New England 04 - Remember Brave Achilles, page 9
Cuthbert Collingwood nodded vigorously.
“Those bloody ships are still, so far as we know, officered and crewed by Germans under that cad von Reuter’s command!”
“Quite so,” De L’Isle agreed sombrely.
Chapter 9
Saturday 8th April
Little Inagua Island, West Indies
The two men were wide awake as the first full light of dawn lanced across the sea, roused by the buzzing, angry roar of multiple aero-engines.
“We ought to fire off a flare,” Ted Forest suggested feebly.
“No,” Abe said definitively. “I don’t think those are our kites.”
“Oh…”
“They approached from the south. I think they are using this island as a way point.”
“Cuban planes?”
“Maybe.”
It had been the best part of thirty-six hours ago, shortly after Abe had collapsed in a heap after dragging the dead goat back to the site of the crash, that he had decided he had got practically everything wrong.
He was supposed to be the expert backwoodsman, skilled in the ways of the hunt and living off the landscape and yet, for whatever reason – his wound, worrying about his friend, not to mention the battle over the Windward Passage and the almost certain loss of their ship and crewmates, and their other too numerous to mention troubles – he, Abraham Lincoln, the Son of the Hunter – had neglected to focus on the absolute basics of wilderness survival.
Shelter, warmth, water…
True, he had been preoccupied with trying to stop Ted dying of shock and the ongoing effects of his injuries, and he had not exactly been – nor was he now or likely to be in the near future - in tip top shape himself, nevertheless, he had neglected to organise ‘shelter’ and thereafter, allowed his thinking to become so muddled that had he not pulled himself together just in time, they might both be dead by now.
Had he been in any mood to give himself the benefit of the doubt, he might also have taken into account the fact that he found himself in an alien, utterly unfamiliar island environment when all his previous outdoor, field, hunting skills had been learned – mostly while playing at being a backwoodsman with Kate in tow; meaning there had been a lot of times when he had not actually being paying attention to anything other than…Kate – but Abe was in no frame of mind to go easy on himself.
Deep down he recognised that he needed to be angry if he was to carry on. If he was ever to see Kate and his son again, or to hold his unborn second child in his arms, he had to stop making stupid mistakes!
Thus, when next he was able to physically pick himself up, he had made a plan.
He and Ted Forest were horribly exposed to the elements on the beach, so he scouted around nearby in the thickest shrubs for somewhere he could stretch a makeshift awning. This achieved with splintered wooden struts, several large pieces of doped fabric torn off the shattered fuselage of the wrecked Sea Fox, he administered one of the last two doses of morphine to his friend and dragged, carried – he fainted later from pain and exhaustion - Ted some fifty yards back from the beach to their new sun-sheltered hiding place. In the dry, scratchy undergrowth they were now invisible from the beach, yet by peering through the undergrowth they could still observe any movement on the sea to the south.
Only then had Abe gone back to the goat carcass, butchered it crudely with the hand axe from the aircraft and set about lighting a small fire in the windbreak provided by the wreck. This was less than straightforward because the stench of dripping aviation fuel, forced him to make the fire at a distance which largely nullified the ‘windbreak’ effect of the wreckage. That was when he discovered that nothing was quite as bone dry as it seemed, nevertheless, smoke was soon pluming into the still air of the late afternoon. He tried to prop two severed goat legs – the hindmost – to cook. He must have passed out again because the meat was burning in the ashes when he awoke.
Wasting time trying to procure fresh meat had been another huge mistake. He had seen what must have been turtle tracks on the beach. That was a thought he had filed away as he carried dripping, half-cooked, bloody pieces of goat meat back to his friend. Abe had been astonished that Ted managed to eat more than a little of the scorched flesh, messily, obviously, before he collapsed and slept, and Abe wiped the grease and gobbets of stray flesh off his friend’s chin. He tried to eat as much of the variously burned or near raw meat as he could but by the evening the remains of the carcass were a fly-covered morass and the fire had died to cooling cinders. By the time he had fetched a fresh canteen of water it was dark and the last thing he remembered of that day – their second day, yesterday - on the island was re-arranging his flying jacket over his friend.
Now Abe peered out from beneath the awning.
“There must be about twenty planes,” he reported. “They’re flying at about a thousand feet. Old string bags, a bit like Bristol IVs and Vs. They’re heading,” Abe hesitated, “south west, I think.”
Ted Forest actually tried to prop himself up on a shaky elbow.
“Easy, old man,” Abe cautioned, holding the two-thirds empty canteen to his friend’s cracked lips. “I’ve already had a slurp of water; you finish what’s left.”
The two men became aware of more engines in the sky.
Abe peeked again.
“That’s a second group. Another ten or twelve kites, following the first lot.”
“They must be on the way to attack Matthew Town,” Ted Forest croaked. There was a new clearness in his eyes, an un-befuddled consciousness for the first time since the crash, which made Abe feel ten times better. “There’s a proper port down there. A telegraph station, too. Several hundred people, mostly workers from the salt flats…”
Abe was suddenly thinking other thoughts.
Turtles come ashore at night…
He began to scramble into the open, remembering belatedly that he had planned to get down to the beach before dawn.
“Where are you going?” Ted inquired.
“Turtles,” Abe retorted enigmatically and was gone.
He kept low as he moved through the scrub. Not that he was particularly worried about being seen from the air. Those chaps above him had other things to think about although it was likely that some keen-eyed fellow was bound to see the wreck of the Sea Fox.
How do you kill a turtle?
Reaching the beach, he moaned in frustration.
Tracks all the way down to the surf but no bloody turtles!
He scanned farther, eyeing the near distance.
He was about to give up; then he saw it.
Something moving in the sand fifty to sixty yards away, almost in the scrub. A turtle struggling to get around an outgrowth of razor-sharp coral jutting up through the low dunes.
Flies buzzed around the butchered carcass of the goat near the nose of the broken Sea Fox, Abe brushed through the swarm to recover the hand axe.
I should have buried the goat or dragged it into the sea…
Too late now.
The turtle did not seem very big, eighteen inches from beak to tail.
However, even after Abe had decapitated it, the damned thing weighed what seemed like a ton. Of course, he only had one fully serviceable arm and he was more than somewhat knocked about. Nevertheless, it must have taken him the best part of an hour to wrestle the beast back to the aircraft.
Oh, well, no problems cooking the blasted thing.
I light a fire, roll it into the embers and keep adding twigs and driftwood until the thing is tender! It did not matter if it took all day to be half-way edible, in the meantime he would do two or three water runs, and hopefully see if he needed to do anything about Ted’s wound dressings.
The wreck still stank of petrol.
Closer investigation revealed that eighty-seven octane was dripping from the fuel tank, slowly soaking the sand beneath the what was left of the telescoped nose, engine and forward cockpit of the Sea Fox.
By some quirk of good fortune, more by luck than conscious design, yesterday he had lit his fire a couple of yards beyond the petrol-wet sand…
The sound of aircraft had long receded by the time he rekindled a fire and added to yesterday’s small pile of flotsam and jetsam, mostly wood fragments he had collected off the beach and found trapped in the surrounding shrubs, no doubt deposited in the storms or hurricanes which periodically tore through these islands.
Hurricane season…
Had that passed now?
He guessed the answer was probably…yes.
He cursed as he picked himself up, having inadvertently tripped over the tail fin of the small bomb – a twenty-five pounder he guessed – he had discovered sticking out of the ground beside the aircraft…yesterday.
The passage of time already had very little meaning to him.
How strange was that?
Presently, he tipped the dead turtle into the flames, belly up, hoping not to extinguish the fire, before spreading more flammable material on top. He waited for the kindling to catch alight, piled on several more substantial pieces of driftwood and dead wood from the nearby brush around the carcass, and left the kill to cook.
He checked on Ted.
They chatted hoarsely for a couple of minutes.
“I might be able to sit up,” Abe’s friend muttered.
“We’ll see about that when I’ve re-filled the canteen.”
Ted confessed he thought he was about to foul himself.
“I’ll clean you up when I get back. We need to wash our clothes, anyway. I can do that in the surf, they’ll dry in no time flat stretched over the bushes,” Abe assured the other man.
They had to have water to keep hydrated or they would die. Everything else came a poor second to that.
He patted his friend’s shoulder and departed.
The secret to survival is to be organised: problematically, it had taken Abe nearly two days to start to get organised, they had been very lucky, the proof of that thus far was that they had survived.
Returning to the wreck from the rain pool where he had killed the goat two days ago, Abe saw that the fire had either gone out or was reduced to embers, ash, because there was no smoke rising from the vicinity of the wrecked Sea Fox. The island was relatively flat, more or less uniformly covered with waist or chest high scrubby vegetation with here and there, saplings leaning into the wind at head, or slightly greater height. Here and there scrub-covered dunes stood above the general lie of the land, otherwise there was little to obscure the horizon in any direction. This meant the wreck was clearly visible even a mile away.
I have to camouflage it…
Ted Forest had indeed soiled himself in his absence but as he appeared to be sleeping Abe had returned to the crash site and begun hacking at the scrub to break up the outline of what was left of the aircraft – its tail was twenty yards away, one wing nearby, its ribs standing proud since Abe had stripped off its doped canvas skin to provide a covering for his and Ted’s hide-cum-shelter. He worked until he was spent, stumped back to attend to his friend.
“What does turtle taste like?” Ted Forest inquired, stupidly embarrassed to have to rely on his friend to wipe his nether regions like a baby, and generally attempt to clean him up somewhat.
“Food, hopefully!”
Abe knew he had to keep moving or he would stiffen up, doze off and be useless for the rest of the day. He stumbled back down to the surf to dunk himself, and Ted’s now ragged trousers – he had had to tear the left leg to shreds to splint up his broken leg that first day on Little Inagua - into the gently roiling, marvellously clear waters. The cold soothed his angry shoulder. He floated awhile, then when some minutes later he heard aircraft, far to the south he peered, unavailingly into the blue skies.
He must have passed out again soon afterwards because the next thing he knew he came around to discover he had washed up on the beach.
He retched uncontrollably.
Dammit, I must have swallowed some sea water!
Back at the hide in the scrub he stretched his shirt and his friend’s trousers over the top of the awning to dry in the afternoon sun, and mechanically now, carried the empty again water canteen on his latest trek to a rain pool.
Most of the time he was operating like a man in a dream.
He returned to stoke the ‘turtle fire’ at least twice before evening, making another journey to fetch brackish water from a closer, newly found rain pool, brushing past feral donkeys and goats who seemed to have no memory whatsoever of their fright of a day or so ago…
Briefly, Abe became obsessed attempting to reconstruct a timeline of recent events.
We crashed early in the morning, that means we have been on the island two, or three days?
The exercise defeated him.
Abe gave up trying to keep track, he simply did not have the energy or the spare mental capacity.
Using a stick, he rolled the scorched turtle out of the cinders as the sun began to set.
One part of his mind wondered what had befallen Matthew Town that morning. The outpost was far below the horizon and the aircraft must have flown south after their attack.
The blade of the hand axe careened off the top of the shell.
Abe swore out aloud.
With the stick he rolled the headless turtle onto its back, tried to hack at the belly carapace which, after a third blow, split with a satisfying, brittle ‘crack’.
He was so preoccupied hacking and prising at the shell to get at what looked like pink cooked flesh, that when he glanced up, he blinked incredulously, disbelieving the evidence of his eyes, possibly for several long seconds at the sight of the ship unhurriedly cruising east through the five-mile-wide channel between Great and Little Inagua Islands.
The ship, a warship, looked…odd.
Like something out of a very old book…
Three slim funnels, the first two belching thick black plumes of coal smoke, a low hull with a minimal bridge and after searchlight platform, no turrets but single-gunned mounts, each with a blast shield, forward of the bridge, amidships – mounted on the beam – and aft. And the bow was more like the ram he had seen on pictures of Greek triremes of classical antiquity than anything remotely contemporary.
The vessel was too distant to make out a name on her prow or stern, and what looked like a two-digit pennant number on her hull below the bridge was equally indecipherable.
Abe cursed his inattention.
That was no Royal Navy ship; had it been he might have missed the one chance he got to signal, the one chance he got to save his and Ted’s life…
The signal gun was back at their makeshift redoubt in the dunes.
Worse, he had no idea how effective his attempts to disguise the wreck of the Sea Fox had been, or if he was visible squatting down beside it. He had seen no sign of human habitation or even of occasional visits on the island; therefore, any sighting by a passing ship would inevitably give rise to, in this case, hugely unwanted curiosity.
Belatedly, he flattened himself in the scrub.
It was over an hour later that he brought turtle meat and a re-filled canteen of water back to Ted Forest, who insisted on sitting upright once Abe had painfully helped him back into his now salt encrusted trousers.
“That’s better,” his friend quipped feebly. “A chap hates to be exposed in public. Especially, if one is likely to have to entertain guests.”
“You saw that ship?” Abe queried. He did not ask his friend how he had raised himself high enough to see through the undergrowth.
“Bolivar class light cruiser,” the other man said, wincing in discomfort as he tried to maintain his sitting position. “Five thousand tons, six six-inch guns – only four in a broadside though, a coal-burner, capable of twenty-two or three knots in her prime. That would have been the best part of forty or fifty years ago, mind you. That ship might have been laid up in reserve for most of the last twenty years.”
Abe scowled.
“Whose bloody navy, Ted?”
“Santo Domingo, Dominican most likely.”
“You should move as little as possible,” Abe admonished him. “I’m a doctor, remember. I know about these things. I have no idea how your wound hasn’t opened up again…”
“You’ve been looking after the both of us like a real trooper for the last two or three days,” Ted Forest retorted with enfeebled defiance. He paused, thought about it, “or however long we’ve been here already, with a bloody bullet hole in your shoulder!” Abe’s friend pointed out. “Trust me, you look as crocked as I must feel. And just so you know, I’m dying of shame just lying here doing nothing…”
The distant sound of a ship’s horn reverberated across the island.
Perturbingly, the one call was quickly answered by another.
Both men scrabbled to see through the tops of the surrounding vegetation, peering to the south from where another vessel was approaching. When she turned to reveal her silhouette, the two downed airmen knew immediately that she was a sister of the first cruiser. This time they glimpsed the flags flying from her main mast and stern jack, a white cross on a red and blue background.
“Dominican,” they both murmured.
“Those planes this morning,” Abe mused, “now these old ironclads? Here? Now? We’re sitting on British sovereign territory; it’s as if they want a really big war, Ted?”
