At four o’clock in the afternoon, Doucette told each team what they were to do, and the bearing they were to take, and the targets they were to approach, and Mortmain and Leo recited it all back. I have no doubt at all that the mere recital of these details filled the men with certainty. They let the dark settle and slipped their folboats into the open at last. Mortmain and Chesty headed due north, right through the unguarded boom gate and into Keppel Harbour, into the very mouth of the port. The Empire Docks themselves were so heavily lit that they were forced to stay in the outer harbour, choosing first a 6000-ton heavily laden cargo vessel, Moji Maru, which they surmised was carrying rubber. After placing three mines along its length, they sidled up to the 6000-ton vessel Tatsula Maru – it still had its English pre-war lettering under its Japanese title. A 5–6000-ton vessel, unladen, was their next. Fixing the limpets, the contact, the fuses, three by three per ship, they were able to time themselves by the chimes at St Andrew’s Cathedral clearly heard across the water every quarter of an hour. They were done in less than an hour and a half and slipped away south for Pandjang, as ordered by Doucette, and were greatly favoured by the tide.
In the Singapore roads, Doucette and Bantry, and Leo and Jockey had diverged. In the darkness, Doucette could find none of the ships he had been watching and selecting over past days. All shipping at Examination Anchorage was gone or impossible to see out here in the fast-flowing Phillip Channel. But he found a fine big tanker, the Tiensin Maru, 11,000 tons, and placed all nine mines by the engine room and along the stern and the propeller shaft. He wanted it to explode in all compartments, to create a Singapore sensation by being dramatically and visibly blown apart.
Leo and Rubinsky went right into the Bukum Island docks, a few miles south-west of Singapore, and as in Townsville months before, heard sentries and welders yelling jocularly to each other. It was ten o’clock, so Leo and Jockey had the time to examine the entire length of the wharf. They mined the dark side of the bows of a 6000-ton freighter, Subuk Maru, and then exhausted by stress and effort, Leo wrapped an arm around the ship’s anchor chain for a while and he and Jockey rested, within earshot of the sentries’ banter and the sizzle of oxy torches. They ate chocolate in the dark, surveying the wharf area, of which Leo made sketches and notes as they tarried, invisible in the shadow of the enemy’s bows.
The tide changed at eleven o’clock, and they let it take them to their next ship, a modern freighter, the Hoshi. A curious thing happened to Leo and Rubinsky while they were working on their second ship. A light went on in a porthole above them and a face appeared, a Japanese face, seeking the cooler night air in his sweltering sleeping quarters. He looked right at Leo and Rubinsky but did not see their stained faces or did not notice their breath. Mortmain had taught them a technique for breathing so shallowly that an animal three yards away would not hear them.
He was a very ordinary merchant seaman, a little bald, certainly no warrior. But he had chosen his ship, and so he had to await its destruction.
They could see their next target anchored in the stream, and it was well-laden and of a good size, but when they slid under the dark side of its stern, and Jockey held fast and Leo tried to affix the first magnetic mine under the water, the ship’s hull proved too rusty to take it. Leo did something extraordinary then, either out of determination or the obduracy of stress and excitement and frozen intent. He drew his commando knife, reached below the water and began scratching patches of rust away. The next time he tried the mine held, and so he had to repeat the scratching twice more, as Jockey played out the connecting detonation wire. Did any merchant seaman taking his rest in the targeted ship hear the sound? Was he too tired or accustomed to the noises of a crowded port to report it?
The third limpet having stuck, a whistle on Bukum signalled change of shift. It was one o’clock in the morning. They could get away now before the tide turned against them. Through helpful currents Leo and Rubinsky were in fact the first back to NC11, and next Mortmain and Chesty Blink-horn, who had suffered a harder time with currents. Then Doucette and Bantry came in, happy but complaining only half-jokingly of the impact of a collision they had had with Mortmain in the dark the night before, and the fact it had affected their steering and timing. Doucette was inspecting the problem by feel in the last dark hour of night when they heard the first mines go up, and then as they stood and stared during a short two and a half hours, they heard periodic explosions all over the Singapore roads, and sirens of patrol vessels and sub-hunters. In a sharp-edged early light they saw Doucette’s tanker explode beyond all possible ambition in flame and smoke as deep-dyed and effusive as that of a volcano. Doucette wept and smiled and wept, and no one blamed him. The rusty third ship marked out by Leo and Rubinsky off Bukum, already a scene of frantic alarm, seemed by full day spontaneously to erupt as if by its own volition. Leo could see its bows and stern both standing clear of the water, but only for seconds it seemed, before it accepted the force of Leo’s and Jockey’s daring and disappeared. It was a matter of awe now. Chesty Blinkhorn, muscular but very young and his world until recently restricted to a country town, said, Poor bastards, as if he had not expected till now the scope of his commando ambition, and how much mayhem it could cause. And as repetitive explosions and repetitive alarms enlivened and stunned their morning, they drank their water and ate their rations and felt like the gods and demons they had become. They hadn’t only stolen fire, they had planted it on others.
For them, exhilaration overrode all other impulses. Each detonation enlarged their legend. Doucette was keeping count by means of his telescope. With their rods and fuses and magnetic make-fasts they had sunk at least 40,000 tons of shipping and God knew what in the enemy’s cargo. Leo felt that he had nudged open his father’s prison gate, that the walls were closer to falling. And he intended to give the walls a further nudge if asked to do so. They laughed and wept on the cloud-feathery peak of NC11 as explosions tore the sky. Nothing would ever be as wonderful a riposte as this, nothing would ever be as stylish. They had intended to steal the enemy’s sense of safety, but were astonished now they had done so.
They did not fall asleep until late afternoon, and behind their closed eyes the wonderful explosions recurred. With his head down, Doucette had murmured, Did you fellows notice how easy it is for native junks and prahus to come and go? They slept on groundsheets on their inured backs, and when they woke the awe at what they had done recurred to them and authorised all their future plans.
That night they took three separate courses back to the meeting place at Pandjang Island. They were next to invisible on a normal sea. They knew and believed that. With daylight, Leo and Jockey simply turned to a convenient island shore, hid their folboat, and found the boon of a Chinese graveyard, where they were able to hide and rest, having been assured by IRD that the Malays kept away from Chinese graveyards. They needed a deeper sleep than they were able to get amongst the dead that day, but they were still stimulated. The tale of what they had done fuelled them overnight, and the repetitiveness of their single blade stroke induced in them a sort of euphoric meditation. In the darkness they skirted pagars lit by kerosene lanterns and heard fishermen within or from the shore, and they were as unseen as their deeds entitled them to be. A Sumatra came rushing out of the west and blinded them with rain and jolted them about on waves, but did not much delay them in the end. Before the next dawn, at two in the morning, they got to Pandjang and the bay where they had swum with the otters. The others all turned up within the hour, the Boss still complaining of the damage Rufus Mortmain had done to his steering.