They took turns to watch for Pengulling. In last light they spotted it far out to sea, heading south as if towards home. Nav had come back, and they had somehow missed him, and he them. Pengulling looked like a vessel on which there was no dissent now, as it moved definitely Australia-wards.
That night the monsoon started. They sat up under ground-sheets and discussed their situation. Maybe they should paddle south to Pompong Island and live there off the cache of supplies till the monsoon ended, and then when the native prahus set off westwards on the trade wind, they would capture one and sail it to India, like Doucette had earlier. A little disappointing they wouldn’t be home for Christmas, but they’d be home in the end. And they were not depressed, said Leo, except that he knew the marriage would be postponed further. He confessed later that he nonetheless had a sense I would tolerate such a thing.
They began to build a hut. An old man and his grandson rowed in in a native kolek and this time Doucette went down and negotiated with the old Malay for food – a risk, but it had to be taken now. They completed their rough thatch shelter, and then finished some of their tinned rations with the fish the old man gave them for dinner, and lay down very tired and ready for a sleep, with Rufus Mortmain on watch.
And then at eight o’clock there was a sudden frail density of blackness on the water. Pengulling was back. The young men had made the nerve-wrecked Nav return yet again. Doucette and his five abandoned their hut and paddled out. The reunion – well, it can be imagined. Nav the outsider, a bucket of worms, said Leo, talking endlessly. When Leo and the others briefed them, a form of intoxication possessed the men of Pengulling. They had all voted to come back, they told Doucette, except for Nav who had been incapable of electoral activity. Yet he still got the navigation and steering right, and so there was a kind of admirable quality to him also.
Everyone agreed, around dinner tables afterwards, that the trip back had been – yes, boring. The professional warrior Doucette claimed that these were the necessary longueurs a professional soldier had to face, and that they should be grasped for the sake of contemplation. (As if he were not himself the soul of impatience.) The blazing blue nothing at the centre of each second, he asserted, had to be seized.
Meanwhile, as his sailors spoke of boredom, Doucette knew that Ulysses did not get home without passing through Scylla and Charybdis, Scylla being the six-headed monster which guarded its cave by lashing forth and devouring mariners by the half-dozen; and Charybdis being the maelstrom. Doucette knew that in surviving Charybdis, Ulysses lost a swathe of ship-mates. Doucette’s Scylla and Charybdis were that narrow hole in the gate, Lombok Strait. Nav was anxious about it for days before, in a continuous frenetic state, barking at the men but fussy about the duties of navigation which would get him safely back between the two monstrous shores, Bali to the one side, Lombok to the other.
During the afternoon of the approach to the strait, Nav was in a flighty condition, repeatedly talking to himself, said Leo, mumbling coordinates. In darkness he was calmer and worked better, and he hoped to be through by dawn. Chesty Blinkhorn, who was on lookout with his head through the awning atop the wheelhouse, reported the phosporescence of the bows of another ship coming up on them from astern and overtaking them with ease at a distance of a mile. It looked like a Japanese minesweeper or a patrol boat, but seventy-five yards long, he reported. Blacked out, it had the muteness of a blind monster, but its flag could be seen. In the wheelhouse Nav recited to himself a continuous stream of prayers and curses. Mortmain, naked but for a monocle, packed explosives around the radio, enough to break the back of the Pengulling if they were set off. Bantry put his rosary beads around his neck, Leo noticed, and lifted a silenced Sten gun to one of the flaps in the after-awning. Everyone of them resigned himself to bloody, explosive death. Mortmain and Leo, observing the other vessel through glasses, could see the lookouts on the Japanese vessel. On somebody’s order, the Japanese ship kept pace with the Pengulling, slowing down to a crawl to do so.
What were Leo’s true thoughts at this moment, if he knew them in the first place? He would have told me in the end, of course, if we had been married long enough, or it would have emerged in some illness or scream. Five minutes passed of the most intense anguish. The minesweeper or whatever it was kept level pace with the creeping two-knot Pengulling. The Japanese vessel possessed two cannon, one on its fore deck and the other on the apron in front of the bridge. Leo did not know their calibre, but it was obvious to him that either could obliterate them. So they lived for five minutes with the bitter certainty of what was to befall them, a certainty which only the young and irrationally hopeful could sustain.
But for no reason then, the big vessel peeled away westwards, in the direction of Surabaya. It could normally be surmised, as the men hugged and clapped each other’s backs, that the Japanese watch officer, who must have had authority over the helm, had decided that so late at night, and so close to the end of his watch, he did not wish to initiate the rigmarole of searching a fishing vessel for little result. He had been sloppy, he had wanted his bunk, and his discretion and sloppiness had saved them.
I wish I could have heard that laughter. I wish I could plug into it at will. Rosary beads and suicide pills hanging not yet required from their necks. The rest of us are cut out of its echoes, however. It was one of those moments you had to be present at to understand how succulent it was. Another item for the legend, and another chain. The lucky Boss Doucette. Even Japanese naval officers-of-the-watch succumbed to the spell inherent in his blessed plans.
On a permissive riptide, Pengulling swept through the Lombok Strait. And after what had happened to them, they did not mind the tides which then, beyond the strait, ran up contrary to delay them. For after a further day they pulled down their Japanese flag and the flag of the Singapore port administration. They were in range of Australian coastal bombers. Nav suffered a burst of manic delight, and ordered the wireless operator to send a message to a friend of his, an American at Potshot, with the news that Lombok Strait was lightly patrolled.
The others could hear Doucette chastising Nav in the wheelhouse and, later in the day, Doucette made a speech over the evening meal, eaten under awnings on the tanks amidships, which Leo recorded in his occasionally kept diary. It would seem, said Doucette, from a rash radio message recently sent, that some of the party expected to be welcomed back with parades, and to have our expedition written up in the weekend newspapers and made a newsreel of. I’ll tell you now, said Doucette, that will not happen. The Pengulling will be used again, and then there may be further raids on Singapore and other places using the methods we used. If you think your exploits are going to be spoken of in pubs, and that decorations will come plentiful and fast, then I suggest you should avoid any further association with this type of operation. In the meantime, you have the satisfaction of the secret knowledge of what you did.