menacing and shark-like, and he stared at it in hatred and in fear.

"Master!" Mohammed's voice behind him.

Sebastian turned quickly and saw the black face and the red face beside the floating sack of corks a hundred yards away. "Flynn!"

"Good-bye, Bassie," Flynn called. "The old Hun is coming back to finish us off. Look! They've got machine guns set up on the bridge. See you on the other side, boy:

Quickly Sebastian looked back at the cruiser and saw the clusters of white uniforms on the angle of her bridge. Ja, there are still some of them alive." Through borrowed binoculars, Fleischer scanned the littered area of the wreck.

"You will use the Maxims, of course, Captain? It will be quicker than picking them off with rifles."

Captain von Kleine did not answer. He stood tall on his bridge, slightly round-shouldered, staring out at the wreckage with his hands clasped behind him. "There is something sad in the death of a ship," he murmured. "Even such a dirty little one as this." Suddenly he straightened his shoulders and turned to Fleischer. "Your launch is waiting for you at the mouth of the Rufiji. I will take you there, Commissioner."

"But first the business of the survivors."

Von Kleine's expression hardened. "Commissioner, I sank that dhow in what I believed to be my duty. But now I am not sure that my judgement was not clouded by anger. I will not trespass further on my conscience by machine-gunning swimming civilians."

"You will then pick them up. I must arrest them and give them trial."

"am not a policeman," he paused and his expression softened a little. "That one who fired the rifle at us. I think he must be a brave man. He is a criminal, perhaps, but I am not so old in the ways of the world that I do not love courage merely for its own sake. I would not like to know I have saved this man for the noose. Let the sea be the judge and the executioner." He turned to his lieutenant. Kyller, prepare to drop one of the life rafts." The lieutenant stared at him in disbelief "You heard me?"

"Yes, my Captain."

"Then do it." Ignoring Fleischer's squawks of protest, von Kleine crossed to the pilot. "Alter course to pass the survivors at a distance- of fifty metres."

"Here she comes." Flynn grinned tightly, without humour, and watched the cruiser swing ponderously towards them.

The cries of the swimmers around him, pleading mercy, were plaintive as the voices of sea birds tiny on the immensity of the ocean.

"Flynn. Look at the bridge!" Sebastian's voice floated across to him. "See him there. The grey uniform."

Tears from the sting of sea salt in his wound, and the distortion of fever had blurred Flynn's vision, yet he could make out the spot of grey among the speckling of white uniforms on the bridge of the cruiser.

"Who is it?"

"You were right. It's Fleischer," Sebastian shouted back, and Flynn began to curse.

"Hey, you filthy, fat Blucher," he bellowed, trying to drag himself up onto the floating sack of corks. "Hey, you whore's chamber pot." His voice carried above the murmur of the cruiser's engines running at dead-slow. "Come on, you blood-smeared little pig The tall hull of the cruiser was close now, so close he could see the bulky figure in grey turn to the tall white, uniformed officer beside him, gesticulating in what was clearly entreaty.