“Bolivar class light cruiser,” the other man said, wincing in discomfort as he tried to maintain his sitting position. “Five thousand tons, six six-inch guns – only four in a broadside though, a coal-burner, capable of twenty-two or three knots in her prime. That would have been the best part of forty or fifty years ago, mind you. That ship might have been laid up in reserve for most of the last twenty years.”
Abe scowled.
“Whose bloody navy, Ted?”
“Santo Domingo, Dominican most likely.”
“You should move as little as possible,” Abe admonished him. “I’m a doctor, remember. I know about these things. I have no idea how your wound hasn’t opened up again…”
“You’ve been looking after the both of us like a real trooper for the last two or three days,” Ted Forest retorted with enfeebled defiance. He paused, thought about it, “or however long we’ve been here already, with a bloody bullet hole in your shoulder!” Abe’s friend pointed out. “Trust me, you look as crocked as I must feel. And just so you know, I’m dying of shame just lying here doing nothing…”
The distant sound of a ship’s horn reverberated across the island.
Perturbingly, the one call was quickly answered by another.
Both men scrabbled to see through the tops of the surrounding vegetation, peering to the south from where another vessel was approaching. When she turned to reveal her silhouette, the two downed airmen knew immediately that she was a sister of the first cruiser. This time they glimpsed the flags flying from her main mast and stern jack, a white cross on a red and blue background.
“Dominican,” they both murmured.
“Those planes this morning,” Abe mused, “now these old ironclads? Here? Now? We’re sitting on British sovereign territory; it’s as if they want a really big war, Ted?”
Abe’s friend tried very hard to stop himself laughing.
It hurt.
“Abe, old man,” he gasped, “I think we’re a long way beyond that. All we’re waiting for now is the politicos back in London to catch up with events!”
That was when they heard what they thought must be very distant thunder. Except the skies were clear, darkening azure blue all the way to the stars.
The friends watched the two cruisers idling in the water as the dusk thickened, and more than once they imagined they heard the distant thunder again.
“They’re blocking the channel between the two islands,” Ted decided. He and Abe were leaning against each other to keep themselves upright, awake.
“Against what?”
“Us? The Empire. It’s odds on that we’re at war with the blighters by now.”
“True,” Abe conceded. Some sixth sense told him he ought to have attempted to make a better fist of hiding or moving the remains of the goat carcass, covered up the fire and the remaining quartered pieces of turtle and shell.
And why did I leave one of the service revolvers on the beach?
He could not remember where he had left the hand-axe he had used to butcher the goat and turtle. Nor had he returned to the beach where they had camped that first, and second night on the island; there would be other signs that they had been there…
Oh, God!
I left the remaining medical supplies in the box near the crash site…
Abe began to get up, struggling onto his knees first.
“I need to grab anything useful from the crash,” he muttered.
“Why?” Ted Forest queried.
Abe opened his mouth to reply.
But got no further.
A brilliant beam of light burned through the gathering gloom.
The two men flattened themselves in the undergrowth as one, then another searchlight blazed along the beach, swung past the crash site, and then, inevitably, zeroed in on the partially camouflaged wreck of the Sea Fox.
Chapter 10
Saturday 8th April
Puente de Congosto, Castile and León, Spain
Albert Stanton could see Maud Daventry-Jones waving to him as the Imperial Airways flying boat approached the quayside… and yet, she never seemed to get any nearer.
He waved back through the porthole.
The aircraft was moving, gently flexing on the current of the East River; but why was there nobody else with him in the cabin of the leviathan?
And why was Maud alone on the quayside?
He had to get back to Maud…
Suddenly, her face was just the other side of the glass.
He cried out in relief.
Then, as if gripped by some inexorable under-tow she was slipping away from him, her fingertips clawing helplessly at the glass which became opaque as the flying boat slid away, its engines firing up anew as it turned down river as if to set off back across the Atlantic to Europe.
He tried to move to the hatch.
Heard it being dogged shut, felt powerful hands wrestling him back to his seat in the cabin…
No matter how hard he struggled, thrashed around, or swore, – with shocking, wholly uncharacteristic vehemence and loquacity – until his throat was parched, and his yells of protest hoarse, barely strangled whispers, he remained pinned in his seat as the sea plane bounded over the waves and with a final roaring flourish, took to the air carrying away from the woman he loved…
He sat up in the cool darkness.
He was dripping with sweat, shivering.
“Nightmare,” he muttered.
But that did not explain what he was doing sitting on a cold stone floor with the mother and father of all headaches. Gingerly, he felt the back of his skull. His hair was matted, sticky.
I was with that fellow Mariano.
He seemed a pleasant enough cove even though he had obviously been unkindly amused, and mildly contemptuous of my pigeon Spanish…
Things started coming back to him. In splinters of memory at first, then fragments, jigsaw pieces he had to join up one by one: the ruined castle, the women changing into peasant dresses, the walk into the village. He had thought it was odd that there was hardly anybody about. They had left the women with a comely lady called Consuela, and Mariano had walked him along a twisting lane to the northern end of Puente de Congosto, to a small house, well, a hovel actually by new England standards, down by the river…
‘I don’t like leaving the ladies this way,’ he had protested.
In fact, by that juncture he was feeling thoroughly lousy, as if he had badly let down Melody and Henrietta. Okay, he had stepped forward and led them out of that ambush at El Barca de Avila the other day. However, that had been pure instinct, an adrenaline rush and thereafter, he had been pretty much useless. Melody must have sensed that he was a broken reed the other night on the riverbank; otherwise she would never have taken over that way. Oh, if only Maud could see him now, she would know that without a scintilla of a doubt that he was a complete fraud, a straw man utterly unworthy of her affections.
I was talking to Brother Mariano, he remembered.
Then what?
He had been in Paris, talking to those movie people.
Counting the days before he returned to New York to pick up where he and Maud had left off.
The poor girl must be worried sick about me!
Perhaps, she thinks I am dead!
Paul Nash…
That odd meeting on the southbound express. The terrifying flight over the mountains… did I really parachute into that olive grove at Navalperal de Tormes?
It was at this juncture that Albert Stanton lurched forward onto his knees and was violently sick.
After a few minutes his head cleared somewhat.
It became a little simpler to join up the dots, to re-establish a time-line between the dissonant memories jostling for attention. Even better, his eyes were finally adjusting to the near Stygian gloom of his cell. Or rather, cellar-dungeon.