For three weeks now, the Blitcher's launches had been plying steadily back and forth. Up to the present they had delivered some five hundred tons of timber. The problem was finding storage for this unwieldy cargo once the coal bUnkers were filled.
"We will have to begin deck loading the cordwood soon," von Kleine muttered, and Lochtkamper opened his mouth to reply when the alarm bells began to clamour an emergency, and the loud-hailer boomed.
"Captain to the bridge. Captain to the bridge." Von Kleine turned and ran.
On the companion ladder he collided with one of his lieutenants. They caught at each other for balance and the lieutenant shouted into von Kleine's face.
"Captain, an aircraft! Flying low. Coming this way.
Portuguese markings."
"Damn it to hell!" Von Kleine pushed past him, and bounded up the ladder. He burst on to the bridge, panting.
"Where is it?"he shouted.
The officer of the watch dropped his binoculars and turned to von Kleine with relief "There it is, sir!" He pointed through a hole in the tangled screen of camouflage that hung like a veranda roof over the bridge.
Von Kleine snatched the binoculars from him and, as he trained them on the distant winged shape in the mist haze above the mangroves, he issued his orders.
"Warn the men ashore. Everybody under cover," he barked. "All guns trained to maximum elevation. Pom-poms loaded with shrapnel. Machine-gun crews closed up but no firing until my orders." He held the aircraft in the round field of the field glasses.
"Portuguese, all right," he grunted; the green and red insignia showed clearly against the brown body of the aircraft.
"She's searching. The aircraft was sweeping back and forth, banking over and turning back at the end of each leg of her search pattern, like a farmer ploughing a field. Von Kleine could make out the head and shoulders of a man crouched forward in the squat round nose of the aircraft. Now we'll find out how effective is our camouflage." So the enemy have guessed at last. They must have reported the convoy of steel plate or perhaps the chopping of the cordwood has alerted them, he thought, watching the aircraft tacking slowly towards him. We could not hope to go undetected for ever but I did not expect them to send an aircraft, Then suddenly the thought struck him so hard that he gasped with the danger of it. He whirled and ran to the forward rail of the bridge and peered out through the camouflage net.
Still half a mile distant, trundling slowly down the centre of the channel with the wide rippling V of her wake spread on the current behind her, clumsy as a pregnant hippo with her load of cordwood, the launch was aimed straight at Blitcher. From the air she would be as conspicuous as a fat tick on a white sheet.
"The launch..." shouted von Kleine, hail her. Order her to run for the bank get her under cover!
But he knew it was useless. By the time she was within hail, it would be too late. He thought of ordering his forward turrets to fire on the launch and sink her but He discarded the idea immediately, the fall of shell would immediately draw the enemy's attention.
Impatiently he stood gripping the rail of the bridge, and mouthing his anger and his frustration at the approaching launch.
Sebastian hung over the edge Of the cockpit. The wind buffeted him, flapping his jacket wildly about his body, whipping his hair into a black tangle. With his usual dexterity Sebastian had managed to drop the binoculars overboard. They were the property of Flynn Patrick O'Flynn, and Sebastian knew that he would be expected to pay for them. This spoiled Sebastian's enjoyment of the flight to some extent, he already owed Flynn a little over three hundred pounds. Rosa would have something to say also. However, the loss of the binoculars was no handicap, the aircraft was flying too low and was so unstable that the unaided eye was much more effective.
From a height of five hundred feet the mangrove forest looked like a fluffy overstuffed mattress, a sickly fever green in colour, with the channels and the water-ways between them dark gun-metal veins that flashed the sunlight back like a heliograph. The clouds of white egrets that rose in alarm as the aircraft approached looked like drifts of torn paper scraps. A fish eagle hung suspended in silent flight ahead of them, the wide span of its wings flared at the tips like the fingers of a hand. It dipped away, sliding past the aircraft's wing tip so close that Sebastian saw the fierce yellow eyes in its white hooded head.
Sebastian laughed with delight, and then grabbed at the side of the cockpit to steady himself, as the machine rocked violently under him. This was the pilot's method of attracting Sebastian's attention, and Sebastian wished he would think up some other way of doing it.
He looked back angrily shouting in the howl of wind and engine.
"Watch it! YOU Stupid dago." Da Silva was gesticulating wildly, his pink mouth working under the black mustache, his eyes wild behind the panes of his goggles, his right hand stabbing urgently out over the starboard wing.
Sebastian saw it immediately on the wide water-way, the launch was so glaringly conspicuous that he wondered why he had not seen it before, then he recalled that his attention had been concentrated on the terrain directly beneath the aircraft and he exCUsed himself. Yet there was little to justify da Silva's excitement, he thought. This was no battle cruiser, it was a tiny vessel of perhaps twenty-five feet. Quickly he ran his eyes down the channel, following it to the open sea in the blue distance.
It was empty.
He glanced back at the pilot and shook his head. But da Silva's excitement had, if anything, increased. He was making another frenzied hand-signal that Sebastian could not understand. To save- argument Sebastian nodded in agreement, and instantly the machine dropped away under him so that Sebastian's belly was left behind and he clutched desperately at the side of the cockpit once more.
In a shallow turning dive, da Silva took the machine
Down and then levelled out with the landing-wheels almost brushing the tops of the mangroves. They rushed towards the channel, and as the last mangroves whipped away under them da Silva eased the nose down still farther and they dropped to within a few feet of the surface of the water. It was a display of fine flying that was completely wasted on Sebastian. He was cursing da Silva quietly, his eyes starting from their sockets.
A mile ahead of them across the open water bobbed the overladen launch. It was only a few feet below their own level, and they raced towards it with the wash of the propeller blowing a squall of ripples across the surface behind them.
"My God!" The blasphemy was wrung from Sebastian in his distress. He's going to fly right into it!" It was an opinion that seemed to be shared by the crew of the launch. As the machine roared in on them, they began to abandon ship. Sebastian saw two men leap from the high piled load of timber and hit the water with small white splashes.
At the last second da Silva lifted the plane and they hopped over the launch. For a fleeting instant Sebastian stared at a range of fifteen feet into the face of the German naval officer who crouched down over the tiller bar at the stern of the launch. They were then past and climbing sharply, banking and turning back.