Abe had drunk at the rain pool. Planning to leave both filled canteens with his friend.
Ted Forest objected: “You need water to stay alert, old chap.”
Abe ignored this.
There was no way he could properly examine Ted Forest’s broken lower leg without tampering with the splints. He had cut away his friend’s trouser leg on the night they crashed. Prosaically, he sniffed the bruised, swollen area around the break, much to his patient’s amusement. They both smelled like particularly dirty, stinking polecats, and looked like two sun-burned, ragged escapees from the set of a pirate film.
“It must be the water that’s caused the fever,” Abe decided, not remotely reassured. “Your wounds, mine too, I suppose, aren’t about to heal up good as new out here but I can’t see,” he quirked a grimace, “or smell, any obvious infection in your leg.”
That, of itself, was nothing short of a miracle.
Although, how long it was likely to last was anybody’s guess.
By rights, they ought to be helpless hospital cases by now and that they were anything but, was a thing to be marvelled at, not questioned overlong.
Abe sighed.
If Kate was here now, she would be telling him: “Things are what they are; keep on walking forward, one step at a time…”
That was when the two men heard the utterly incongruous, distant sound of the brass band playing.
Abe reached for the Mauser and the blood-stained cartridge pouch now containing thirty-eight rounds. More recovered bullets lay in a small, blood-encrusted heap nearby, another twenty or so, half of them in two five-round 7.92-millimetre stripper clips. These needed cleaning, that would be Ted’s job while he was away.
The nearest shooting ‘pit’, a hastily excavated – with his bare hands – scrape, was some three hundred yards to the west, sited roughly parallel to the big ship’s bow.
“Go, go, go,” Ted Forest hissed.
Abe hesitated.
“Go!” His friend grinned, grabbing his RNAS service revolver. “I’ll be fine back here. If any of the beggars come ashore, I’ll crawl back to the ‘redoubt’, as agreed.”
“The ‘redoubt’ was another low dune situated some two hundred yards farther back into the, in some places, virtually impenetrable brush and scrub which covered much of the island. Ted Forest had insisted that if necessary, he would “Bloody well crawl there!”
As if to hurry Abe on his way his friend stuck out his hand.
The two men shook.
And then Abe was gone, moving at a hunched run like a wraith, forgetful of his pains and exhaustion, remembering the boy who had hunted in the woods of the Mohawk Valley with Kate, his precious Tekonwenaharake…
It was only as he settled, a little breathlessly in the sand and peered through the screen of vegetation in front of him that he realised that the big ship – he could see the name on her prow, the Reina Eugenie – had moved much closer inshore and anchored within less than a hundred yards of the waves breaking over the reefs.
At first that made no sense whatsoever.
It was some moments before Abe identified the masts of two other ships somewhere beyond the antique-looking battleship; belatedly, he surmised that the commander of the Reina Eugenie was using the reef as an anti-torpedo barrier to his north and the escorting vessels as a southward screen.
These fellows are afraid of an air attack!
Specifically, by aircraft dropping torpedoes…
Abe squeezed his eyes, tried to wipe the sheen of grit and sand off his face and hands as he slowly laid the Mauser in the crook of two limbs of a bush.
He worked the bolt and put a round in the chamber.
The straight-line action of the bolt meant he had to move his head to the side every time he chambered a round. Stupid design! It meant a rifleman had to take his eye off his target, and subsequently re-sight every shot. This was a design concept the British Army had abandoned during the Great War and never again embraced.
Things are what they are…
He estimated it was about two hundred and eighty to three hundred yards to the forward 12-inch main battery turret of the battleship. Perhaps, three hundred and twenty to the ship’s old-fashioned, open compass platform in front of the armoured conning tower.
The band was playing on the quarterdeck, somewhere in the shadow of the aft turret.
He adjusted the back sight.
The Reina Eugenie’s midship gangplank was down, and men were clambering into a small cutter.
Two officers dressed like circus clowns… and about a dozen seamen.
The oars dropped into the water and the boat began to draw away from the side of the ship. For a few seconds it seemed as if the vessel was going to run the gap in the reef to come ashore, then its course became plain. It was moving to come around the bow of the Reina Eugenie, either to carry its officers to, or to return them to, one of the other ships farther out to sea.
As if on cue, another launch rowed beneath the battleship’s stern and began to make for the gangway. A gaggle of men had stepped onto the main deck, clearly awaiting the next boat.
Had there been some kind of conference on board the battleship?
If so, the officers on deck and in that first cutter might be the commanders of the other ships at anchor.
Key men, important targets…
Abe eyed the first boat, now clumsily pulling against the tide making little headway. He looked back to the second boat, gliding up to the gangway.
Wait until both boats are clear of the ship…
Shoot the men on deck first, then the officers in the launches who would be, literally, sitting ducks bobbing up and down in the open sea.
Knowing exactly what he was going to do he waited.
His mind quietened.
He planned his first ten shots.
The Spaniards would start reacting immediately.
First there would be surprise.
Then awakening.
Confusion, panic.
How many shots before somebody realised what was happening?
Three? Four? Five?
He swore to make those first shots count.
Aim for the upper torso.
Breathe slowly, breathe regularly.
Pause breath at the moment one squeezed the trigger…
The Mauser kicked hard into his right shoulder; oddly, his brain did not register the bark of the gun, only the brief muzzle smoke, instantly carried away on the slight onshore breeze he had been focusing so hard to compensate for in his initial aim.
An epauletted figure at the head of the gangway reeled backward, taken somewhere on his left side. He crumpled to the deck approximately nine hundred feet away from Abe.
Recognising he had over-adjusted for the light wind Abe had jerked his face aside and chambered a new round as the man fell. A second man’s head seemed to explode as the rifle bucked anew. But that was only a glimpsed impression; the next target was always the only thing that mattered.
The men around the victims crouched down.
Inadvertently, this provided broader, static aiming points.
Abe suspected he missed everything with his third shot.
Not so his fourth and fifth.
The deck of the battleship was suddenly a veritable hornet nest of activity. The sound of the ironclad’s loud speakers and crazily ringing bells drifted to landward, the band had stopped playing, the parade on the fo’c’sle was disintegrating into a chaos of stampeding men.