Томас Кенэлли - The Widow and Her Hero

The tide changed at eleven o’clock, and they let it take them to their next ship, a modern freighter, the Hoshi . A curious thing happened to Leo and Rubinsky while they were working on their second ship. A light went on in a porthole above them and a face appeared, a Japanese face, seeking the cooler night air in his sweltering sleeping quarters. He looked right at Leo and Rubinsky but did not see their stained faces or did not notice their breath. Mortmain had taught them a technique for breathing so shallowly that an animal three yards away would not hear them.

He was a very ordinary merchant seaman, a little bald, certainly no warrior. But he had chosen his ship, and so he had to await its destruction.

They could see their next target anchored in the stream, and it was well-laden and of a good size, but when they slid under the dark side of its stern, and Jockey held fast and Leo tried to affix the first magnetic mine under the water, the ship’s hull proved too rusty to take it. Leo did something extraordinary then, either out of determination or the obduracy of stress and excitement and frozen intent. He drew his commando knife, reached below the water and began scratching patches of rust away. The next time he tried the mine held, and so he had to repeat the scratching twice more, as Jockey played out the connecting detonation wire. Did any merchant seaman taking his rest in the targeted ship hear the sound? Was he too tired or accustomed to the noises of a crowded port to report it?

The third limpet having stuck, a whistle on Bukum signalled change of shift. It was one o’clock in the morning. They could get away now before the tide turned against them. Through helpful currents Leo and Rubinsky were in fact the first back to NC11, and next Mortmain and Chesty Blink-horn, who had suffered a harder time with currents. Then Doucette and Bantry came in, happy but complaining only half-jokingly of the impact of a collision they had had with Mortmain in the dark the night before, and the fact it had affected their steering and timing. Doucette was inspecting the problem by feel in the last dark hour of night when they heard the first mines go up, and then as they stood and stared during a short two and a half hours, they heard periodic explosions all over the Singapore roads, and sirens of patrol vessels and sub-hunters. In a sharp-edged early light they saw Doucette’s tanker explode beyond all possible ambition in flame and smoke as deep-dyed and effusive as that of a volcano. Doucette wept and smiled and wept, and no one blamed him. The rusty third ship marked out by Leo and Rubinsky off Bukum, already a scene of frantic alarm, seemed by full day spontaneously to erupt as if by its own volition. Leo could see its bows and stern both standing clear of the water, but only for seconds it seemed, before it accepted the force of Leo’s and Jockey’s daring and disappeared. It was a matter of awe now. Chesty Blinkhorn, muscular but very young and his world until recently restricted to a country town, said, Poor bastards, as if he had not expected till now the scope of his commando ambition, and how much mayhem it could cause. And as repetitive explosions and repetitive alarms enlivened and stunned their morning, they drank their water and ate their rations and felt like the gods and demons they had become. They hadn’t only stolen fire, they had planted it on others.

For them, exhilaration overrode all other impulses. Each detonation enlarged their legend. Doucette was keeping count by means of his telescope. With their rods and fuses and magnetic make-fasts they had sunk at least 40,000 tons of shipping and God knew what in the enemy’s cargo. Leo felt that he had nudged open his father’s prison gate, that the walls were closer to falling. And he intended to give the walls a further nudge if asked to do so. They laughed and wept on the cloud-feathery peak of NC11 as explosions tore the sky. Nothing would ever be as wonderful a riposte as this, nothing would ever be as stylish. They had intended to steal the enemy’s sense of safety, but were astonished now they had done so.

They did not fall asleep until late afternoon, and behind their closed eyes the wonderful explosions recurred. With his head down, Doucette had murmured, Did you fellows notice how easy it is for native junks and prahus to come and go? They slept on groundsheets on their inured backs, and when they woke the awe at what they had done recurred to them and authorised all their future plans.

That night they took three separate courses back to the meeting place at Pandjang Island. They were next to invisible on a normal sea. They knew and believed that. With daylight, Leo and Jockey simply turned to a convenient island shore, hid their folboat, and found the boon of a Chinese graveyard, where they were able to hide and rest, having been assured by IRD that the Malays kept away from Chinese graveyards. They needed a deeper sleep than they were able to get amongst the dead that day, but they were still stimulated. The tale of what they had done fuelled them overnight, and the repetitiveness of their single blade stroke induced in them a sort of euphoric meditation. In the darkness they skirted pagars lit by kerosene lanterns and heard fishermen within or from the shore, and they were as unseen as their deeds entitled them to be. A Sumatra came rushing out of the west and blinded them with rain and jolted them about on waves, but did not much delay them in the end. Before the next dawn, at two in the morning, they got to Pandjang and the bay where they had swum with the otters. The others all turned up within the hour, the Boss still complaining of the damage Rufus Mortmain had done to his steering.

They took turns to watch for Pengulling . In last light they spotted it far out to sea, heading south as if towards home. Nav had come back, and they had somehow missed him, and he them. Pengulling looked like a vessel on which there was no dissent now, as it moved definitely Australia-wards.

That night the monsoon started. They sat up under ground-sheets and discussed their situation. Maybe they should paddle south to Pompong Island and live there off the cache of supplies till the monsoon ended, and then when the native prahus set off westwards on the trade wind, they would capture one and sail it to India, like Doucette had earlier. A little disappointing they wouldn’t be home for Christmas, but they’d be home in the end. And they were not depressed, said Leo, except that he knew the marriage would be postponed further. He confessed later that he nonetheless had a sense I would tolerate such a thing.

They began to build a hut. An old man and his grandson rowed in in a native kolek and this time Doucette went down and negotiated with the old Malay for food – a risk, but it had to be taken now. They completed their rough thatch shelter, and then finished some of their tinned rations with the fish the old man gave them for dinner, and lay down very tired and ready for a sleep, with Rufus Mortmain on watch.

And then at eight o’clock there was a sudden frail density of blackness on the water. Pengulling was back. The young men had made the nerve-wrecked Nav return yet again. Doucette and his five abandoned their hut and paddled out. The reunion – well, it can be imagined. Nav the outsider, a bucket of worms, said Leo, talking endlessly. When Leo and the others briefed them, a form of intoxication possessed the men of Pengulling . They had all voted to come back, they told Doucette, except for Nav who had been incapable of electoral activity. Yet he still got the navigation and steering right, and so there was a kind of admirable quality to him also.

Everyone agreed, around dinner tables afterwards, that the trip back had been – yes, boring . The professional warrior Doucette claimed that these were the necessary longueurs a professional soldier had to face, and that they should be grasped for the sake of contemplation. (As if he were not himself the soul of impatience.) The blazing blue nothing at the centre of each second, he asserted, had to be seized.