South by Java Head. Alistair MacLean

padding behind him, footsteps crossing the iron-hard teak deck. Captain Findhorn replaced his cap, slewed round in his chair and looked at his chief officer who was standing where he himself had been seconds before, gazing thoughtfully at the barometer. For a few moments Captain Findhorn studied him in silence, thought that his chief officer was a classic refutation of the widely-held belief that light-haired, light-skinned people cannot sunburn well: between the white shirt and the fair flaxen hair, sun-bleached almost to a platinum blond, the back of the neck was a strip of old, dark oak. Then the chief officer had turned round and caught his eye, and Findhorn smiled, briefly.

      “Well, Mr. Nicolson, what do you make of it?” The quartermaster was only feet away: with members of the crew within earshot, the captain was always punctiliousness itself towards his senior officers.

      Nicolson shrugged his shoulders and walked across to the screen door. He had a peculiarly soft-footed, almost catlike gait, as if he were stepping on old, dry sticks and feared he might break them. He looked at the brassy oven of the sky, at the oily copper sheen of the water, at the far horizon to the east where the two met in a shimmer of metallic blue, and finally at the glassy swell that was building up to the northeast, pushing up on their port quarter. He shrugged again, turned and looked at the captain, and for the hundredth time Findhorn found himself marvelling at the clear, ice-blue of his officer’s eyes, doubly striking in the sunburnt darkness of the face. He had never seen eyes like them, remotely like them, anywhere. They always reminded Captain Findhorn of Alpine lakes, and this irritated the captain, for he had a precise, logical mind, and he had never been in the Alps in his life.

      “Not much doubt about it, sir, is there?” The voice was soft, controlled, effortless—the perfect complement to the way he walked and carried himself: but it had a deep, resonant quality that enabled him to be heard through a roomful of talking people or in a high wind with an abnormal ease and clarity. He gestured through the open screen door. “All the signs. The glass is only 28.5, but it was 75 hardly an hour ago. It’s falling like a stone. The wrong time of the year, and I’ve never heard of a tropical storm in these latitudes, but we’re in for a bit of a blow, I’m afraid.”

      “You have a genius for understatement, Mr. Nicolson,” Findhorn said dryly. “And don’t refer disrespectfully to a typhoon as ‘a bit of a blow’. It might hear you.” He paused a moment, smiled and went on softly. “I hope it does, Mr. Nicolson. It’s a Godsend.”

      “It would be all of that,” Nicolson murmured. “And rain. There’ll be plenty of rain?”

      “Buckets of it,” Captain Findhorn said with satisfaction. “Rain, high seas and a ten or eleven wind and there’s nary a son in the Nipponese army or navy will see us this night. What’s our course, Mr. Nicolson?”

      “One-thirty, sir.”

      “We’ll keep it there. The Carimata Straits for us by noon tomorrow, and then there’s always a chance. We’ll turn aside only for their Grand Fleet and we’ll turn back for nothing.” Captain Findhorn’s eyes were calm, untroubled. “Think there’ll be anyone out looking for us, Mr. Nicolson?”

      “Apart from a couple of hundred aircraft pilots and every ship in the China Sea, no.” Nicolson smiled briefly, and the smile touched and whitened the wrinkles at his eyes and was gone. “I doubt if there’s any of our little yellow pals within 500 miles who doesn’t know that we broke out of Singapore last night. We must be the juiciest tit-bit since the Prince of Wales went down, and the size of the flap will be corresponding. They’ll have combed every exit—Macassar, Singapore, Durian and Rhio—and the High Command will be throwing blue fits and chucking themselves on to their swords by the dozen.”

      “But they never thought to check the Tjombol Straits and Temiang?”

      “I suppose they’re reasonably sane and do us the compliment of thinking we are also,” Nicolson said thoughtfully. “No sane man would take a big tanker through these waters at night, not with the draught we’ve got, and not a light in sight.”

      Captain Findhorn inclined his head, half-nod, half-bow. “You have rather a pretty line in compliments yourself, Mr. Nicolson.”

      Nicolson said nothing. He turned away and walked to the other side of the bridge, past the quartermaster and Vannier, the fourth officer. His feet on the deck made no more sound, almost, than the whisper of falling leaves. At the far end of the bridge he stopped, looked through the starboard wheel-house door at the haze-blurred silhouette of Linga Island melting softly into the purple distance, then turned back again. Vannier and the quartermaster watched him silently, tired speculation in tired eyes.

      From above their heads came the occasional murmur of voices, or the shuffling of aimless, wandering feet. Up there were the gunners who manned the two wheelhouse top Hotchkisses, .5s well spaced on each side of the starboard compass platform teak screen. Old guns these, very old and feeble and inaccurate, good only for boosting the morale of those who had never had to use them against an enemy. The suicide seats, these two gun positions were called: the exposed wheel-house top, highest point of the bridge superstructure, always held priority for strafing attacks on tankers. The gunners knew this, and they were only human: they had been unhappy, increasingly restless, for days now.

      But the fidgety unease of the gunners, the quartermaster’s hands moving gently on the spokes of the wheel—these were only small, insignificant sounds that punctuated the strange, hushed silence that lay over the Viroma, an enveloping, encompassing silence, thick, cocoon-like, almost tangible. And the little sounds came and went and left the silence deeper, more oppressive than before.

      It was the silence that comes with great heat and the climbing humidity that spills out sweat over a man’s arms and body with every mouthful of liquid he drinks. It was the dead, flat silence that lies over the China Sea while the gathering storm bides its time beyond the horizon. It was the silence that comes upon men when they have not slept for a long, long time, and they are very tired. But, above all, it was the silence that comes with waiting. That kind of waiting where a man’s nerves are stretched out on a rack, and every hour more of waiting is another turn of the rack, and if the waiting doesn’t end soon the rack will turn too far and the nerves tear and sunder with the strain—but if the waiting does end then that will be even worse for it will be the end not only of the waiting, it will almost certainly be the end of everything.

      The men of the Viroma had been waiting for a long time now, Or perhaps not such a long time—it was only a week since the Viroma, with a false funnel, dummy ventilators, the newly painted name of Resistencia and flying the flag of the Argentine republic, had rounded the Northern tip of Sumatra and steamed into the Malacca Straits in broad daylight. But a week has seven days, every day twenty-four hours and every hour sixty minutes. Even a minute can be a long time when you are waiting for something which must inevitably happen, when you know that the laws of chance are operating more and more inexorably against you, that the end cannot be much longer delayed. Even a minute can be a long, long time when the first bomb or the first torpedo may be only seconds away, and you have ten thousand, four hundred tons of fuel oil and high octane gasoline beneath your feet …

      The telephone above the flag locker shrilled jarringly, insistently, cutting knife-like through the leaden silence on the bridge. Vannier, slight, brown-haired, an officer of only ten weeks standing, was nearest to it. He whirled round, startled, knocked over the binoculars on the locker-top behind him, and fumbled the receiver off its hook. Even through the tan the red flush could be seen creeping up through neck and face.

      “Bridge here. What is it?” The voice was meant to be crisp, authoritative. It didn’t quite come off. He listened for a few moments, said thank you, hung up and turned round to find Nicolson standing beside him.

      “Another distress signal,” he said quickly. Nicolson’s cold blue eyes always made him feel flustered. “Up north somewhere.”

      “Up north somewhere.” Nicolson repeated the words, his tone almost conversational, but carrying an undertone that made Vannier squirm. “What position? What ship?” There was a sharp edge to Nicolson’s voice now.

      “I—I