Алистер Маклин - South by Java Head

“Excellent.” Nicolson took a last look round the room. “No point in waiting any longer, then. Let’s be on our way.”

“Where are we going?” Kiseki had his feet planted wide, his huge head hunched far down into his shoulders. “Where are you taking us?”

“Telak tells me that your personal launch is the finest and fastest for a hundred miles up and down the coast. We’ll be through the Sunda Straits and into the Indian Ocean long before the dawn comes.”

“What!” Kiseki’s face was contorted in fury. “You’re taking my launch! You’ll never get away with it, Englishman, you’ll never get away with it.” He paused, another and even more shocking thought occurred to him and he lunged forward across the parquet floor, dragging the other two behind him and kicking out at Nicolson in berserk anger. “You’re taking me with you, damn you, you’re taking me with you!”

“Of course. What else did you think?” Nicolson said coldly. He stepped back a couple of paces to avoid the flailing feet and jabbed the muzzle of his rifle, none too gently into Kiseki’s midriff, just below the breast-bone. Kiseki doubled up in agony. “You’re our one guarantee of a safe-conduct. We’d be madmen to leave you behind.”

“I won’t go,” Kiseki gasped. “I won’t go. You can kill me first, but I won’t go. Concentration camps! Prisoner-of-war of the English! Never, never, never! You can kill me first!”

“It won’t be necessary to kill you.” Nicolson pointed out. “We can tie you, gag you, even take you on a stretcher if we have to.” He nodded at the cloakroom door. “Plenty of cheap labour in there. But it would only complicate matters. You can come on your feet or you can come on a stretcher with a couple of bullet holes in your legs to quieten you down.”

Kiseki looked at the pitiless face and made his choice. He came on his feet.

On their way down to the jetty they met no Japanese soldiers, no one at all. A windless night, but the rain was falling heavily, persistently, and the streets of Bantuk were deserted. At long, long last, luck was turning their way.

Vannier and the others were already aboard the launch. There had been only one man on guard, and Telak and his men had been as silent as the night. Van Effen was already asleep in a bunk below, and Walters was just about to begin transmission. Forty-four feet long and with a fourteen-foot beam, the launch gleamed and shone even in the rain and the darkness and was ready for instant departure.

Willoughby took over the engine-room and almost drooled with sheer joy at the sight of the big, immaculately kept twin diesels. Gordon and Evans loaded another half-dozen drums of fuel oil on to the deck aft. And McKinnon and Vannier were already making a round of the larger vessels behind the breakwater, checking for radio sets, smashing the magneto of the only other launch in the harbour.

They left at exactly ten o’clock at night, purring gently out into a sea as smooth as a mill-pond. Nicolson had begged Telak to accompany them, but he had refused, saying that his place was with his people. He had gone up the long jetty without as much as a backward glance, and Nicolson knew they would never see him again.

As they moved out into the darkness, the four Japanese soldiers, still lashed to the stretchers, ran pell-mell up the vanishing jetty, shouting at the tops of their high-pitched voices. But their cries were abruptly lost, drowned in a sudden clamour of sound as the launch rounded the point of the breakwater, the twin throttles jammed wide open, and headed south-west under maximum power towards Java Head and the Indian Ocean beyond.

They rendezvoused with H.M.A.S. Kenmore , a Q-class destroyer, at half-past two in the morning.

The End