"I say," Gareth exclaimed. "What are you up to?"
"They catch me with arms aboard, big trouble," Papadopoulos explained.
"No arms, no trouble," and he watched his men fall on the lines that secured the big white-painted vehicle. "We do same trick with slaves, they go down pretty damn fast with the chains."
"Now, just hold on a shake. I paid you a fortune to transport this cargo."
"Where that fortune now, Major?" Papadopoulos shouted down at him derisively. "I got nothing in my pants how about you?" and the Captain turned away to urge his men on.
The turret of Priscilla the Pig opened suddenly and from it emerged the head and shoulders of Jake Barton with his hair blowing in the wind and a Vickers machine gun in his arms. He braced himself in the turret with the thick water jacketed barrel of the Vickers across the crook of his left arm, and the pistol grip firmly enclosed in his other hand.
Across his shoulder was draped a heavy necklace of belted ammunition.
He fired a roaring clattering burst, the tracer streaking in fiery white balls of flame a mere twelve inches over the Captain's head.
The Greek threw himself flat on his deck, howling with terror, and his crew scattered like a flock of startled hens, while Jake looked down on them benignly from his post in the turret.
"I think we should understand each other, Captain.
Nobody is going to touch these machines. The only way you are going to save your ship is by out sailing the Englishman, Jake called mildly.
"She can make thirty knots," protested the Captain, still face down on the deck.
"The longer you talk the less time you have," Jake told him.
"It'll be dark in twenty minutes. Turn away, and make a stern chase of it until it is dark Papadopoulos rose uncertainly to his feet, and stood blinking his one eye rapidly and miserably wringing his hands.
"Kindly move your arse," said Jake affably, and fired another burst of machine-gun bullets over his head.
The Captain dropped once again to the deck, howling the orders to bring the HirondelLe around on a course directly away from the closing British warship.
As the schooner came around on to her new course, Jake called Gareth across to him, and handed him the machine gun. "I want this bunch of bastards covered while I work with the Greek. You, Vicky and Greg can batten down the hatches on the cars in the meantime."
"Where did you get that gun?" Gareth asked. "I thought they were all cased."
"I like to keep a little insurance at all times, "Jake grinned, and Gareth selected two cheroots from his case, lit them both, and passed one up to Jake.
"Compliments of the management" he said. "I'm beginning to know why I picked you as a partner." Jake stuck the cheroot in the side of his mouth, exhaled a long blue feather of smoke and grinned jauntily.
"If you've got any pull with your Royal Navy, lad, then get ready to use it." Jake stood in the deep canvas crows-nest at the cross trees of the main mast, and swayed with a gut-swooping rhythm through the arc of the swinging mast as he tried to keep the grey silhouette that closed them rapidly in the field of the telescope.
Although the warship was only ten miles off, already her shape was fading into the deepening dusk, for the sea breeze had chopped the surface to a wave-flecked immensity and the sun behind Jake was touching the watery horizon and throwing the east into mysterious blue shade.
Suddenly a bright prick of light began winking rapidly from the hazy shape of the warship , and Jake read the urgent p query.
"What ship?" and Jake grinned and tried to judge how conspicuous the schooner, with her mass of canvas, was to the destroyer, and to decide the moment when he would trade speed for invisibility.
The destroyer was signalling again.
"Heave to or I will fire upon you."
"Bloody pirates," Jake growled indignantly, and cupped his hand to bellow down at the bridge.
"Get the canvas off her." On the deck far below, he saw the Greek's face, pale in the dusk looking up at him, then heard his orders repeated and watched the motley crew climb swiftly aloft.
Jake glanced back towards the tiny dark shape of the destroyer on the limitless dark sea and saw the angry red flash of her forward gun bloom in the dark. He remembered that flash so well and his skin crawled with the insects of fear as he waited out the long seconds while the shell climbed high into the sombre sky and then fell towards the schooner.
He heard it come, passing overhead in a rising shriek, before it pitched into the sea half a mile ahead of Hirondelle.
A swift, blooming pillar of spray gleamed in the last rays of the sun like pink Carrara marble and then was blown swiftly away on the wind.
The crewmen froze in the rigging, petrified by the howling passage of the shot, and then suddenly they were galvanized into frantic babbling activity and the gleaming white canvas disappeared as swiftly as a wild goose furls its wings when it settles on the lake surface.
Jake looked back at the destroyer and searched for seconds before he found her. He wondered what they would make of the disappearance of the sails. They might believe the Hirondelle had obeyed the order to heave to, not guessing that she was under propeller power as well.
Certainly she would have disappeared from their view, her low dark hull no longer beaconed by the towering white pyramid of canvas. He waited impatiently for the last few minutes until the warship itself was no longer visible from the masthead before bellowing down to the Greek the orders that sent Hirondelle swinging away into the wind and pounding back into the head sea along her original track, side-stepping the headlong charge of the destroyer.
Jake held that course while the tropical night fell over the Gulf like a warm thick blanket, pricked only by the cold white stars. He strained his eyes into the impenetrable blackness, chilled by "the fear that the destroyer Captain might have double-guessed him and anticipated his turn. At any moment, he expected to see the towering steel hull emerge at close range from the night and flood the schooner with the brilliant white beams of her battle lights and hear the squawking peremptory challenge of her bull horn.
Then suddenly, with a violent lift of relief, he saw the cold white fingers of the lights far behind at least six miles away at the spot where the destroyer had seen him taking in sail. The Captain had bought the dummy, believing that Hirondelle had heaved to and waited for him to come up.
Jake threw back his head and laughed with relief before he caught himself and began shouting new orders down to the deck, swinging the schooner once again across the wind on the reciprocal of the warship's course, and beginning the long delicate contest of skill in which the Hirondelle ducked and weaved on to her old course, while the warship plunged blindly back and forth across the darkened Gulf, searching desperately with the mile-long beams of the battle lights for the dark and stinking hull of the slaver or switching them off and running under full power with all her ports darkened in the hope of taking HirondeUe unawares.
Once the destroyer Captain almost succeeded, but Jake caught the flashing phosphorescence of her bow-wave a mile off. Desperately he yelled at the Greek to heave to and they lay silent and unseen while the low greyhound-wasted warship slid swiftly across their bows, her engines beating like a gigantic pulse, and was swallowed once again by the night. The nervous sweat that bathed Jake's shirt dried icy cold in the night wind as he put HirondeUe cautiously on course again.
Two hours later he saw the lights of the destroyer again, a glow of white light far astern, that pulsed like summer sheet lightning as the arc lamps traversed back and forth.
Then there was only the stars and many hours later the first steely light of dawn growing steadily and expanding the circle of the dark sea around the schooner.