Алистер Маклин - South by Java Head

Within three seconds Nicolson was out in the passage, wrestling with the handle of the pantry door. The handle turned, but the door refused to open – locked, perhaps, more probably jammed and buckled. A providential fire axe hung on the bulkhead outside the fifth engineer’s cabin and Nicolson swung it viciously against the lock of the pantry door. On the third blow the lock sprang open and the door crashed back on its hinges.

Nicolson’s first confused impressions were of smoke, burning, a sea of smashed crockery and an almost overpowering reek of whisky. Then the rush of fresh air quickly cleared the air and he could see the two nurses sitting on the deck, almost at his feet, Lena, the young Malayan girl, with her dark, sooty eyes wide and shadowed with terror, and Miss Drachmann beside her, her face pale and strained but calm. Nicolson dropped on his knees beside her.

“The little boy?” he asked harshly.

“Do not worry. Little Peter is safe.” She smiled at him gravely, eased back the heavy metal door of the hot press, already ajar. The child was inside, snugly wrapped in a heavy blanket, staring out at him with wide, fearful eyes. Nicolson reached in a hand, gently ruffled the blond hair, then rose abruptly to his feet and let his breath go in a long sigh.

“Thank God for that, anyway.” He smiled down at the girl. “And thank you, too, Miss Drachmann. Damned clever idea. Take him outside in the passage, will you? It’s stifling in here.” He swung round, then halted and stared down in disbelief at the tableau at his feet. The young soldier, Alex, and the priest were stretched out on the deck, side by side, both obviously unconscious – at least.

Farnholme was just straightening up from examining the priest’s head. The smell of whisky from him was so powerful that his clothes might have been saturated in it.

“What the hell’s been going on here?” Nicolson demanded icily. “Can’t you keep off the bottle for even five minutes, Farnholme?”

“You’re a headstrong young man, young man.” The voice came from the far corner of the pantry. “You mustn’t jump to conclusions, especially wrong conclusions.”

Nicolson peered through the gloom. With the dynamos and lighting gone the windowless pantry was half-shrouded in darkness. He could barely distinguish the slight form of Miss Plenderleith sitting straight-backed against the ice-box. Her head was bent over her hands and the busy click-click, click-click of needles seemed unnaturally loud. Nicolson stared at her in utter disbelief.

“What are you doing, Miss Plenderleith?” Even to himself, Nicolson’s voice sounded strained, incredulous.

“Knitting, of course. Have you never seen anyone knitting before?”

“Knitting!” Nicolson murmured in awe. “Knitting, of course! Two lumps or three, vicar.” Nicolson shook his head in wonder. “If the Japs knew this they’d demand an armistice tomorrow.”

“What on earth are you talking about?” Miss Plenderleith demanded crisply. “Don’t tell me that you’ve lost your senses, too.”

“Too?”

“This unfortunate young man here.” She pointed at the young soldier. “We jammed some trays against the serving hatch when we came in – it’s only wood, you know. The Brigadier thought it might give protection from bullets.” Miss Plenderleith was talking very rapidly, very concisely, her knitting now laid aside. “When the first bombs hit, this young man tried to get out. The Brigadier locked the door – and very quick he was about it, too. Then he started to pull the trays down – going to go out the hatch, I suppose. The – ah – priest here was trying to pull him back when the bullets came through the hatch.”

Nicolson turned away quickly, looked at Farnholme and then nodded down at the Muslim priest. “My apologies, Brigadier. Is he dead?”

“Thank God, no.” Farnholme straightened on his knees, his Sandhurst drawl temporarily in abeyance. “Creased, concussed, that’s all.” He looked down at the young soldier and shook his head in anger. “Bloody young fool!”

“And what’s the matter with him?”

“Laid him out with a whisky bottle,” Farnholme said succinctly. “Bottle broke. Must have been flawed. Shockin’ waste, shockin’.”

“Get him outside, will you? The rest of you outside, too.” Nicolson turned round as someone entered the door behind him. “Walters! I’d forgotten all about you. Are you all right?”

“All right, sir. Wireless room’s a bit of a shambles, I’m afraid.” Walters looked pale and sick, but purposeful as ever.

“Doesn’t matter now.” Nicolson was grateful for Walters’s presence, his solidity and competence. “Get these people up to the boat-deck – in the passage, better still in your office or cabin. Don’t let ’em out on deck. If there’s anything they want to get from their cabins, give ’em a couple of minutes.” Walters smiled wryly. “We’re taking a little trip, sir?”

“Very shortly. Just to be on the safe side.”

It would hardly benefit the morale of the passengers, Nicolson reflected, by adding what Walters himself must have been aware of – that the only alternatives were cremation or disintegration when the ship went up. He went out the door quickly, then staggered and almost fell as a tremendous detonation, right aft, seemed to lift the stern of the Viroma out of the water and sent a shuddering, convulsive shock through her every plate and rivet. Instinctively Nicolson reached out and caught the lintel of the door, caught and held Miss Drachmann and Peter as the nurse fell against him, steadied her and turned quickly to Walters.

“Belay that last order. No one to go to their cabins. Just get ’em up there and see that they stay there.” In four strides he was at the after screen door, opening it cautiously. Seconds later he was outside on deck, standing at the top of the iron ladder that led down to the main deck, and staring aft.

The heat struck at him almost with the physical impact of a blow and brought tears of pain to his eyes. No complaints that he couldn’t see this fire, he thought grimly. Billowing, convoluted clouds of oily black smoke stretched up hundreds of feet into the sky, reaching higher and higher with the passing of every second, not tailing off to a peak but spreading out at the top in a great, black anvil-head, spreading over the ship like, a pall: at the base, however, just at deck level, there was hardly any smoke at all, only a solid wall of flame perhaps sixty feet in diameter, a wall that rose forty feet, then broke into a dozen separate pillars of fire; fiery, twisting tongues of flame that reached hungrily upwards, their flickering points swallowed up in the rolling darkness of the smoke. In spite of the intense heat, Nicolson’s first reaction was to cover not his face but his ears: even at a hundred and fifty feet the roaring of the flames was all but intolerable.

Another miscalculation on the part of the Japs, he thought grimly. A bomb meant for the engine-room had exploded in the diesel oil bunkers, blowing aft through the engine-room bulkhead and for’ard clear through both walls of the cofferdam into number one cargo tank. And it was almost certainly number one tank that was on fire, its quarter of a million gallons of fuel oil ignited and fanned by the fierce down-draught of air through the wrecked cofferdam. Even if they had had firefighting apparatus left, and the men to man the apparatus, tackling that inferno, an inferno that would have engulfed and destroyed any man before he could have come within fifty feet of it, would only have been the suicidal gesture of an imbecile. And then, above the deep, steady roar of the flames, Nicolson heard another, more deadly sound, the high-pitched, snarling howl of an aero engine under maximum boost, caught a momentary glimpse of a Zero arrowing in off the starboard beam, at mast-top height, flung himself convulsively backward through the open door behind him as cannon-shells struck and exploded where he had been only two seconds before.