For example, he had not realised that there was so much eighty-seven octane left in the Sea Fox’s fuel tank, positioned behind the engine right in front of the forward cockpit, or that petrol was still leaking, drip, drip, drip into the sand beneath the aircraft even now, three days after the crash.
Or rather, worryingly he had noticed it but not actually recognised the danger of it…
He remembered thinking about fuel leaking but it was all a blur, today he was suddenly focused, pre-occupied, in fact, on that drip, drip, drip into the shaded sand where the sun never reached and the liquor therefore only evaporated at a very slow rate…
Two days running I lit an open fire practically right beside the wreck!
Abe had never had a lot of time for the Christian God.
On the other hand, he empathised – even if he was not completely sold on it – with Kate’s belief that the spirit of the forest and the sky was always watching over one.
Either way, it seemed that somebody had been looking after him the last few days!
I could have set myself on fire at any time!
That unexploded bomb could have blown up when we crashed!
I could have cut my foot off with that hand axe!
Or been cleaning my shoulder wound in the surf when those cruisers turned up and never noticed!
The pain in his left shoulder reminded him that if the bullet had hit him a few inches to the right it would probably have taken his head off…
All things considered, he and Ted ought to be dead now.
So, much as the notion of a couple of boat-loads of enemy sailors coming ashore to investigate the wreck of the Sea Fox was hardly a welcome prospect, things were not entirely hopeless.
Pretty much hopeless, obviously; just not completely black.
It was approaching noon, stiflingly hot each time the breeze died away. Watching the ships out in the channel separating Little and Great Inagua he got the impression the men on their decks were relaxed, killing time. Their ships’ main battery guns were trained fore and aft, and both vessels were only ‘smoking’ from one of their three stacks.
The ironclads had old-fashioned crows’ nests on their two masts, a tripod arrangement above the bridge and spindly, single shaft, braced with multiple cable stays abaft the funnels. The lookouts on the nearest ship inshore seemed to be looking out to sea, to the south and east, hardly ever training their glasses on the shore.
It was weird what you could see when you were not concussed and you were finally, paying attention!
Think it through, Abe.
Up to twenty sailors – probably heavily armed – are coming ashore.
They may have spotted you and Ted, in which case there was not a lot they could do about it. Abe was not about to leave his friend behind and anyway, he was probably too weak to out-run twenty determined Catholics looking for an unbeliever to spit-roast.
So, what were the alternatives?
He was supposed to have hunter’s blood in his veins.
Stop thinking like prey; become a hunter again!
But whatever you do, remember the squashed rations box!
It, the Webley and the other knocked about goodies he had recovered from the crash site were stashed some thirty yards away on the route back to where he had left Ted, half-asleep, half-passed out in the shade of a couple of tall, unusually verdant bushes.
Watching the boats turn towards the land, crabbing a little across the current as they headed for a narrow gap in the reefs, Abe had a pang of regret leaving the second Webley with the rest of the stash. Instantly, he admonished himself.
Twenty men, one hand gun!
That was not going to work out well…
What sort of odds were they?
And besides, now that he was thinking straight, he had a much better idea…
Nothing less than finding two dead bodies of British airmen in the wreck would satisfy the men coming ashore. Well, if he could not give them that there was something else, he might, if he was very lucky, be able to give them!
Abe began to squirm low through the bushes, ever watchful of the two boats which he knew would have to head about a hundred yards to the west to safely get through the gap in the reef. He knew where the gap was because the waves broke into angry whitecaps other than for the thirty to forty feet-wide eddying calm of the channel, which was clearly visible to anybody on shore. This meant that if he could get to the wreck unseen, he would probably – inevitably, there was a very big ‘if’ involved in that assumption – remain unseen from either of the boats, and hopefully, from the nearer of the anchored cruisers.
‘The best hunts are the simplest,’ his soul-father, Tsiokwaris, would say to him when he and Kate went into the woods with the tribe’s long Martini-Henry, or even just with bow, arrow or the strings and bait for traps.
The hunt was never anything but complicated, hard work, and long periods of exhausting concentration; but that was not what the old warrior was talking about. He was reminding the youngsters not to be too clever, to remember that a successful hunt counted for nothing if by carelessness or negligence they returned injured.
‘One kills to eat, to survive. Dead men have no hunger.’
Abe kept moving on his hands and knees, lowering himself onto his belly, hoping the wreck and the haphazardly draped branches and uprooted bushes he had used to try to break up its outline, many of which had fallen to the ground since, would cover his approach.
The hardest part was rolling the unexploded twenty-five-pounder beneath the dripping fuel tank.
The sand had absorbed most of the leakage and it was anybody’s guess how much fuel was actually left in the damaged tank.
All of which was incidental.
If he could persuade the bomb or the tank – filled with fumes far more potentially explosive than its liquid petrol – to detonate there was not going to be a lot left of either the wreck, or evidence of his inept fire-lighting and butchery strewn all around it. Granted, if the plane blew up that was going to look suspicious, but crashed aircraft invariably sat in huge puddles of fuel and theoretically… anything could set it off, at any time.
Whatever, anything was better than letting the bastards inspect the crash site at their leisure and coming to the conclusion that there were two unaccounted for airmen, at loose, somewhere on the island.
The effort of crawling so far and then manhandling the bomb, which normally would have been child’s play, except today was anything but in his present physical condition with one-and-a-half arms.
The thought crossed his mind as he fumbled for the matches that it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was about to set himself on fire.
Or blow himself up!
Try not to do that, Abe!
Each time the breeze fluked it blew petrol vapour into his face.
Each time he hesitated those boats got closer to the beach.
He struck a match, tried to flick it the yard or so to the fuel-soaked sand.
Nothing happened. He cursed under his breath. Tried again, realising that some of the matches were still damp.
Slow down, think about this!
He searched for a dry match, took a deep breath, struck it and instead of trying to flick it at the petrol-wet sand he lit off another match in the small, half-soggy match box and waited for two or three more to ignite.
The flame flared in his hand and he lobbed the burning box towards the case of the bomb beneath the fuel tank.
For a moment he was afraid the matches had burned out.