Алистер Маклин - South by Java Head

“Gudrun?”

“Johnny! Oh, Johnny!” She clung to him and he could feel her trembling.

“Peter! Where’s Peter?” he demanded urgently.

“Oh, Johnny!” The habitual cool self-possession was gone, and her voice was almost a wail. “The boat struck and– and–”

“Where is Peter?” His fingers digging deeply into her shoulders, he was shaking her violently, his voice a savage shout.

“I don’t know, I don’t know! I– I can’t find him.” She broke away, dived sideways into the water that was boiling waist-high by them. He caught her, jerked her to her feet and whirled round. It was Vannier who had followed him into the surf, and he was right behind him. He thrust the girl at him.

“Take her ashore, Vannier.”

“I won’t go! I won’t!” She was struggling in Vannier’s arms, but she hadn’t the strength left to struggle very much. “I lost him! I lost him!”

“You heard me, Vannier?” Nicolson’s voice as he turned away was a cutting whip. Vannier mumbled “Yes, sir” to the retreating back and started to drag the half-hysterical girl through the surf.

Again and again Nicolson plunged into the white water, his hands scrabbling desperately along the shingled bed of the sea: again and again he came up empty-handed. Once he thought he had found him, but it was only an empty bag; he threw it away like a man demented and flung himself yet farther out into the surf, near the coral that had sunk them. He was up almost shoulder high in the water now, being swept off his feet with monotonous regularity, swallowing great mouthfuls of sea, shouting the name of the boy over and over again like some crazy litany, driving his exhausted body to incredible, inhuman efforts, driven by a horrifying fear, a dreadful anxiety that left him no longer sane, and anxiety such as he had not known could exist in the heart of any man. Two minutes, perhaps three, had elapsed since the boat had struck, and even in his madness he knew that the little boy could not have lived so long in these waters.

What little reason he had left told him so, but he ignored it, dived once more through the creaming surf to the shingled floor of the sea. But again nothing, below the.water or on the surface, only the wind, the rain, the darkness and the deep-throated booming of the surf. And then, high and clear above the wind and the sea, he heard it.

The child’s thin, terrified cry came from his right, along the beach, about thirty yards away. Nicolson whirled and plunged in that direction, cursing the deep waters that reduced his stumbling run to grotesque slow-motion. Again the child cried, not a dozen feet away this time. Nicolson shouted, heard a man’s answering call, and then all at once he was upon them, the looming bulk of a man as tall as himself, with the child high up in his arms.

“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Nicolson.” Van Effen’s voice was very faint and far away. “The little one is not harmed. Please to take him from me.” Nicolson had barely time to snatch him in his arm before the Dutchman swayed on his feet, just once, then toppled and fell his length, face down in the foaming water.

THE JUNGLE, dank, dripping and steaming hot, was all around them. High above, through tiny gaps in the interwoven branches of heavily liana trees, they could catch glimpses of the grey sullen sky, the same sky that had completely obscured the sunrise, just over two hours previously. The light that filtered down from these tree-tops had a strangely unreal quality, sinister and foreboding, but a quality that accorded well with the claustrophobic green walls of the jungle and the scummed, dismal swamps that bounded both sides of the jungle path.

Even as a jungle path it was almost a failure. As far as the jungle was concerned, it offered a fairly free passage, and axes or machetes had evidently been busy, fairly recently, on either side. But as a path it was treacherous to a degree, one moment hard-packed and worn smooth by constant use, the next vanishing abruptly and mysteriously as it rounded a giant tree-trunk and dipped into the waiting swamps ahead then reappearing a few yards ahead, smooth and firm again.

Nicolson and Vannier, already covered to the waists in the rotting, evil-smelling slime, were beginning to discover the techniques for dealing with these sudden breaches in the path. Invariably, they were beginning to find, there was an alternative route round these swamp patches and if they cast around long enough they usually found it. But it took too long to seek out these bypasses and, more than once, they had wandered so far from the track that they had regained it only by chance, so that now, unless the bypass was almost immediately obvious, they plunged through the swamps and regained firm land on the other side, pausing every time to wipe off as much of the slime as possible and the ugly grey leeches that fastened. to their legs. Then they would hurry on again, following the tortuous path round the massive trees as best they could in the weird, dim half-light of the tropical forest, trying their best to ignore the strange stirrings and rustlings that paralleled their progress on either side.

Nicolson was a seaman, first, last and all the time. He was little at home on land, still less so in the jungle, and this was not a journey that he would ever have made, would ever have contemplated making, had there been any option. But there had been no option, none whatsoever, a fact that had become cruelly evident soon after the first grey stirrings of dawn had let him look around to assess their position and the condition of the boat’s company. Both had been very far from reassuring.

They had landed somewhere on the Java shore of the Sunda Straits, in a deep bay, two miles wide across the horns, with a narrow shingled beach and a jungle that crowded down almost to the water’s edge, a dense, impenetrable looking jungle that ran back into the high rain-forests that covered the slopes of the low hills to the south. The shores of the bay itself were completely empty of any life, animal or human, or any signs of life: there was only their own little company, huddled for what pitiful shelter they could under a cluster of palms, and, about a hundred yards along the beach, the upturned lifeboat.

The lifeboat was in bad shape. A great hole, almost fifteen feet in length, had been ripped out between the keel and the bilge grab-rail, and the keel itself had been broken and wrenched away from its hog piece. The lifeboat was beyond repair, a total loss. There was only the jungle left for them, and they were in no condition to face that.

Captain Findhorn, for all his courage, was still a very sick man, unable to walk a dozen steps. Van Effen was weak too, and in considerable pain, violently sick at regular intervals: before Nicolson and McKinnon had succeeded in freeing his badly mangled leg from the clam that had seized it while he had been bringing the child ashore, he had almost drowned in the shallow water, and this, coupled with the shrapnel wound in the thigh received some days previously and the crack on the skull lately given him by Farnholme had dangerously lowered his resistance and powers of recuperation. Both Walters and Evans had swollen arms from infected wounds, and they, too, suffered constantly, while McKinnon, though in no great pain, limped on a badly stiffened leg. Willoughby was weak, Gordon shiftless and worse than useless and Siran and his men obviously intended to be of help to no one but themselves.

That left only Nicolson and the fourth officer, and Nicolson knew that there was nothing they could do for the others, not directly. To try to repair the lifeboat was out of the question, and to think of building any kind of boat or raft with the few tools they had left was just ridiculous. On land they were, and on land they would have to remain. But they couldn’t remain on that beach indefinitely. If they did, they would starve. Nicolson had no illusions about their ability to survive for any time at all on the food they could scrape from trees, bushes, on and under the ground. An experienced jungle man might get enough for survival, but the chances were that they would poison themselves in the very first meal they took. Even if they didn’t, bark and berries wouldn’t keep seriously ill men alive for long, and without medicines and fresh bandages for infected and suppurating wounds, the outlook was bleak indeed. Food, shelter, bandages and medicine – these were the essentials and wouldn’t just come to them. They would have to go to look for them, to seek for help.