Sebastian saw the launch had rounded to, and that her crew were clambering aboard and splashing around her, but da Silva had throttled back and the engine was burbling,. Once more the aircraft dropped towards the river under half power. He levelled out fifty feet above the water, and flew sedately, keeping away from the launch and well towards the northern side of the channel.
"What are you doing?" Sebastian mouthed the question at da Silva. In reply the pilot made a sweeping gesture with his right hand at the thick bank of mangroves alongside.
Puzzled, Sebastian stared into the mangroves. What was the fool doing, surely he didn't think that... There was a hump of high ground on the bank, a hump that rose perhaps one hundred and fifty feet above the level of the river. They came up to it.
Like a hunter following a wounded buffalo, moving carelessly through thin scattered bush which could not possibly give cover to such a large animal, and then suddenly coming face to face with it so close, that he sees the minute detail of crenellation on the massive bosses of the horns, sees the blood dripping from moist black nostrils, and the dull furnace glare of the piggy little eyes in the same fashion Sebastian found the Blitcher.
She was so close he Could see the pattern of rivets on her plating, the joints in the planking of her foredeck, the individual strands of the canopy of camouflage netting spread over her. He saw the men on her bridge, and the gun-crews behind the pom-poms and the Maxim machine guns on the balconies of her upper works From her squatting turrets her big guns gaped at him with hungry mouths, revolving to follow the flight of the machine.
She was monstrous, grey and sinister among the mangroves, crouching in her lair, and Sebastian cried aloud in surprise and alarm, a sound without shape or coherence, and at the same moment the engine of the aeroplane bellowed in full power, as da Silva thrust the throttle wide and hauled the joystick back into his crotch.
As the aircraft rocketed upwards, the deck of the Blitcher erupted in a thunderous volcano of flame. Flame flew in great bell-shaped ejaculations from the muzzles of her Machine guns. Flame spat viciously from the multi-barrelled pom-poms and the machine guns on her upper works
Around the little aircraft the air boiled and hissed, disrupted, churned into violent turbulence by the passage of the big shells.
Something struck the plane, and she was whirled upwards like a burning leaf from a garden bonfire. Wing over wing she rolled, her engine surging wildly, her rigging groaning and creaking at the strain.
Sebastian was flung forward, the bridge of his nose cracked against the edge of the cockpit and instantly twin Jets of blood spurted from his nostrils to douse the front of his jacket.
The machine stood on her tail, propeller clawing ineffectively at the air, engine wailing in over rev. Then she dropped away on one wing and one side swooped sickeningly downwards.
Da Silva fought her, feeling the sloppiness of the stall in her controls come alive again as she regained air-speed. The fluffy tops of the mangroves rushed up to meet him, and desperately he tried to ease her off. She was trying to respond, the fabric wrinkling along her wings as they flexed to the enormous pressure. He felt her lurch again as she touched the top branches, heard above the howl of the engine the faint crackling brush of the vegetation against her belly. Then suddenly, miraculously, she was clear; flying straight and level, climbing slowly up and away from the hungry swamp.
She was sluggish and heavy, and there was something loose under her. It banged and thumped and slapped in the slipstream, jarring the whole fuselage. Da Silva could not dare to manoeuvre her. He held her on the course she had chosen, easing her nose slightly upwards, slowly gaining precious altitude.
At a thousand feet he brought her round in a wide gentle turn to the south, and banging and thumping, one wing heavy, she staggered drunkenly through the sky towards her rendezvous with Flynn O'Flynn.
Flynn stood up with slow dignity from where he had been leaning against the hole of the palm tree.
"Where are you going?" Rosa opened her eyes and looked up at him.
"To do something you can't do for me."
"That's the third time in an hour!" Rosa was suspicious.
"That's why they call it the East African quickstep," said Flynn, and moved off ponderously into the undergrowth.
He reached the lantana bush, and looked around carefully.
He couldn't trust Rosa not to follow him. Satisfied, he dropped to his knees and dug with his hands in the loose sand.
With the air of an old-time pirate unearthing a chest of doubloon he lifted the bottle from its grave, and withdrew the cork. The neck of the bottle was in his mouth, when he heard the muted beat of the returning aircraft. The bottle stayed there a while longer, Flynn's Adam's apple pulsing up and down his throat as he swallowed, but his eyes swivelled upwards and creased in concentration.
With a sigh of intense pleasure he re corked and laid the bottle once more to rest, kicked sand over it, and set course for the beach.
"Can you see them?" he shouted the question at Rosa as he came down through the palms. She was standing out in the open. Her head was thrown back so that the long braid of her hair hung down to her waist behind. She did not answer him, but the set of her expression was hard and strained with anxiety. The men standing about her were silent also, held by an expectant dread.
Flynn looked up and saw it coming in like a wounded bird, the engine stuttering and surging irregularly, streaming a long bluish streak of oily smoke from the exhaust manifold, the wings rocking crazily, and a loose tangle of wreckage hanging and swinging under the belly where one Of the landing wheels had been shot away.
It sagged wearily towards the beach, the broken beat of the engine failing so they could hear the whisper of the wind in her rigging.
The single landing-wheel touched down on the hard sand and for fifty yards she ran true, then with a jerk she toppled sideways. The port wing hit into the sand, slewing her towards the edge of the sea,
her tail came up and over.
There was a crackling, ripping, tearing sound; and in a dust storm of flying spend she cartwheeled, stern over stern.
The propeller tore into the beach, disintegrating in a blur of flying splinters, and from the forward cockpit a human body was flung clear, spinning in the air so that the outflung limbs were the spokes of a wheel. It fell with a splash in the shallow water at the edge of the beach, while the aircraft careened onwards, tearing herself to pieces. A lower wing broke off, the guy wires snapping with a sound like a volley of musketry. The body of the machine slowed as it hit the water, skidding to a standstill on its back, with the surf washing around it. Da Silva hung motionless in the back cockpit, suspended upside down by his safety-straps, his arms dangling.
The next few seconds of silence were appalling.
"Help the pilot! I'll get Sebastian." Rosa broke it at last.
Mohammed and two other Askari ran with her towards where Sebastian was lying awash, a piece of flotsam at the water's edge.
"Come on!" Flynn shouted at the men near him, and lumbered through the soft fluffy sand towards the wreck.