“Won’t somebody miss this car?” Melody pointed out the flaw in his theory.
“In a day or two, perhaps.”
The car was braking to a halt.
Up ahead there was a sentry box, a pole barrier blocking the road and two bored men in the field grey of the Policia Federales, rifles slung over their shoulders, were stamping out their cigarettes, straightening and beginning to show interest in the approaching vehicle.
“What if these clowns figure out that we’re not the fellows who drove south this morning?” Albert Stanton asked suddenly. “This car must be pretty damned nearly unique in this part of the country?”
“No, the Inquisition will have a fleet of the bloody things. No expense is spared persecuting heretics and blasphemers in His Catholic Majesty’s Spain.”
“If you say so.”
The Blohm and Mertz ground to a halt.
Albert Stanton and Paul Nash wound down their windows, the latter waved perfunctorily and opened his door, clambering out into the bright sunshine, stretching as if he had been sitting in the car all day.
Melody became aware Henrietta was crushing her hand.
The women were virtually smothering Pedro in their anxiety to shield him from whatever happened next.
Melody was still struggling to absorb the reality of the casual, merciless violence with which Paul Nash, their protector, had slaughtered those men less than a couple of hours ago. In the darkness last night, she had not witnessed his brief, violent interaction with Consuela, or the manner in which he had swiftly, efficiently executed Brother Mariano and his accomplice. Moreover, she had been, and still was, oddly shocked to learn from Albert Stanton that Nash had shot a dog to stop it barking before he had rescued him.
She struggled to hear what Nash was saying to the policemen.
Suddenly, an unshaven man stuck his head inside the car, peering at the two women and the young boy. Melody instantly looked at the floor, hoping Henrietta would do likewise.
The women could feel the man’s eyes stripping them naked.
The policeman had bad breath. It seemed an age before he finally withdrew his head, leaving behind a faint, lingering stench of sweat and stale tobacco smoke.
“You lucky bastards!” The man guffawed. “Real lookers you’ve got there! You’ll get yours’ before you get back to the city! Give them one from us!”
Melody felt her face burning, wanted to scream at the man.
Then Paul Nash was dropping back into the passenger seat.
The barrier was rising.
The car was rolling forward.
And mercifully, nobody had been shot.
Chapter 16
Sunday 9th April
Little Inagua, West Indies
When Abe had finally crawled and scampered back to the low, overgrown dune behind which Ted Forest had been hiding, waiting to be surrounded by vengeful Dominican sailors, some hour or so after the huge explosion which even at his remove, of some four hundred yards, had seemed to his friend like the detonation of a very large bomb, the horror on his face needed no further explanation.
“I’m fine,” Abe gasped, dropping exhausted by his friend’s side. “I’m fine, really…”
His friend needed a lot of convincing.
“You’re covered in blood, old man,” he objected in a hoarse whisper, deciding he would ask about the rifle and the biscuit tin Abe had deposited in the sand nearby in a moment.
“The blood’s not mine,” Abe muttered, crawling back to the lip of the sandy hummock to peer intently through the foliage towards the site of the crash where, from this distance, there was no longer any sign that the Sea Fox had ever existed.
Merely a fading haze of grey smoke.
The brush around the wreck had caught fire after the explosion and judging by their screams, wounded men had been left to burn to death until somebody belatedly rallied the shocked survivors, who had, too late to save their fallen comrades, begun to beat out the flames. Now, the last wisps of smoke were eddying on the breeze. Another boat had grounded on the beach nearby, fresh men had jumped into the surf and had started to search along the shore and inland adjacent to the blast zone.
“The chap I took the Mauser from was in bits,” Abe remarked, distractedly. “His bullet pouch was half-way inside his rib cage.”
Ted Forest could contain his angst no longer.
“What the Devil happened back there, Abe?”
“I fell over a twenty-five-pounder that must have hung up when we attacked that cruiser. I rolled it back under the kite’s fuel tank. It was still dripping eighty-seven octane, the ground around was soaked with the stuff…”
Ted grimaced: ‘There must have been several gallons left in it when we crashed,” he decided, trying to calculate how long the Sea Fox had been in the air by then.
“Anyway,” his friend continued, “I rolled the bomb under the kite and started a fire. Obviously, I absented myself pretty damned quick.”
“PDQ is just the ticket,” Ted agreed.
“By then the chaps from that ship off shore were marching up the beach. Honestly, I had no idea there would be such a big bang. I think the bomb must have cooked-off first, then the petrol. The fellow I got the gun from – well, what was left of him – nearly dropped on top of me and I was thirty, forty yards away…”
Neither man spoke for some seconds as Abe tried to see what was going on through the bushes.
“The biscuit tin is the kite’s emergency rations box, by the way. I think it must have been stowed under your seat in the second cockpit.”
“Oh, right.”
“The reason I was so long getting back was that I took a fairly wide detour. Otherwise my tracks might have led the bastards straight back here. Although,” he decided, “it doesn’t look like they’re searching…”
He swore, rolled onto his back and reached for the Mauser.
“I think two of the beggars have just found the chap who almost landed on top of me!” He hissed lowly, even though the ‘beggars’ in question were still at least three hundred, perhaps, three-hundred and fifty yards away, nicely silhouetted against the sea at their backs.
Ted Forest heard the bolt snap back as Abe chambered the first round of the rifle’s five-bullet magazine. In the absence of heat haze, with the sun still relatively high it would have been perfect ‘seeing’ light even had Abe not been gifted with, and always taken for granted, his preternaturally acute eyesight.
Why on earth had the Germans designed an infantry rifle with a straight bolt? The blasted thing meant a chap had to take his eye off the target every time he chambered a fresh round…
The two men standing over the cadaver of their comrade were looking around, one appeared to stare, briefly, directly at Abe, straight down the barrel of the Mauser. The Dominicans were saying something to each other, now and then glancing down at their feet, both still shouldered their guns. The seemed to reach a decision and turned towards where Abe had deliberately left a very visible trail into the thickest of the nearby scrub.
The two sailors were definitely on the hunt now.
Abe followed their progress, regularly looking back to the crash site. Other men were fanning out now. Looking for debris? Or their fallen comrades?
“What’s going on?” Ted whispered eventually.
“I think they smell a rat, I’m afraid.”