Abe dropped back and walked alongside Ted Forest’s litter for a while. His friend was semi-conscious, heavily drugged; the SBS men had no shortage of morphine and other medicines.
Each Marine carried an assault rifle, an automatic pistol holstered on their hip, a wicked 8-inch scalping knife strapped to either right or left thigh, grenades of various flavours on their webbing, along with countless spare magazines for their Enfields and their pistols, bedding rolls, and ration packs.
Abe thought he remembered the SBS men brewing up on a small, portable stove… but he might have imagined that.
The ‘spare’ trooper marking time near the stretcher party also carried a lightweight radio set with a ten feet whip aerial. He had earphones, a chin microphone and seemed to be constantly in communication with… something or somebody.
“Every patrol carries a gismo that enables it to know exactly where it is night or day, rain of snow,” Tom McPherson explained at one point. “Well, within about ten or twenty yards, leastways.”
Abe remarked that kit like that would be useful on an aeroplane.
“One day,” the other man chuckled. “One day. Right now, it’s on the secret list. The list that’s headed ‘drink poison before reading’.”
Abe was in a state of collapse when he finally crumpled into the bushes just short of the northern shoreline of Little Inagua. He heard the surf breaking.
Was there a reef out there?
Or were the waves breaking on the beach?
He did not care; he was too far gone.
The Marines set Ted Forest down beside him.
“Are we dead yet, Abe?” His friend inquired hoarsely, as an SBS man raised his head to hold a canteen to his lips.
“No, not yet. I hurt far too much to be dead.”
“There’s plenty of time to die another time, sirs,” the SBS man holding the canteen said, without a scintilla of irony.
Abe had assumed that perhaps there might be a seaplane waiting to extract the SBS patrol. He waited, hearing no sound of approaching engines.
He heard only the waves breaking.
Then…
“There she is, chaps!”
Still, Abe heard nothing.
Strong arms were hauling him upright, and effortlessly lifting Ted Forest’s deadweight.
“Smartly now,” Lieutenant Tom McPherson hissed.
Abe stumbled down the beach, into the surf, and fell into a boat. He bounced against the bulbous, yielding flank of the vessel.
An inflatable boat…
A small motor whirred.
“Careful there!”
The call came from the darkness to his right.
There was another boat; now the Marines where wrestling Ted Forest’s litter into it.
Abe stared into the night.
He saw no ship, no seaplane bobbing beyond the surf.
The men manning the boat he was in wore matt black uniforms, like the SBS men, their faces were corked dark, only their eyes glinted in the fading moonlight. Dawn was coming and suddenly everybody was in a crashing hurry.
And then Abe saw it.
The rounded flank of some great whale, its ventral fin rearing twenty or thirty feet out of the sea… and incongruously, there seemed to be men moving about upon its back…
Chapter 36
Wednesday 13th April
Villaseco de los Reyes, Castile and León
When it transpired that the two men with shotguns had no immediate intention of raping, or actually, of mistreating her, Henrietta or Pedro, Melody had been at something of a loss. That was what happened when one had been in fight or flight – almost entirely ‘flight’ – mode for the last month.
The older of the two men had asked who they were.
“Lady Melody and Lady Henrietta and her son, Pedro,” she had explained, encouraged that neither of the shotguns was pointed anywhere other than at the ground.
She guessed the men were father and son; they both had the same build and look about them, neither more than about five feet five inches in height, each lean from hard lives, wearing similar dark, worn jackets over cloth shirts tucked into their trousers. Each wore what looked like hobnailed boots, possibly army-issue from times when they had performed militia service.
“Mujeres importantes?” The father queried softly.
Important women…
“Si, mucho,” Melody confirmed. “Llévanos a la frontera. Di tu precio.”
Take us to the border. Name your Price.
“What about Paul Nash and Albert?” Henrietta objected.
“We’re here and they aren’t,” Melody pointed out tartly.
The older man asked if the women were fleeing from the Inquisition.
Melody nodded.
“Okay,” the man said in English, grinning to his partner. “These must be the ones.”
“What’s going on?” Henrietta demanded.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” the younger man said, his English much more heavily accented than his companion’s. “Well, not you. But you are not the first to walk this way lately.”
Melody’s head was spinning.
“Who are you?”
“The resistance,” the senior of the pair replied. “Spaniards who still have our dignity even though we were driven out of our own country by those maniacs in Madrid half a lifetime ago.”
Melody blinked, struggled to her feet.
“Sefardí occidental?” She asked, afraid she had misread something very important.
Western Sephardim?
The man nodded.
Melody breathed a sigh of relief, raised her hands, touched her chest.
“My maternal grandmother was Spanish, she came from the tradition of the Western Sephardim,” she explained. “She always kept her religious observances to herself all her life.”
Two decades ago, the Spanish throne had deflected theocratic pressure by declaring open season on what remained, or rather, had been rebuilt, of the Jewish community in its part of the Iberian Peninsula. In re-running the pogroms of the middle ages and the post-Reconquista purging of Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism and live as ‘New Christians’, the monarchy had guaranteed the support of the Holy See in its subsequent repeated clampdowns on groups of would-be ‘modernisers’.
The rest of the World had turned a blind eye to what was, by any standards, an affront to the core values of Western civilisation. But not so the children of the Diaspora, among whom Melody, granted several generations removed, philosophically if not strictly by blood or religious belief, still retained a distant kindred bond.
The two men had slung their shotguns over their shoulders.
“You were with two men?” The older man asked.
“Friends. Good friends.”
This prompted a nod. The man glanced to his younger companion. “Find them. Bring them to the camp.”
Melody felt she had to voice a warning.
“Don’t creep up on them.”
“Dangerous hombres?” She was asked.
“You have no idea.” Melody glanced to Henrietta. “No idea at all…”
“Melody,” Henrietta said lowly. “We can’t just trust these men.”
“We must trust them.” Melody said it as gently as she could, knowing the man nearby must hear every word. Presently, his eyes were searching the olive grove around them, suspicious of any movement and possibly, uncomfortable to be out and about by day.
“These hills are dangerous,” he sighed. “The Inquisition and the Federales National fear to walk these lands but there are always informers. Priests are the worst; but then they are the ones who have most to lose. Their livings, their fine houses, their prestige among the faithful, and pilgrims to rob. Spain is a country that is not a country, Castile was once my country, not Spain; so, it must be for many among us. They say the Queen was driven into exile in Lisbon, that the great families are at war with each other.” He shook his head. “My father was a jeweller in Salamanca. The Mother Church stole his life’s work, he died of grief in Portugal long before his time. So, my son and I became bandits. What does that say about my country?”