Abe coolly removed the first stripper clip, clicked home the second. As with the bullets in the first clip he had doctored their tips, hoping they would disintegrate on impact; then, even if he only nicked a man the wound might, if the round exploded on impact, still prove catastrophically disabling, possibly fatal.
He had no qualms about ‘monkeying about’ with his ammunition. There were hundreds of Spaniards – well, Dominicans, Hispanics of several hues, Cubans and their German friends out there and it was just him and Ted on the island. Besides, the bastards had already sunk his ship and shot him down without even the basic courtesy of a warning declaration of war; thus, he had no problems knowingly breaking the ‘rules of war’ laid down in the 1870s.
‘Expanding’, or so-called Dum Dum bullets, supposedly invented by an Indian Army Captain at the Dum Dum Arsenal in Calcutta, were specifically outlawed in a protocol to the Paris Treaty, along with such abominations a poison gas, the sack of captured towns and cities and all manner of unpleasantness previously meted out by conquering armies against civilian populations.
Abe drew a bead on the nearest of the two officers standing – like idiots, or incredibly brave men, which was probably the same thing in the circumstances – in the back of the cutter turning to pull around the bow of the Reina Eugenie. The men were, presumably, attempting to identify the sniper’s position on shore.
In fact, one man pointed excitedly towards Abe a split second before his sixth round took him full in the chest and bowled him backwards, out of the boat into the water.
Abe shot the other officer in the back as he appeared to be groping for his comrade’s body in the water.
Abe ignored the men now frantically rowing their boat, desperate to get behind the bulk of the battleship and careless of either the man in the water or his friend slumped unmoving across the stern gunwale.
Abe took a breath to compose himself anew.
He switched his attention to the second boat; now rowing frantically for the stern.
On the deck above it a surprisingly large number of men had not yet gone to ground. A machine gun opened fire like a distant chain saw, shooting wildly at shadows well over a hundred yards to Abe’s right.
The officers in the second boat were still sitting down, hunched low. This was not a thing any of their rowers could copy.
Abe thought that was the height of cowardice.
His eighth shot probably clattered harmlessly against the tempered steel plating of the battleship.
His ninth shot slumped the nearest officer into his comrade’s arms. The rowers, to a man, abandoned their oars and dove for the boards at their feet, leaving the surviving officer holding his dead, or dying, friend in his arms.
The man made no attempt to lower himself.
Instead, he appeared to be scanning the fatal shore.
Awaiting his death.
Abe was a man in a hurry; matching the distant motion of the boat he let his target’s torso steady in his sights and pulled the trigger.
Then, he was sliding backwards into the scrub, bracing himself to sprint for his second shooting scrape about fifty yards closer to where he had left Ted Forest.
The Reina Eugenie’s fog horn sounded once, twice, thrice.
A heavy gun, perhaps one of the battleship’s barbette mounted ‘secondaries’ erupted. The shell screamed far inland, flamingos and other birds already startled by the rifle fire rose into the air. Distantly, very distantly, the shell exploded.
Another big gun fired.
Again, the shell rocketed into the interior.
Abe tried not to laugh.
If the battleship’s secondaries could not be depressed sufficiently to hit the shoreline at this range, there was no way the Reina Eugenie’s main battery guns could be either.
Everything around him was rushing faster and faster.
But Abe was moving, thinking, acting as if he was in an impenetrable bubble of quietness, unhurried, thinking two, three stages ahead.
The killing had only just begun and he might have been born for this moment; this perfect concatenation of seemingly hopeless, violent chaos.
In this gathering storm of mayhem, he was utterly in his element, the master of murder, a hunter with a licence to do exactly what he pleased.
There were no rules other than to kill or to be killed; it made it so much easier to know that there was no escape, only the ecstatic, erotic thrill of the… hunt.
Chapter 21
Monday 10th April
Fleet Headquarters, Norfolk, Virginia
The Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral David Cuthbert Horatio, 9th Baron Collingwood, had never been under any illusions that a war in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Spain would be the ‘pushover’ that a certain mischievous clique back in Whitehall assumed it would be. To the contrary, he had always assumed that it would be a very bloody affair even if only one or two of the Spanish colonies picked up the cudgels. Now he was looking at a situation map which told him that every conceivable enemy of the British Empire in the whole region, including those in Central and along the northern shores of the Southern America continent had come to the party.
Losing the Achilles had been bad enough – no less so for the manner of the dastardly, unprovoked attack upon her – but in the last few hours the blood-letting had begun, as he had always known it would, to get out of hand.
Now it seemed that, emerging from the deep-water channel of the Mississippi, unable to manoeuvre or to take evasive action because of the surrounding mud and sand flats, HMS Indomitable had been struck by two submarine-launched torpedoes.
One of the battlecruiser’s escorting destroyers had spied a submarine’s conning tower and run the despicable vessel down. It seemed the water had been too shallow for the submarine, a three of four hundred-ton coastal design by all accounts, to fully submerge. What had obviously been a suicide attack mounted from the cover of a mangrove swamp as the Indomitable squadron reached the deeper waters of the Gulf of Spain, had ended with the submarine sunk in less than forty feet of water.
Apparently, the submersible – at this stage there was inevitably no little doubt about its actual provenance, one suggestion was that it was a vessel of the Armada de Nuevo Granada – had dived bow first into the sea bed and its stern was still above water, enabling the rescue of a handful of her men. Had it not been from the intelligence which might be wrung from the survivors Collingwood would happily have ordered his people to feed the wretches to the sharks. As it was, Indomitable, unable to steam had anchored while her list to starboard was corrected by counter-flooding, and damage control and engineering teams laboured to stem the ingress of water, and to get her back under way.
No precise casualty figures were yet available but mercifully, with the great ship having been closed up at battle stations, less than twenty deaths and serious injuries had been suffered. That said, it was already clear that Indomitable’s part in the new war was already over. Collingwood’s engineering staff was busy making arrangements to ready a floating dock at the St John’s River base in Florida. Ocean-going tugs at Bermuda and Norfolk were on standby if the great ship was unable to proceed under her own steam, and already facilities were being readied at Mobile Bay in the event Indomitable had to be towed inshore to be patched up before proceeding to Florida.
“What’s going on down at the Inagua Islands?” Collingwood inquired; his voice quiet with thoughtfulness.