South by Java Head

Captain Francis Findhorn, O.B.E., Commodore of the British-Arabian Tanker Company and master of the 12,000 ton motor-ship Viroma, gave the barometer a last two taps with his fingernail, looked at it without expression for a moment then walked back quietly to his seat in the port corner of the wheelhouse. Unthinkingly, he reached up to direct the overhead ventilation louver on to his face, winced as the blast of hot, humid air struck at him, then pushed it away again, quickly but without haste. Captain Findhorn never did anything with haste. Even the next simple gesture of taking off his gold-braided white cap and rubbing the dark, thinning hair with his handkerchief was made with an unhurried speed, with so complete a lack of unnecessary and wasted movement that one instinctively knew this calm deliberation, this unstudied economy of motion, to be an inseparable part of the man’s nature.

There was a soft 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 don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

Nicolson looked at him for a long second, turned away, reached down the phone and began to crank the generator handle. Captain Findhorn beckoned to Vannier and waited until the boy had walked hesitantly across to his corner of the bridge.

“You should have asked, you know,” the captain said pleasantly. “Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think it necessary, sir.” Vannier was uncomfortable, on the defensive. “It’s our fourth call today. You—you ignored the others, so I——”

“True enough,” Findhorn agreed. “It’s a question of priorities, boy. I’m not going to risk a valuable ship, a priceless cargo and the lives of fifty men on the off-chance of picking up a couple of survivors from an inter-island steamer. But this might have been a troopship, or a cruiser. I know it’s not, but it might have been. And it might have been in a position where we could have given some help without sticking our necks out too far. All improbable ‘ifs’ and ‘mights’, but we must know where she is and what she is before we make a decision.” Findhorn smiled and touched the gold-braided epaulettes on his shoulders. “You know what these are for?”

“You make the decisions,” Vannier said stiffly. “I’m sorry, sir.”

“Forget it, boy. But one thing you might remember—to call Mr. Nicolson ‘sir’ once in a while. It’s—ah—expected.”

Vannier flushed and turned away. “Sorry again, sir. I don’t usually forget. I’m—well, I think I’m just a little bit tired and edgy, sir.”

“We all are,” Findhorn said quietly. “And not a little bit, either. But Mr. Nicolson isn’t —he never is.” He raised his voice. “Well, Mr. Nicolson?”

Nicolson hung up the receiver and turned round.

“Vessel bombed, burning, possibly sinking,” he said briefly. “0.45 N, 104.24 E. That makes it the Southern entrance to the Rhio channel. Name of the vessel uncertain. Walters says the message came through very fast, very clear at first, but quickly deteriorated into crazy nonsense. He thinks the operator was seriously injured and finally collapsed over his table and key, for he finished up with a continuous send—it’s still coming through. Name of the ship, as far as Walters could make out, was the Kenny Danke.

“Never heard of it. Strange he didn’t send his international call-sign. Nothing big, anyway. Mean anything to you?”

“Not a thing, sir.” Nicolson shook his head, turned to Vannier. “Look it up in the Register anyway, please. Then look through the K’s. Obviously the wrong name.” He paused for a moment, the cold blue eyes remote, distant, then turned again to Vannier. “Look up the Kerry Dancer. I think it must be that.”

Vannier riffled through the pages. Findhorn looked at his chief officer, eyebrows raised a fraction.

Nicolson shrugged. “A fair chance, sir, and it makes sense. N and R are very close in Morse. So are C and K. A sick man could easily trade them—even a trained man. If he was sick enough.”

“You’re right, sir.” Vannier smoothed out a page of the directory. “The Kerry Dancer, 540 tons, is listed here. Clyde, 1922. Sulaimiya Trading Company——”

“I know them,” Findhorn interrupted. “An Arab company, Chinese backed, sailing out of Macassar. They’ve seven or eight of these small steamers. Twenty years ago they had only a couple of dhows—that was about the time they gave up legitimate trading as a bad business and went in for the fancy stuff—guns, opium, pearls, diamonds, and little of that legally come by. Plus a fair amount of piracy on the side.”

”No tears over the Kerry Dancer!”

“No tears over the Kerry Dancer, Mr. Nicolson. Course 130 and hold it there.” Captain Findhorn moved through the screen door on to the port wing of the door. The incident was closed.

“Captain!”

Findhorn halted, turned round unhurriedly and looked curiously at Evans. Evans was the duty quartermaster, dark, wiry, thin-faced and with tobacco stained teeth. His hands rested lightly on the wheel, and he was looking straight ahead.

“Something on your mind, Evans?”

“Yes, sir. The Kerry Dancer was lying in the roads last night.” Evans glanced at him for a moment then stared ahead again. “A Blue Ensign boat, sir.”

“What!” Findhorn was jerked out of his normal equanimity. “A Government ship? You saw her?”

“I didn’t see her, sir. The bo-sun did—I think. Anyway, I heard him talking about it last night—just after you’d come back from shore.”

“Are you quite certain, man? He said that?”

“No mistake, sir.” The high-pitched Welsh voice was very definite.

“Get the bo’sun up here at once!” Findhorn ordered. He went over to his chair, sat down, easy and relaxed, and thought back to the night just gone. He remembered his surprise—and relief—when he had gone over the side and found the bo’sun and carpenter manning the motor lifeboat that was to take him ashore, his surprise and relief when he had seen the butts of a couple of short Lee Enfields protruding beneath a piece of canvas thrown carelessly over them. He had said nothing about these. He remembered the distant sound of guns, the pall of smoke lying over Singapore from the last bombing raid—one could set a watch by the appearance of Japanese bombers over Singapore every morning—the weird, unnatural hush that had lain over city and roads. The roads themselves had been empty, deserted as he’d never known them, and he couldn’t remember seeing the Kerry Dancer or any other ship flying the Blue Ensign as they went in. It had been too dark and he had had too much on his mind. And he had had even more to worry about on the way out. He had learnt that the oil islands of Poko Bukum, Pulo Sambo and Pulo Sebarok had been fired, or were to be fired—he had been unable to find out or even see for himself, the pall of smoke obscured everything. The last of the naval units had pulled out and there was no one to take his fuel oil. Nor his aviation spirit—the Catalinas were gone, and the only Brewster Buffaloes and Wildebeeste torpedo bombers that remained were charred skeletons on the Selengar Airfield. 10,400 tons of explosive fuel, trapped in the harbour of Singapore and——

“McKinnon, sir. You sent for me.” Twenty years that hadn’t missed out a sea or port in the world worth looking at had turned McKinnon from a raw, shy, unknowing Lewis boy to a byword among the sixty odd ships of the British Arabian Company for toughness, shrewdness and unvarying competence—but they hadn’t altered a single inflexion in his slow, soft-spoken Highland voice, “About the Kerry Dancer?”

Findhorn nodded, said nothing, just continued looking at the dark, stocky figure before him. A commodore, he thought dryly, inconsequentially, has his privileges. The best first mate and the best bo’sun in the company …

“I saw her lifeboat yesterday evening, sir,” McKinnon said quietly. “She left before us—with a full complement of passengers.” He looked speculatively at the captain. “A hospital ship. Captain.”

Findhorn climbed down off his chair and stood in front of McKinnon, without moving, The two men were of a height, eye to eye. No one else moved. It was as if each one feared to break the sudden, utter stillness that had fallen on the bridge. The Viroma wandered one degree off course, then two, then three, and Evans made no move to correct it.

“A hospital ship,” Findhorn repeated tonelessly. “A hospital ship, Bo’sun? She’s only a little inter-island tramp—500 tons or so.”

“That’s right. But she’s been commandeered, sir. I was talking to some of the wounded soldiers while Ferris and myself were at the jetty, waiting for you. Her captain’s been given the option of losing his ship or sailing her to Darwin. There’s a company of soldiers aboard to see that he does.”

“Go on.”

“That’s all there is, sir. They filled up the second boatload before you came back—most of the cases were walking wounded but there were a few on stretchers. I believe there are five or six nurses, none British, and a little boy.”

“Women, children and sick men and they stick them aboard one of the Sulaimiya Company’s floating death-traps—and the whole archipelago swarming with Jap aircraft.” Findhorn swore, quietly, savagely. “I wonder what mutton-headed genius in Singapore thought that one up.”

“I don’t know, sir,” McKinnon said woodenly.

Findhorn looked at him sharply, then looked away again. “The question was purely rhetorical, McKinnon,” he said coldly. His voice dropped almost an octave and he went on quietly, musingly, speaking to no one in particular, a man thinking aloud and not liking his thoughts at all.

“If we go north, the chances of our getting as far as Rhio and back again are less than remote: they do not exist. Let us not deceive ourselves about that. It may be a trap—it probably is: the Kerry Dancer left before us and she should have been through Rhio six hours ago. If it’s not a trap, the probability is that the Kerry Dancer is at this moment sinking, or has sunk. Even if she is still afloat, fire will have forced passengers and crew to abandon ship. If they’re just swimming around—most of them wounded men—there’ll be mighty few of them left in the six or seven hours it would take us to get there.”

Findhorn paused for some moments, lit a cigarette in defiance of the company’s and his own regulations, and went on in the same flat monotone.

“They may have taken to their boats, if they had any boats left after bombs, machine-guns and fire had all had a go at them. Within a few hours all the survivors can land on any one of a score of islands. What chance have we got of finding the right island in total darkness in the middle of a storm—assuming that we were crazy enough—suicidal enough—to move into the Rhio Straits and throw away all the sea-room we must have in the middle of a typhoon?” He grunted in irritation as spiralling smoke laced his tired eyes—Captain Flndhorn hadn’t left the bridge all night—gazed down with mild surprise, as if seeing it for the first time, at the cigarette clipped between his fingers, dropped it and ground it out with the heel of his white canvas shoe. He stared down at the crushed stub for long seconds after it had gone out, then looked up, his gaze travelling slowly round the four men in the wheelhouse. The gaze meant nothing—Findhorn would never have included the quartermaster, bo’sun or the fourth officer in his counsels. “I can see no justification whatsoever for jeopardising the ship, the cargo and our lives on a wild goose chase.”

No one said anything, no one moved. The silence was back again, heavy, foreboding, impenetrable. The air was still, and very airless—the approaching storm, perhaps. Nicolson was leaning against the flag locker, hooded eyes looking down at his hands clasped before him: the others were looking at the captain, and not blinking: the Viroma had now slewed yet further off course, ten, perhaps twelve degrees, and still swinging steadily.

Captain Findhorn’s wandering gaze finally settled on Nicolson. The remoteness had gone from the captain’s eyes now, when he looked at his first mate.

“Well, Mr. Nicolson?” he asked.

“You’re perfectly right, sir, of course.” Nicolson looked up, gazed out the window at the foremast swaying slowly, gently, under the lift of the deepening swell. “A thousand to one that it’s a trap, or, if it isn’t, ship, crew and passengers will all be gone by now—one way or another.” He looked gravely at the quartermaster, at the compass, then back at Findhorn again. “But as I see we’re already ten degrees off course and still slewing to starboard, we might as well save trouble and just keep on going round to starboard. The course would be about 320, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr. Nicolson.” Findhom let his breath escape in a long, almost inaudible sigh. He crossed over towards Nicolson, his cigarette case open. “For this once only, to hell with the rules. Mr. Vannier, you have the Kerry Dancer’s position. A course for the quartermaster, if you please.”

Slowly, steadily, the big tanker swung round, struck off to the north-west back in the direction of Singapore, into the heart of the gathering storm.

A thousand to one were the odds that Nicolson would have offered and the captain would have backed him in that and gone even further—and they would both have been wrong. There was no trap, the Kerry Dancer was still afloat and she hadn’t been abandoned—not entirely.

Still afloat, at 2 o’clock on that sultry, breathless mid-February afternoon in 1942, but not looking as if she would be afloat much longer. She was deep in the water, down by the head and listing over so heavily to starboard that the well-deck guardrail was dipping into the sea, now lost in it, now showing clear as the long, low swell surged up the sloping deck and receded, like waves breaking on a beach.

The forward mast was gone, broken off about six feet above the deck; a dark, gaping hole, still smouldering, showed where the funnel had been, and the bridge was unrecognisable, a scrapyard shambles of buckled steel plates and fractured angle-irons, outlined in crazy, surrealist silhouette against a brazen sky. The fo’c’sle—the crew’s quarters just for’ard of the well-deck—looked as if it had been opened up by a gigantic can-opener, the scuttles on the ship’s side had disappeared completely and there was no trace of anchors, windlass or for’ard derrick winch; all this fo’c’sle damage the result, obviously, of a bomb that had penetrated the thin steel deck plating and failed to explode until it was deep inside the ship. No one there at the time could have known anything about it, for the lethal blast would have been far faster than realisation. Abaft the well-deck, the wood-lined accommodation quarters on the main and upper decks had been completely burnt out, gutted as far as the after well, sky and sea clearly visible through the gaunt and twisted framework.

It was impossible that human beings could have survived the bludgeoning, the consuming, metal-melting white heat that had reduced the Kerry Dancer to the charred, dead wreck drifting imperceptibly south-westwards towards the Abang Straits and faraway Sumatra. And, indeed, there was no life to be seen on what was left of the decks of the Kerry Dancer, no life to be seen anywhere, above or below. A deserted, silent skeleton, a dead hulk adrift on the China Sea. … But there were twenty-three people still alive in the after-castle of the Kerry Dancer.

Twenty-three people, but some of them had not much longer to live. These were the wounded soldiers, the stretcher cases that had been close enough to death already before the ship had pulled out from Singapore, and the conclusive impact of the bombs and the gasping heat of the fires that had stopped short at the break of the after well-deck had destroyed what feeble resources and hold of life were left to most of them, and tipped the scales against recovery. There might have been hope for them, some slender hope, had they been brought out of that panting suffocation while there was yet time and lowered to the rafts and boats. But there had been no time. Within seconds of the first bomb falling, someone outside had sledge-hammered tight the eight clips that secured the only door—the water-tight door—that gave access to the upper deck.