Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

Past Sohano, with its shallow reef topped by wooden toilet huts built out on stilts over the water, the tide slackened. Here the water became muddy, the channel marked by iron beacon posts set on the edge of reed-covered shallows, Minon Island so low that the thicket of bushes covering it seemed to be growing out of the water. Mangrove swamps fringed the Buka shore. ‘I seen crocodile here.’ Luke grinned.

It was no place for a stranger to navigate, and I left it to him, following the course he took with the chart folded in my hand. Any moment now we should sight the island of Madehas. ‘Shall we be able to see the house?’ I asked Mac. But he didn’t answer, his eyes blank, seeing only what was in his mind.

‘You want to see Colonel Holland’s house?’ Luke was leaning with his bare elbows on the back of the captain’s chair, quite relaxed and only occasionally checking our course. ‘You see that beacon?’ He pointed ahead to a lopsided post topped by a triangle with its point upwards that marked the limit of the shoal area on the Buka side of the channel. ‘When we are there, we are clear of Minon, and I show you Holland house.’

‘That’s Number Seven beacon.’ Mac suddenly turned, his eyes wide, a fleck of froth at the corner of his mouth. ‘That night we raided Madehas, we were waiting in our canoes right here on Minon. The Jap guard boat was late, and the mosquitoes — the bloody bastard mozzies … there were six of them, and we got every one, over there by Number Seven.’ His words came slowly, his voice strange as though it were somebody else speaking through his mouth, and he wasn’t looking at me or Luke, or even at the helmsman. He was looking straight at the guard, who was standing at the back of the wheelhouse between the Decca and the echo-sounder. ‘Yu,’ he said suddenly, his hand outstretched, pointing. ‘Yu savvy olpela armi kiap? Yu savvy Colonel Lawrence?’

The man nodded, his eyes widening, his face going pale as Mac moved slowly towards him, talking, talking, his voice getting wilder, the froth gathering on his lips. He was speaking in a voice that was quite strange to me and in a language I didn’t understand, and yet I got the drift of it. And the man’s eyes grew wide with fear. This was the older man who had been on guard outside my cabin after dawn. He would have been a teenage youth when the Japs ruled in Buka and Colonel Holland and his men raided from the mountains. He would have grown up in fear of him, a legendary figure, and now this madman frothing at the mouth was claiming he spoke with the tongue of Colonel Holland, moving steadily closer, imposing his will and impressing his words by angry stabs of his left hand, the fingers spread. I watched, mesmerised. So did Luke. So did the guard, a growing horror in his eyes. And then, with a quick, powerful thrust of his right hand, Mac lunged forward.

The guard’s mouth opened, a scream — but it never came. Mac’s left hand clamped over the lips, blocking the sound in, thrusting at the man’s body so that it was forced back against the bulkhead, and all the time the nerves jerking it in the violence of death, the heavy galley meat knife buried the full length of its blade inside his stomach. The jerks subsided, the eyes glazing. Mac held the body there a moment, then put his knee against it, tugging at the knife. It pulled out suddenly, thick with gore, and some guts and a thin trickle of liquid spilled out with it. He let the dead man drop then, taking the pistol carefully from the limp hands, the body hitting the deck with a thud. He was smiling. ‘Oldest trick in the world. Pretend to be a man back from the dead … ’ He gave a cackling laugh. He knew I hadn’t the stomach for it and was sickened by his callousness. ‘What did you expect?’ he growled. ‘Mutiny and bloodshed go together, don’t they?’

I stared down at the body lying on the steel deck, a man of about forty, with a wife no doubt and a thatched hut full of kids. And now the black face gone grey, the eyes staring, no life there, and Mac standing over him with his gun in one hand and the other red with half-congealed blood, holding a butcher’s knife. The Passage had suddenly become an evil, haunted place. ‘You’ll get used to it.’ He pushed past me, spitting a piece of soap out of his frothing mouth and dropping the knife as he reached for the mike of the ship’s broadcast system, his eyes all the time on the helmsman, who stared back at him like a petrified rabbit. ‘Call Teopas to the bridge.’ He thrust the mike into my hands.

I did as he said, unable to keep my voice steady and wondering what he was going to do now. Holding the mike to my lips, I could feel the stickiness of half-congealed blood on the handgrip. ‘Coxs’n to the wheelhouse, please. Coxs’n Teopas. To the wheel-house, please.’ I put the mike back in its cradle, and we waited. Nobody spoke. Mac had withdrawn to the chart table, putting Luke between himself and the sliding door to the bridge wing. I saw him checking the safety catch, to see that it was on, I thought. A minute, maybe a little more, passed before Teopas’s bare feet sounded on the ladder to the starboard bridge wing.

A moment later he came in, swinging his rifle loosely by the breach, relaxed, smiling, confident. ‘What yu want, Kept-’

The short burst of fire caught him in the stomach first, then the chest. It flung him backwards, yet his feet were still making forward-pacing movements so that his big torso, the jet-black skin stitched with small holes, was forced over, to lie on its back twitching with death-throe reflexes. That burst of fire had sounded shattering in the confines of the wheelhouse. ‘Why did you do that?’ The words burst from my lips. It was killing for the sake of killing.

Mac looked at me. ‘He’s their leader.’ He said it flatly, and still in the same flat voice he added, ‘You should’ve done it yourself if you wanted it done different.’ He turned to Luke, telling him to get Teopas’s body out on to the bridge wing. And when he didn’t move, standing frozen into immobility as he peered down at the man’s chest with the holes leaking blood, Mac grabbed hold of him and shook him. ‘You want to get killed?’ He reached for the telegraph handle, slammed it to Stop Engines and picked up the broadcast microphone again, this time speaking into it himself, using the Buka language, not Pidgin. ‘Get that body out of here, on to the bridge wing, where they can see it,’ he shouted to Luke. ‘Go on, move! Yu tu.’ He motioned to the helmsman with the machine pistol. ‘Mekim.’ Then he was speaking into the mike again. The ship’s engines had stopped, everything very still as we lost way, the reeds and mangrove trees almost stationary, the bows swinging.

For’ard the guards on the catwalks, all four of them, were facing aft, eyes showing white and the dark faces puzzled and uneasy. Suddenly one of them fell prone, wriggling behind a ventilation cowl, his gun thrust forward. The others followed his example. ‘Sitting targets,’ Mac said, still with the mike to his mouth so that his words boomed round the ship. He caught my eye, nodding towards the dead coxs’n. ‘Get him to the bridge wing, and pitch his body down on to the deck. Go on — move! Show the bastards he’s dead. If they don’t throw their guns down into the tank deck then, we’ll have to kill them.’ It was the threat to kill them that got me moving. Luke, too, I think. We got hold of the body, half carrying, half dragging it to the doorway. ‘Now stand him upright,’ Mac said. ‘Let them see how he’s been shot to pieces. Then pitch him down the ladder.’ And as we pushed Teopas into an upright position, holding him there on the bridge wing so that guards and prisoners alike could see, Mac’s voice boomed again from the loudspeakers. ‘Push him over,’ he called, and we pitched the body down the ladder. It fell with a sickening thud, the round black head rammed against the metal grating, blood staining the woolly halo of hair.