With the sunset the big ships would surely send more men ashore; angry men seeking vengeance. He and his friend needed to be far inland by then.
Abe was desperately thirsty again, and trembling with hunger. He was as near to exhaustion as a man could be and still, at some level, function. Still he scrambled through the brush, night was falling fast as it always did in these latitudes.
Ted Forest almost shot him as he emerged from the darkness.
Abe collapsed on the sand, breathless.
“I thought they must have got you, old man,” his friend confessed.
“They’ll get us both if we stay here,” Abe gasped, the words cracking in his dry throat.
Ted Forest pressed a canteen into his shaking hands.
“It’s half-full,” he explained. “I knew you’d need a drink when you got back!”
Abe drained it in one draft.
The ships off shore had stopped shooting once it was full night and the ships had gone dark, not a light showing. Abe thought that was the first intelligent thing the Spanish had done all day!
Spanish… New Granadans, Cubans, Dominicans, Hispanics, they were all Spaniards, sons of the Conquistadors who had raped the Indies all those centuries ago. Until then, Abe had never really subscribed to the implicit racialism, a sense of some God-given moral superiority most people in the First Thirteen wrapped about them like a flag when it came to the… Spaniards. Even now, he felt a little guilty, dirty thinking of the men he had killed as somehow lesser, meaner folk.
But then the bastards were trying to kill him, and his friend and now they were in league with the Germans; Achilles was gone and it was all he could do, even in his weary debilitation, not to hate the fanatical mongrels on those ships…
Suddenly, a battery of brilliant beams of burning white light suddenly scorched across the island, thankfully, some distance away from the hiding place in the dunes although the wash of illumination from those fiery searchlights lit Abe and Ted Forrest’s filthy faces as if it was already morning.
Abe did not hesitate.
He rolled over, wormed up the reverse slope of the hollow and brought the Mauser to his shoulder.
He went into his routine: slowed his breathing, heart rate, quietened his mind, waited for the nearest searchlight to swing across his sights and fired.
The searchlight – high on the bridge of the Reina Eugenie – blinked out in an instant.
A second searchlight mounted somewhere aft of the ship’s stacks suddenly when dark, not so the searchlights of the nearby cruiser.
It took two rounds to snuff out one of its two probing fingers of light, another stubbornly remained in action, its loom periodically half-revealing two boats casting off from the smaller ironclad’s side.
Abe rolled onto his back and ejected the empty five-round stripper, groping for the three rounds in his pocket.
Damn…
If the worst came to the worst, one of them was for Ted, and the other was for him. He had no illusions what the men from those ships would do to them if they were captured…
“I cleaned up the other two clips,” Ted Forest reminded his friend. “And the rest of the spare rounds you left with me this morning. I reckon seven of those are okay.”
Abe had forgotten all about the gore-encrusted rounds.
“Good,” he muttered, snapping the first of fresh the clips into place, pulling back the bolt and chambering the first round. Realising he was out of breath he forced himself to lie still, on his back.
He had not realised how exhausted he was; he was forgetting things, making mistakes…
He tried to organise his jangling, slow-motion thoughts.
They still had their service revolvers, of course, but Abe knew that if they ever had to use them it would be as a last resort. The Mauser was the one thing that enabled him to keep the hunters at bay.
“We have to move,” he told Ted Forest.
His friend did not react.
“Now!” Abe hissed.
“You don’t stand a chance with me slowing you down.”
A part of Abe’s conscious mind saw the logic to this proposition; viscerally, he rejected it out of hand.
“Yeah, well, be that as it may, old chap,” he retorted irritably. “I’m not leaving you behind. If I have to, I’ll punch you on the nose and carry you. And that,” he sighed, rising to his feet, “Is that!”
He scrabbled around his friend’s day-long hideaway.
“Signal gun?” He demanded.
“In the emergency rations box with two spare cartridges, a green one and a red one, I think.”
Abe tried to inventory their weapons.
“Hatchet,” he muttered.
“It’s around here somewhere, I used to chop down a couple of saplings,” Ted explained. “Thought I might have to cover myself if the Spaniards had a spotter plane…”
“Good thinking…”
Abe’s had touched the half-buried halt of the hand axe.
He had already slung the Mauser over his good shoulder, swept up the empty water canteens in his weak, trembling left hand, now he threated the haft of the hatchet though the back of his waist band and reached down to drag Ted Forest to his feet.
It was a close-run thing as to whom this hurt the worst…
“Can you hang onto the emergency rations box, Ted.”
That signal-flare gun might yet be their salvation.
“Yes…”
He was not going to ask his friend if he could walk.
He had to walk or they were dead men.
The two men rocked unsteadily; Abe swept his right arm around his friend’s torso, Ted Forest clung to him fighting waves of dizziness that briefly distracted him from the new pain in his broken, splinted calf.
Then, they set off, limping, stumbling, agonisingly slowly directly away from the shore. After some minutes the sound of the surf receded. Splashing into a shallow water pool they collapsed. Slaked their thirst, refilled their canteens and soaking wet, shivering in the cool and coming chill of the night they shambled onward.
By the time the ships’ searchlights began again to trawl along the beach and the scrub-covered dunes they were the best part of three-quarters of a mile inland. Eventually, they fell over one too many exposed roots and lay panting, enfeebled in a heap waiting, it seemed forever, for their pain-wracked, starving bodies to regain the strength to move again.
Abe stared up at the stars wandering across the perfect jet blackness of the heavens. His hurts faded a little, his thoughts slowed.
“Ted, are you all right, old man?” He asked in a hoarse whisper.
“Yeah, never been better, old chap,” the other man retorted, still a little winded, his voice pinched with pain.
Abe started laughing and to his astonishment, so did his friend.
“I thought we were done for when the Spanish loosed off those 12-inch salvoes,” the Englishman declared.
The huge shells had rocketed over their heads like express trains travelling at the speed of sound.
“One of the beggars went right over me,” Abe confided. “I swear I felt the wind of its passing. “I didn’t hear many explosions; I reckon those big shells need to hit something solid to go off. Otherwise, they just bury themselves in the sand.”
Farther inland, Abe had glimpsed smoke rising from fires started by the random cannonade. The flames seemed to have subsided during the afternoon, leaving the darkness of the night unsullied other than by the erratically probing searchlights of the ironclads off shore.
“How many do you think you winged?” Ted Forest asked breathlessly. “I couldn’t see a damned thing from where I was.”
“Thirty,” Abe replied. “Maybe forty, or more. There were at least a dozen fellows in that boat that turned over on the reef. Early on, I got several chaps who were decked out in dress uniforms with those stupid epaulettes the Spanish like so much. Hopefully, they were senior officers. I reckon they must have been, actually. It took the fellows on those ships a long time to get their act together.” He chuckled ruefully: “Not that I’m entirely convinced they’ve got their act together even now!”