Instead he went to Rosa and took her possessively in his arms.
"Do you love me?"he asked.
"What?"she shouted above the bellow of the engine.
"Do you love me?"he roared.
"Of course I do, you fool," she shouted back and smiled up into his face before going up on tip-toe to kiss him while the slipstream of the propeller howled around them. Her embrace had passion in it that had not been there these many months, and Sebastian wondered sickly how much of it had been engendered by an outside agency.
"You can do that when you get back." Flynn prised him loose from Rosa's grip, and boosted him up into the cockpit.
The machine jerked forward and Sebastian clutched desperately to retain his balance, then glanced back. Rosa was waving and smiling, he was not certain if the smile was directed at him or at the helmeted head in the cockpit behind him, but his jealousy was swamped by the primeval instinct of survival.
Clutching with both hands at the sides of the cockpit, and his toes curling in their boots as though to grip the floorboards of the cockpit, Sebastian stared ahead.
The beach disappeared beneath the fuselage in a solid white blur; the palm trees whipped past on one side, the sea on the other; the wind tore at his face and tears streamed back along his cheeks, the machine bumped and bucked and jounced, and then leaped upwards under him, dropped back to bounce once more and then was airborne. The earth fell away gently beneath them as they soared, and Sebastian's spirits soared with them. His misgivings melted away.
Sebastian remembered at last to pull the goggles down over his eyes to protect them from the stinging wind, and godlike he looked down through them at a world that was small and tranquil.
When at last he looked back over his shoulder at the pilot, this strange and wonderful shared experience of immortality had lifted him above the petty passions of mere men, and they smiled at each other.
The pilot pointed out over the right wing tip, and Sebastian followed the direction of his arm.
Far, far out on the crenellated blue blanket of-the sea, tiny beneath vast flUffy piles of thunderhead cloud, he saw the grey shape of the British cruiser Renounce with the pate white feather of its wake fanning on the surface of the ocean behind it.
He nodded and smiled at his companion. Again the pilot pointed, this time ahead.
Still misty in the blue haze of distance, haphazard as the unfitted pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the islands of the Rufiji delta were spilled and scattered between ocean and mainland.
In the rackety little cockpit, Sebastian squatted over his pack and took from it binoculars, pencil and map-case.
It was hot. Moist itchy hot. Even in the shade beneath the festooned camouflage-nets the decks of Blitcher were smothered with hot sticky waves of swamp air. The sweat that oozed and trickled down the glistening bodies of the half-naked men who slaved on her foredeck gave them no relief, for the air was too humid to evaporate the moisture. They moved like sleep-walkers, with slow mechanical determination, manhandling the thick sheet of steel plate into its slings beneath the high arm of the crane.
Even the flow of obscenity from the lips of Lochtkamper, the engineering commander, had dried up like a spring in drought season. He worked with his men, like them stripped to the waist, and the tattoos on his upper arms and across his chest heaved and bulged as they rode on an undulating sea of Muscles.
"Rest," he grunted; and they straightened up from their labour, mouths gaping as they sucked in the stale air, massaging aching backs, glowering at the sheet of steel with true hatred.
"Captain." Lochtkamper became aware of von Kleine for the first time. He stood against the forward gun-turret, tall in full whites, the blond beard half concealing the cross of black enamel and silver that hung at his throat. Lochtkamper crossed to him.
"It goes well?" von Kleine asked, and the engineer shook his head.
, "Not as well as I had hoped." He wiped one huge hand across his forehead, leaving a smudge of grease and rust scale on his own face. "Slow," he said. "Too slow."
"You have encountered difficulties?" "Everywhere," growled the engineer, and he looked around at the heat mist and the mangroves, at the sluggish black waters and the mud banks.
"Nothing works here the welding equipment, the winch engines, even the men everything sickens in this obscene heat."
"How much longer?"
"I
do not know, Captain. I truly do not know." Von Kleine would not press him. If any man could get Blitcher seaworthy, it would be this man, When Lochtkamper slept at all, it was here on the foredeck, curled like a dog on a mattress thrown on the planking. He slept a few exhausted hours amid the whine and groan of the winches, the blue hissing glare of the welding torches and the drum splitting hammering of the riveters, then he was up again bullying, leading, coaxing and threatening.
"Another three weeks," Lochtkamper estimated reluctantly. "A month at the most if all goes as it does now." They were both silent, standing together, two men from different worlds drawn together by a common goal, united by respect for each other's ability.
A mile up the channel, movement caught their attention. It was one of the launches returning to the cruiser, yet it looked like a hayrick under its bulky cargo. It came slowly against the sluggish current, sitting so low in the water that only a few inches of freeboard showed, while its load was a great shaggy hump on which sat a dozen black men.
Von Kleine and Lochtkamper watched it approaching.
"I still do not know about that obscene wood, Captain." Lochtkamper shook his big untidy head again. "It is so soft, so much ash, it could clog the furnace."
"There is nothing else we can do," von Kleine reminded him.
When Blucher entered the Rufiji, her coal-bunkers were almost empty. There was enough fuel for perhaps four thousand miles of steaming. Hardly enough to carry her in a straight run down into latitude 45" south, where her mother ship, Esther, waited to refuel her, and fill her magazines with shell.
There was not the faintest chance of obtaining coal.
Instead von, Kleine had set Commissioner Fleischer and his thousand native porters to cutting cordwood from the forests, that grew at the apex of the delta. It was a duty that Commissioner Fleischer had opposed with every argument and excuse he could muster. He felt that in delivering safely to Captain von Kleine the steel plating from Dares Salaam, he had discharged any obligation that he might have towards the Blitcher. His eloquence availed him not at all, Lochtkamper had fashioned two hundred primitive axe heads from the steel plate, and von Kleine had sent Lieutenant Kyller up-river with Fleischer to help him keep his enthusiasm for wood-cutting burning brightly.