The lights of the village slowly receded into the gloom.
High above their heads the stars were coming out, twinkling like diamonds in the infinite firmament. Hungry, a little faint and aching all over Melody guessed that this was one of those moments when it would have been good to have been religious, except that was a horse which had bolted years ago. God had not been with her when she still believed, or when she had needed Him most. She had trusted Him then and he had not been there for her, or actually, there at all, if she was going to be rigorously forensic about it.
As it was, she elected to wonder at the marvels of the natural universe because if she reflected on the day just passed, its deaths and its terrors, she suspected she was going to break down and her friends needed her to be strong. They all needed to be strong for each other: they were alone, truly strangers in a strange land who might have been drifting on a boundless sea as upon a river in the heart of Spain...
Chapter 40
Wednesday 5th April
Little Inagua Island
Abe had abandoned all hope of reaching the safety of either Cockburn Town or Grand Turk Island after the first very German-looking, low-wing monoplane seaplane wearing garish Spanish roundels and dazzle camouflage had rocketed past his elderly stead blazing away with its wing root-mounted machine guns.
That had not been a good moment.
Neither he◦– or Ted Forrest◦– who had gone silent and was presently slumped unconscious, or dead, his head lolling forward in the rear cockpit had seen the bastards coming.
If either of the enemy aircraft had been flown by men who knew what they were doing, or perhaps, those men had been slightly less over-excited by the prospect of shooting up the Sea Fox◦– a sitting duck by any standard◦– Abe was under no illusion he would be dead by now.
The slipstream was ripping through the gashes in the cockpit around Abe. The contents of the first aid kit beneath his chair seemed to have been scattered around his feet, the fire axe had disappeared, it too was probably skittering around the bottom of the fuselage, or had fallen out.
As it was, even if the aircraft had not been trying to fall out of the sky and his flying controls felt as if they had been shot to pieces, he would have been looking for somewhere, anywhere other than Cuban or Dominican territory to put down on.
Inevitably, without Ted Forest’s guidance he had got lost, ended up flying far too far to the east. Or at least, that was his best guess assuming that the featureless, low-lying island in the haze directly ahead of him was in fact Little Inagua. Somewhere to the south, relatively nearby, there ought to be a much bigger, inhabited land mass but that was immaterial because the Sea Fox was not going to stay in the air long enough to crash anywhere other than the island in front of him. And it was a moot point if the aircraft would hold together long enough to reach that!
Had Abe had the time or the spare mental capacity he might have decided that this was the worst day of his life. True, he had had a few tough, ‘hairy’ scrapes: that first time he landed a Bristol VII on White Bear Lake had been terrifying at the time; being separated from Kate and his son, handcuffed and beaten up crossing the border to re-enter New York had not been much fun; nor, in retrospect had that stunt nearly diving down the Achilles’s funnel been his finest hour. However, all in all, nothing really compared to the fix he was in now.
He was afraid Ted was dead; refused to think about it overlong.
The priority was to survive the coming crash and to do what he could for his friend…
Then, without warning, the engine seized.
Okay, that’s just one more damned thing!
Nothing I can do about it…
The sight of the Achilles nearly stopped in the water haemorrhaging bunker oil as fires consumed her after superstructure, boat deck and catapult amidst a constant rain of huge shell splashes was indelibly imprinted on his psyche. The forward main battery guns of the dying cruiser belched defiance still, her starboard twin 3-inch auto-cannons blasted away at her tormentors regardless of the reality that its projectiles would bounce off the armoured hides of the two big◦– both were twice Achilles’s size◦– German cruisers prowling between three and four miles from their doomed prey.
Somehow, Achilles’s battle flag still streamed, torn and ripped by splinters, singed by the fires raging on the deck below, from her main mast stays.
Do your worst; this ship will never surrender…
Abe had watched as yet another salvo bracketed Achilles, and another, this time accompanied by a sickening crimson flash among the massive waterspouts as an 8-inch round scythed into the cruiser’s vitals beneath the funnel.
Shortly afterwards, they had flown over two big destroyers, just like the killers screening the Karlsruhe fifty miles to the south east. They were obviously closing in to administer the coup de grace with torpedoes and there was nothing, absolutely nothing Abe could do about it. His frustration had been physically agonising in those seconds before the first of those German seaplanes flashed past with their guns blazing.
It was only the ridiculously fast closing speed of those Stettin Wasserflugzeug Funktioniert (Stettin Seaplane Works)◦– SWF◦– Model 157s, licenced copies of the successful BMK 57F scout with their retractable undercarriages removed and replaced with fixed floats, which had saved the lumbering Sea Fox. The enemy aircraft had come in at such a rate of knots they had barrelled past their quarry within two, or at most, three seconds of coming into the effective range of their 0.31-inch Krupp Kleinwaffenfabrik (Krupp Small Arms Factory) machine guns.
Abe had lost control of the aircraft and it had dived into the persistent haze long enough for the two BMK 157s to resume their combat air patrol above the big ships ruthlessly pounding the Achilles to death at what, for their big naval rifles, was practically point-blank range.
The Sea Fox’s intercom was lifeless and fluid from◦– only Abe’s smashed-up instruments, he fervently hoped◦– had spotted his goggles and flying jacket. Fortuitously, since instrumentation was fairly basic on a Sea Fox, most pilots were thoroughly accustomed to flying the type by the seat of their pants anyway.
Abe knew the engine had seized◦– not died of fuel starvation◦– because the two-bladed propeller was static, un-feathered and adding further drag to the powerless machine, accelerating its descent.
The Sea Fox wobbled over one white-capped reef, then another and was suddenly skimming the surface of the lagoon with the grey-brown, green-tinged land still horribly distant. Resisting every instinct to pull the stick back Abe pushed it gently forward, hoping against hope that the sea plane did not just dive straight into the water.
He sensed a fleeting moment of response through the stick.
The ground fast approaching seemed rough, rocky, patchily covered with scrub and arid bushes, Flamingos burst from somewhere to his left and… was that a donkey, no, a small herd of donkeys over to the right?
It would have ended very badly◦– or rather, even more badly than it actually did◦– if unknown to Abe the two BMK 157s had shot away most of the Sea Fox’s relatively flimsy fixed undercarriage. One of the reasons the aircraft was wallowing about was that one strut and wheel was completely gone and the other was flapping about in the slipstream, and it was this which tore off the instant the aircraft hit the ground about twenty yards beyond the jagged coral of the beach.
Abe had had to piece the sequence of events together later.