Then he saw the heat shimmer near the bomb, fire burning low in the sand itself, spreading, licking around the bomb and beyond almost invisible to the naked eye, unless one was aware of the shimmering, overheating air immediately above it.
He watched, mesmerized for several seconds.
Move, you chump!
He rolled away, feeling the burning thermal radiance of the fire at last. The movement instantly turned his wounded shoulder into a different kind of fire, and whimpering privately he squirmed into the undergrowth and desperately sought to put a safe distance between him and the wreck, which he expected to blow up at any time.
Insofar as he had thought about it at all he had expected the bomb, or the fuel tank to light off within seconds. It had never occurred to him that they might cook awhile, not just seconds but for some minutes before they blew up.
The other thing which had never occurred to him was that an officer would be so stupid as to order, in fact, threaten to shoot, any man who refused to obey his order, to approach a clearly burning crashed aircraft without protective clothing, or fire-fighting equipment.
When Abe finally reached what he hoped was a safe distance, some forty to fifty yards away, where he could sneak a view back whence he had come from the protection of thick brush, with all but the top of his head hidden on the shallow down slope of a low dune, he was somewhat incredulous to observe several rifle-bearing white-uniformed sailors poking around the periphery of the wrecked, now burning Sea Fox.
One man had shouldered his gun and begun to kick sand onto the seat of the fire. The doped fabric of the starboard wing was ablaze by then and the heat of the flames around the bomb was such that the nose of the aircraft, with its aluminium frame melting from the heat, was drooping towards the earth.
Presently, more sailors arrived and shouldering arms started to kick and ineffectually shovel sand with their hands and caps onto the seat of the flames beneath the broken Sea Fox.
A couple of men started – presumably realising the danger they were in – thrashing at the ground with the branches of nearby bushes in a futile attempt to beat out the flames.
Abe watched it all with mounting horror.
It was the way that most of the men around the wreck seemed utterly unaware of the peril they were in that would stick in his mind’s eye forever. It was surreal, as if none of the seamen had seen the bomb right in front of their eyes!
After a couple of minutes, the kicking and the beating at the flames slackened and the men around the wreck began to congratulate each other.
The flames had consumed the doped fabric stretched across the metal frame of the fuselage by then. It was as if because the fire, having consumed so much of the flammable material of the airframe, they thought they were winning, regardless of the fact the ground around the Sea Fox was burning.
It was beyond bizarre.
Abe was starting to think that perhaps he was still concussed.
Then, without warning there was an air-ripping, deafening explosion.
Afterwards, Abe decided that the bomb must have exploded first, followed as near instantaneously as makes no difference, by the fuel tank, and that the combined detonation must have created a superheated vortex into which all the unburned petrol in the sand and the local vicinity was sucked before it, also, exploded with a catastrophic violence completely out of all proportion to the actual qualities of volatile accelerant chemicals involved.
During his three-month RNAS induction training period Abe had attended a lecture on experimental ‘bomb technologies’ in which something called a fuel-air, or ‘hyperbaric’ munition, had been. Albeit in passing, mentioned. He guessed that he had just witnessed an ad hoc, accidental really, field test of the theoretical principles underpinning the development of such weapons.
All this he thought in a moment as debris showered down all around him, and something heavy landed with a sickening thud nearby.
When he sneaked a look above the brush the Sea Fox was not there anymore.
And neither were the dozen or so men who had been standing in its vicinity. Farther down the beach men were picking themselves up, several with their hands to their ears, dazed, and as disbelieving as Abe.
He glanced out to sea. The port rail of the nearest cruiser was suddenly lined with men staring to landward.
It was time to go.
However, before he had gone half-a-dozen steps at a crouched run he very nearly fell over the horribly burned, mutilated cadaver of a Dominican Navy seaman. The man’s legs were missing below the knees, likewise his right arm at the elbow. His face was a ruin, scorched black and torn by glinting slivers of shredded metal. The man’s rifle was still slung over his mangled right shoulder.
Abe almost scurried on past.
“No,” he growled under his breath.
Abe turned the dead man over, and in a grim trance he set about separating the sailor’s rifle from his wrecked mortal remains. There was an obscene sucking sound and then its gory strap splashed free.
The gun was a 1922-model German Mauser, one of the straight-bolted, long-barrelled variants, with a five-round magazine.
Thinking slowly, coldly, like a hunter at last, Abe searched the body for more bullets. The man’s small ammunition pouch was – literally – imbedded in his belly. He retrieved it, careless of the bloody, shredded intestines spilling from the man’s belly. His hands and arms were covered in gore, his torso blood-spattered as he squirmed away, satisfied to have found a further three 7.92 millimetre five-round stripper clips.
Something told him he was going to get the opportunity to put every round to good use sooner rather than later.
It was good to know that all the men who had died just now were probably carrying at least – assuming the Dominican Navy standardised these things – three clips of 7.92-millimetre cartridges, propelling 57-millimetre shells. Maybe, he would come back later and look around for more. Given the shock of what had just happened, the cynic in him suspected, that if the survivors searched at all, they would simply mark the position of the bodies, collect the rifles and depart.
Always assuming, that is, that they treated the untimely explosion as an accident of some kind. But then why would they treat it otherwise? They had known that there was already a fire, and like idiots, elected to try and put it out…
On the other hand, if they thought the wreck had been booby-trapped, they would come looking for the perpetrators with a rare vengeance. If that happened, he would simply have to make the best possible use of the cartridges he already had but at least now he had a gun in his hands with a near hundred percent kill ratio at ranges of anywhere up to a thousand yards, and a fifty to seventy-five percent kill potential at up to three-quarters of a mile. The gun was probably accurate beyond that range; problematically, in the absence of a telescopic sight, his eyes were not.
As he moved away from the shore the gun – even though he had never picked up a weapon of this particular type – felt good, familiar in his hands. He had fired a modern Enfield SLR – self-loading rifle – on the ranges at Norfolk, a well-balanced, finely-machined infantry weapon which almost, but not quite combined the best of two worlds; long-range sniping piece and close-range automatic weapon. However, the Mauser felt more like the long Martini-Henry he had used in the forests of the Mohawk country. That gun had instantly become an extension of his body, of his whole being, snug in his right shoulder, rock-steady in his arms which was only natural; he had been born to the hunt, and the Hunter’s blood coursed through his very being.
Some small part of his being hated the way he so desperately longed to find his King’s enemies squarely in his sights.