The early morning breeze had died.
Flies began to swarm over his head.
How long would it be before the Navy told Kate that he was missing?
A day or two more?
He tried to put Kate’s face in the centre of his mind’s eye.
Only days ago, he had bounced their son on his knee.
He had made an absolute pig of himself with Kate; she had laughed and giggled and incited him to carry on…
Abe did not remember stumbling, or falling.
He regained consciousness staring at the hooves of two donkeys, both of which were standing over him viewing him as if they did not quite know what to make of the strange, bipedal creature who lay on the boggy ground next to a long, shallow rain pool.
Abe tried to piece things together.
I squatted down to refill the canteen?
No, he remembered nothing.
This rain pool looked different from the other one.
Bigger, a lot longer and perhaps, deeper, clearer. He was still holding on to the soaked strap of the canteen, which was half-submerged. Something unyielding was pressing into his stomach. He rolled onto his right side, discovering he was lying on his gun.
The two donkeys were not alone. He saw one, then another goat, scrawny beasts foraging five or six paces away. Feral, as good as tame.
No fear of humans…
Abe’s hand closed around the but of the revolver, he aimed and fired, twice. Around him there was loud squealing, panicky braying and a rush of hooves. He had no idea if he had hit anything.
He rolled onto his back and stared at the sky.
Waited for his strength to return.
Presently, sitting up he looked around. There was nothing to be seen from his low vantage point except scrubby bushes and a few stunted trees. In the distance birds circled, riding the updrafts as the heat of the day built up.
Fill the bloody canteen, man!
On his hands and knees, half in the water he tried to take the cleanest water closest to the surface, relieved that his thoughts were, at last, clearing, clarifying. Unlike the puddle around him.
Nothing I can do about that!
Abe staggered to his feet.
Waited for the nausea to pass, tried to focus. Instead of turning his head he moved his whole body, shifting his feet by small increments so that he could survey the surrounding bushes.
Still he saw nothing.
I must have hit something!
Two bullets at point blank range, I must have hit something!
He began to look anew, harder this time.
What was that?
He took a couple of faltering steps, began to push through the waist high scrub. Even then, he almost fell over the carcass before he saw it.
A small goat: white, dirty brown flecked with black. An immature male, he decided. He exhaled a ragged sigh of relief. If he had downed a donkey, he would never have been able to drag it back to the beach.
One bullet had nicked the animal’s right fore leg, probably breaking it, the other had gone through its shoulder. This round was the killer, the unfortunate beast had bled out in a minute or so. Abe breathed a sigh of relief; he hated it when an animal suffered in the kill.
Slowly, carefully, he returned to the rain pool to search for his gun. Finding it, he stuffed it inside his shirt and waistband and went back to the dead goat, contemplating for some minutes how best to take it back to the crash site.
He tried to convince himself he could sling it over his shoulder, ideally, his uninjured one. No. Bad idea. He would have to drag it, by the hind legs.
The sooner I start the sooner I’ll get back to Ted.
Remember the canteen, man!
Abe realised he was talking to himself.
Sign of madness. Or delayed shock. Or a bang on the head. The latter would explain the headache. Of course, thirst might be a contributory factor. He had to be dehydrated…
Too much thinking, not enough doing!
He drank straight from the pool.
Briefly, he passed out again and came too lying on his side in the cooling muddy water.
Eventually, he picked himself up.
He grabbed the goat’s back hooves, began to pull it towards the rain pool. Each time the carcass caught against a bush or bumped over a root the pain jarred through his whole torso even though his left arm still hung stiffly, mostly useless at his side.
He thought about all those times he and Kate had been out in the woods in the Mohawk Valley, stalking – when they were not fooling about – critters and when they were older, bigger prey with that long rifle borrowed from Tsiokwaris. How quiet they had been! How careful not to spook anything, wraiths in the undergrowth, as if they were a part of the forest itself.
Here, he had just blasted away at a herd of curious, unsuspecting beasts with no real idea what was in front of his gun, and taken down a young goat almost by accident.
He trudged forward, wincing with every step.
Yes, fooling about with Kate in the foothills of the Catskills had been a heck of a lot more fun than this game!
Abe tried very hard to cling to that thought as each step seemed to be through treacle. By the time he heard the surf on the offshore reefs again he was almost treading water.
Back beside Ted Forest… at last, he propped the canteen upright.
“I have to let this stand awhile, let the mud in the water settle,” he explained, his own throat burning, hoarse.
The man on the ground muttered something inaudible, incomprehensible.
“I shot a goat,” Abe explained.
Ted Forest forced a parody of a grin.
He croaked: “I couldn’t possible eat a whole goat, old man.”
This lifted Abe’s spirits.
“I plan to cook it first.”
“Oh, well, that’s different…”
Chapter 5
Thursday 6th April
HMS Perseus, 35 Miles SSE of Sable Island, North Atlantic
The forty-thousand-ton aircraft carrier was battering her way west against the rising seas and howling winds of a force eight gale at twenty-three knots. Every few minutes she shipped white water over her enclosed, clipper bow and the whole ship seemed to reverberate like a huge sounding board.
Commander Alexander Lincoln Fielding shuddered to think what conditions must be like on the smaller ships struggling to keep up with the Perseus and the flagship, the fifty-thousand-ton impregnable castle of steel that was HMS Tiger – or as everybody affectionately called her, ‘the Big Cat’ – and the larger of the four cruisers now in hand with Task Force 5.2.
Even from his position high above the rain and windswept flight deck in the Combat Air Wing – CAW – Commander’s chair in ‘Flight Control’, the light cruiser Dido and the more distant, screening destroyers bobbed into and out of sight, disappearing into the troughs of the long, precipitous Atlantic rollers as the Task Force defied the weather.
“They said I’d find you up here!”
Alex half-turned – gazing out across the magnificent, angry, primal confusion of the churning grey seascape was seductively mesmeric – and grinned at Lieutenant Commander Simon Foljambe, RNAS, the CO of the carrier’s strike wing of eighteen Sea Eagle torpedo bombers.
Built to operate up to eighty fixed wing aircraft and half-a-dozen of the new helicopters, presently, Perseus had a complement of just thirty-nine aircraft: the seventeen Goshawk Mark IV interceptor-scouts of Alex’s 7th New York Squadron, the fifteen Sea Eagles, eight of which were configured in a torpedo-bomber role, four ancient Bristol Monarch biplane reconnaissance ‘string bags’, and three of the semi-operational, frankly experimental, Isle of Wight Light Aircraft Company’s Newport helicopters, two-man machines capable of performing short-range search and rescue missions and transferring a pair of passengers from ship to ship, although not in this weather.