African quickstep,' said Flynn, and moved off ponderously into the undergrowth.
He reached the lantana bush, and looked around carefully.
He couldn't trust Rosa not to follow him. Satisfied, he dropped to his knees and dug with his hands in the loose sand.
With the air of an old-time pirate unearthing a chest of doubloon he lifted the bottle from its grave, and withdrew the cork. The neck of the bottle was in his mouth, when he heard the muted beat of the returning aircraft. The bottle stayed there a while longer, Flynn's Adam's apple pulsing up and down his throat as he swallowed, but his eyes swivelled upwards and creased in concentration.
With a sigh of intense pleasure he re corked and laid the bottle once more to rest, kicked sand over it, and set course for the beach.
'Can you see them?' he shouted the question at Rosa as he came down through the palms. She was standing out in the open. Her head was thrown back so that the long braid of her hair hung down to her waist behind. She did not answer him, but the set of her expression was hard and strained with anxiety. The men standing about her were silent also, held by an expectant dread.
Flynn looked up and saw it coming in like a wounded bird, the engine stuttering and surging irregularly, streaming a long bluish streak of oily smoke from the exhaust manifold, the wings rocking crazily, and a loose tangle of wreckage hanging and swinging under the belly where one Of the landing wheels had been shot away.
It sagged wearily towards the beach, the broken beat of the engine failing so they could hear the whisper of the wind in her rigging.
The single landing-wheel touched down on the hard sand and for fifty yards she ran true, then with a jerk she toppled sideways. The port wing hit into the sand, slewing her towards the edge of the sea,
her tail came up and over.
There was a crackling, ripping, tearing sound; and in a dust storm of flying spend she cartwheeled, stern over stern.
The propeller tore into the beach, disintegrating in a blur of flying splinters, and from the forward cockpit a human body was flung clear, spinning in the air so that the outflung limbs were the spokes of a wheel. It fell with a splash in the shallow water at the edge of the beach, while the aircraft careened onwards, tearing herself to pieces. A lower wing broke off, the guy wires snapping with a sound like a volley of musketry. The body of the machine slowed as it hit the water, skidding to a standstill on its back, with the surf washing around it. Da Silva hung motionless in the back cockpit, suspended upside down by his safety-straps, his arms dangling.
The next few seconds of silence were appalling.
'Help the pilot! I'll get Sebastian.' Rosa broke it at last.
Mohammed and two other Askari ran with her towards where Sebastian was lying awash, a piece of flotsam at the water's edge.
'Come on!' Flynn shouted at the men near him, and lumbered through the soft fluffy sand towards the wreck.
They never reached it.
There was a concussion, a vast disturbance in the air that sucked at their eardrums, as the gasoline ignited in explosive combustion. The machine and the surface of the sea about it were instantly transformed into a roaring, raging sheet of flame.
They backed away from the heat. The flames were dark red laced with satanic black smoke, and they ate the canvas skin from the body of the aircraft, exposing the wooden framework beneath.
In the heart of the flames da Silva still hung in his cockpit, a blackened monkey-like shape as his clothing burned. Then the fire ate through the straps of his harness and he dropped heavily into the shallow water, hissing and sizzling as the flames were quenched.
The fire was still Smouldering by the time Sebastian regained consciousness, and was able to lift himself on one elbow. Muzzily he stared down the beach at the smoking wreckage. The shadows of the palms lay like the stripes of a tiger on the sand that the low evening sun had softened to a drill gold.
'Da Silva?' Sebastian's voice was thick and slurred. His nose was broken and squashed across his face. Although Rosa had wiped most of the blood away, there were still little black crusts of it in his nostrils and at the corners of his mouth. Both his eyes were slits in the swollen plum coloured bruises that bulged from the sockets.
'No!' Flynn shook his head. 'He didn't make it.'
'Dead?' whispered Sebastian.
'We buried him back in the bush.'
'What happened?' asked Rosa. 'What on earth happened out there?' She sat close beside him, protective as a mother over her child. Slowly Sebastian turned his head to look at her.
'We found the Blitcher,'he said.
Captain Arthur Joyce, R.N was a happy man. He stooped over his cabin desk, his hands placed open and flat on either side of the spread Admiralty chart. He glowed with satisfaction as he looked down at the hand-drawn circle in crude blue pencil as though it were the signature of the President of the Bank of England on a cheque for a million sterling.
'Good!' he said. 'Oh, very good,' and he pursed his lips as though he were about to whistle 'Tipperary'. Instead he made a sucking sound, and smiled across at Sebastian.
Behind his flattened nose and blue-ringed eyes, Sebastian smiled back at him.
'A damn good show, Oldsmith!' Joyce's expression changed, the little lights of recognition sparkled suddenly in his eyes. 'Oldsmith?' he repeated. 'I say, didn't you open the bowling for Sussex in the 1911 cricket season?'
'That's right, sir.'
'Good Lord! Joyce beamed at him. 'I'll never forget Your opening over to Yorkshire in the first match of the season.
You dismissed Graham and Penridge for two runs two for two, hey?'
'Two for two, it was. 'Sebastian liked this man.
'Fiery stuff! And then you made fifty-five runs?'
'Sixty-five,' Sebastian corrected him. 'A record ninth wicket partnership with Clifford Dumont of one hundred and eighty-sixV 'Yes! Yes! I remember it well. Fiery stuff! You were damned unlucky not to play for England.' oh, I don't know about that,' said Sebastian in modest agreement.
'Yes, you were.' Joyce pursed his lips again. 'Damned unlucky.' Flynn O'Flynn had not understood a word of this. He was thrashing around in his chair like an old buffalo in a trap, bored to the point of pain. Rosa Oldsmith had understood no more than he had, but she was fascinated. It was clear that Captain Joyce knew of some outstanding accomplishment of Sebastian's, and if a man like Joyce knew of it it ' meant Sebastian was famous. She felt pride swell in her chest and she smiled on Sebastian also.
'didn't know, Sebastian. Why didn't you tell me?' She glowed warmly at him.
'Some other time,' Joyce interrupted quickly. 'Now we must get on with this other business.' And he returned his attention to the chart on the desk.
'Now I want you to cast your mind back. Shut your eyes and try to see it again. Every detail you can remember, every little detail it might be important. Did you see any signs of damage?' Obediently Sebastian closed his eyes, and was surprised at how vividly the acid of fear had engraved the picture of Blitcher on his mind.
'Yes,' he said. 'There were holes in her. Hundreds of holes, little black ones. And at the front end the bows there were trapezes hanging down on ropes, near the water.
You know the kind- that they use when they paint a high building Joyce nodded at his secretary to record every word of it.
The single fan suspended over the table in the wardroom hummed quietly, the blades stirred the air that was moist and warm as the bedding of a malarial patient.
Except for the soft clink of cutlery on china, the only other sound was that of Commissioner Fleischer drinking his soup. It was thick, green pea soup, scalding hot, so that Fleischer found it necessary to blow heavily on each spoonful before ingesting it with a noise, not of the same volume, but with the delicate tonal quality, of a flushing water closet. During the pause while he crumbled a slice of black bread into his Soup, Fleischer looked -across the board at Lieutenant Kyller.
'So you did not find the enemy flying-machine, then?'
'No.' Kyller went on fiddling with his wine glass without looking up. For forty-eight hours he and his patrols had searched the swamps and channels and mangrove forests for the wreckage of the aircraft. He was exhausted and covered with insect bites.
' Fleischer nodded solemnly. 'It fell only a short way, but it did not hit the trees. I was sure of that. I have seen sand-grouse do the same thing sometimes when you shoot them with a shotgun. Pow! They come tumbling down like this...' He fluttered his hand in the air, letting it fall awards his soup, then suddenly they do this. 'The hand took flight again in the direction of Commander (Engineering) Lochtkamper's rugged Neanderthal face. They all watched it.
'The little bird flies away home. It was bad shooting from so close,' said Fleischer, and ended the demonstration by picking up his soup spoon, and the moist warm silence once more gripped the wardroom.
Commander Lochtkamper stoked his mouth as though it were one of his furnaces. The knuckles of both his
