“What’s our plan?”
“Hopefully, they won’t find us before nightfall.”
That was a forlorn hope if ever there was one, the day was hardly half-run.
“I heard you’re quite handy with a long rifle?” Ted asked rhetorically. He was too knocked about for them to attempt to ‘leg it’ further into the interior of the island, and he knew, he just knew, that there were no circumstances in which his friend would even think about abandoning him to his fate. “Well, if that fellow Albert Stanton is to be believed.”
Abe half-turned, grinned.
“I know which end the bullets come out of,” he retorted wryly.
“It’s always good to know about a thing like that.”
There was a deal of hand-waving and shouting going on near the beach. More men were trudging along the shore line.
“I think they plan to form a proper search line,” Abe warned, watching the Dominicans affixing bayonets to their Mausers. “The eastern end of the line is going to pass a little to our right.”
Not that this would help a great deal.
One of the Dominicans was bound to glance to their right at the wrong moment and then the game would be up.
“So, what’s the plan?” Ted Forest inquired a second time.
“I plan to start picking off the chaps at the far, western end of the line when they get to about two hundred yards away. You hang onto your Webley, some of the blighters are bound to go to ground. You can blaze away at them when they break cover. But,” Abe added, “not until I tell you to, okay?”
“Understood. Do you mind if I break into the biscuit tin while we’re waiting? All this fear of impending death tosh does wonders for a chap’s appetite.”
“Be my guest, old man.”
The Dominicans advanced unhurriedly, cradling their rifles in their arms, eyes scanning the ground ahead of them with the suspicion of men wary of inadvertently treading on a poisonous snake. The line soon became a little ragged as some men encountered undergrowth they had to bypass, and others paused to prod scrubs and brush with their bayonets.
The steel glinted wickedly in the glare of the tropical sun.
Minutes ticked by.
Abe drew a bead on his first target.
Back and muzzle sights aligned upon the prey.
Next to him Ted Forest was munching on a chunk of what he described as Kendall Mint Cake, apparently a thing hikers and walkers in the Old Country swore by but which was unfamiliar to the Son of the Hunter.
Abe’s finger closed on the trigger.
The first shot would be more speculative than was ideal; afterwards, he would understand the Mauser better, be at one with its action. That was not to say he did not confidently expect to at least ‘wing’ his prey; simply that he did not trust himself to go for a head shot.
He held his breath.
Stilled his soul.
Nestled the stock of the rifle into his right shoulder.
His heart almost erupted out of his chest when the great, reverberating boom of a big ship’s foghorn thundered across the island.
“Fuck!” He spat, rolling onto his back and sliding down to join Ted Forest at the foot of the shallow back slope of the dune.
His friend was nearly as alarmed as he was.
“What?”
“There’s a bloody great big battleship in the channel. I was too preoccupied with the first shot to notice it until that bloody fog horn sounded!”
Abe’s pulse was still racing.
He took a couple of long, deep breaths and squirmed back to the lip of the low rise. His eyes widened. The search line had disintegrated, the Dominicans had shouldered their weapons and were plodding back towards the beach.
The ‘battleship’ – now he looked at it properly it seemed very low in the water, and oddly for-shortened, its gun turrets huge in proportion to the rest of the ship – was idling, water churning under her transom as her shafts went astern.
The ironclad cruiser anchored three hundred yards off the beach had not moved.
Ted Forest had joined his friend, painfully, to view the new arrival.
“She must be looking to anchor,’ he declared. “The water farther out must be too deep. It’s an idea place for big ships because Great Inagua provides shelter from the westerly trade winds. Old coal-burners look for every opportunity to damp down their boilers. Coaling a ship at sea is a beast of a business, or so I am reliably informed.”
The two friends continued their watching brief.
“There we go, she’s let go her stern chains!” This, Ted offered in confirmation of his original observation.
From their vantage point the old ironclad cruiser’s ram bow partially overlapped with the fo’c’sle of the odd-looking battleship, meaning the cruiser’s bridge appeared to sit on top of the big ship’s forward main battery turret.
Ted Forest realised his friend was sighting down the barrel of the Mauser at the two ships.
“The battleship has to be one of the Ferdinands,” he explained distractedly. “She has to be the best part of half-a-mile away,” he added, speculatively.
“I reckon it’s about seven hundred yards from hereabouts to her bridge,” Abe returned.
“What sort of shot is that?”
“With a telescopic sight, point blank,” his friend re-joined. “With the metal sights, assuming the gun wasn’t damaged when the Sea Fox went up, not so straightforward. Especially, as I’ve never held one of these German guns before.” Abe corrected this: “Actually, the only similar vintage gun I’ve ever fired was an old Martini-Henry with a .303-calibre barrel-liner. Seriously, I mean. I did the usual range time with Enfield carbines and assault rifles during my basic training, before you and I met.”
Ted Forest knew his friend had been awarded his marksman’s badge, although as an officer in the RNAS he never wore it.
“But you can hit what you’re shooting at from here?”
“Eight, perhaps nine times out of ten,” Abe guessed. “But this is a bad firing position.”
“Why?” Ted asked innocently, genuinely curious.
“Ideally, I’d choose a pit, not raised ground. I’d move around, too. Get a bit closer. After two or three shots the blighters will have zeroed in on me, us, and they’ve got much bigger guns than we have.”
Ted was munching contentedly on the biscuits from the emergency rations box, mulling the possibilities.
“I’ve only got twenty rounds,” Abe explained. “I’d like to mooch around the wreck site to see if I can find a few more.”
“Before we start our private little war with a Spanish battleship, you mean?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Abe agreed, baring his teeth in a disarmingly predatory smile.
Chapter 17
Monday 10th April
SMS Weser, Guantanamo Bay
Commander Peter Cowdrey-Singh had accepted the invitation of the captain of the converted merchantman, Kapitan zur See Albrecht Weitzman, a cadaverous white haired and bearded man to whom his still, all-German crew were clearly devoted, to join him on the bridge as the Vera Cruz Squadron departed Cuban waters.
Weitzman was content to allow his Navigator, a youthful Oberleutnant whose English accent unashamedly proclaimed that he had been born and brought up in the West Country, Somerset before, aged twelve, his family had moved back to Schleswig-Holsten in the early 1960s.
It was as the Weser, a fifteen-thousand-ton former fast – capable of twenty-three knots – general passenger-cargo ship, taken in hand by the Kaiserliche Marine a decade ago as part of the program to bolster its ‘fleet train’, then as now, a major obstacle to the sustainability of German oceanic ambitions, cleared the final headland and steered due south in the wake of the Lutzen, that Weitzman turned to his English ‘guest’.