the details of his defence system.
There were only two of the many mouths of the Rufiji, up which the English could attack. They were separated by a low wedge shaped island of sand and mud and mangrove.
It was on the seaward side of this island that Kyller had sited the four-pounder pom-poms taken from their mountings on Blucher's upper deck.
He had sunk a raft of logs into the soft mud to give them a firm foundation on which to stand, and he had cut out the mangroves so they commanded an arc of fire across both channels. His searchlights he sited with equal care so they could sweep left or right without blinding his gunners.
From Commander Lochtkamper he had solicited alength of four-inch steel hawser. This was rather like an un rehabilitated insolvent raising an unsecured loan from a money-lender, for Commander Locktkamper was not easily parted from his stores. Far up river Ensign Proust had diverted some of his axe-men to felling fifty giant African mahogany trees. They had floated the trunks down on the tide; logs the size of the columns of a Greek these and the cable Kyller had fashioned stretched across both channels, an obstacle that it would rip the belly out of even a a heavy cruiser coming down on it at speed.
Not satisfied with this, for Kyller had highly developed the Teutonic capacity for taking infinite pains, he lifted the fat globular mines with their sinister horns that Blitcher had sown haphazardly behind her on her journey up-river. These he rearranged into near geometrical ranks behind his log boom, a labour that left his men almost prostrated with nervous exhaustion. This work had taken ten days to complete, and immediately Kyller had begun building observation posts. He placed them on every hump of high ground that commanded a view of the ocean, he built them in the tops of the palm trees, and on the smaller islands that stood out at sea. He arranged a system of signals with his observers flags and heliographs for the day, sky-rockets for the night.
During the hours of darkness, two whale boats rowed steadily back and forth along the log boom, manned by seamen who slapped steadily and sulkily at the light cloud of mosquitoes that hal oed their heads, and made occasional brief but vitriolic statements about Lieutenant Kyller's ancestry, present worth and future prospects.
At 2200 hours on the moonless night of 16 June 1915, the British motor torpedo-boat YN2 crept with both engines running dead slow into the centre of Lieutenant Kyller's elaborate reception arrangements.
After the clean cool air on the open sea, the smell was like entering the monkey-house of London Zoo.
The land masked the breeze, and the frolic of the Surface chop died away. As the torpedo-boat groped its way into the delta, the miasma of the swamps spread out to meet her.
'my God, that smell.' Sebastian twitched his flattened nose. 'It brings back pleasant memories.'
'Lovely, isn't it? 'agreed Flynn.
'We must be almost into the channel.' Sebastian peered into the night, sensing rather than seeing the loom of the mangroves ahead and on either hand.
'I don't know what the hell I'm doing on this barge, grunted Flynn. 'This is raving bloody madness. We've got more chance of catching a clap than finding our way up to where Blitcher is anchored.' 'Faith! Major O'Flynn, and shame on ye!' The commander of the torpedo boat exclaimed in his best musichl brogue. 'We put our trust in you and the Lord.' His tone changed and he spoke crisply to the helmsman beside him. 'Lay her off a point to starboard.'
The long nose of the boat, with the torpedo tubes lying like a rack of gigantic champagne bottles on her foredeck, swung fractionally.
The commander cocked his head to listen to the whispered soundings relayed from the leadsman in the bows.
'Twelve fathoms,' he repeated thoughtfully. 'So far so good Then he turned back to Flynn.
'Now, Major, I heard you shooting the blarney to Captain Joyce about how well you know this river, I think your exact words were, 'Like you know the way to your own Thunder Box.' You don't seem so certain about it any longer. Why is that?'
'It's dark, 'said Flynn sulkily.
'My, so it is. But that shouldn't fluster an old river pilot like you.'
'Well, it sure as hell does.'
'If we get into the channel and lay up until the moon rises, would that help?'
'It wouldn't do any harm.' That exchange seemed to exhaust the subject and for a further fifteen minutes the tense silence on the bridge was spoiled only by the commander's quiet orders to the helm, as he kept his ship within the ten fathom line of the channel.
Then Sebastian made a contribution.
'I say, there's something dead ahead of us.' A patch of deeper darkness in the night; a low blurred shape that showed against the faint sheen of the star reflections on the surface. A reef perhaps? No, there was a splash alongside it as an oar dipped and pulled.
'Guard boat!' said the commander, and stooped to the voice-pipe. 'Both engines ' ahead together.' The deck canted sharply under their feet as the bows lifted, the whisper of the engines rose to a dull bellow and the torpedo-boat plunged forward like a bull at the cape.
'Hold on! I'm going to ram it.' The commander's voice was pitched at conversational level, and a hubbub of shouts broke out ahead, oars splashed Frantically as the guard boat tried to pull out of their line of charge.
'Steer for them,' said the commander pleasantly, and the helmsman put her over a little.
Flash and crack, flash and crack, someone in the guard boat fired a rifle just as the torpedo-boat struck her. It was a glancing blow, taken on her shoulder, that spun the little whale boat aside, shearing off the protruding oars with a crackling popping sound.
She scraped down the gunwale of the torpedo-boat, and then was left astern bobbing and rocking wildly as the larger vessel surged ahead.
Then abruptly it was no longer dark. From all around them sparkling trails of fire shot into the sky and burst in balls of blue, that lit it all with an eerie flickering glow.
'Sky rockets, be Jesus. Guy Fawkes, Guy,' said the commander.
They could see the banks of mangrove massed on either hand, and ahead of them the double mouths of the two channels.
'Steer for the southern channel.' This time the commander lifted his voice a little, and the ship plunged onward, throwing out white wings of water from under her bows, bucking and jarring as she leapt over the low swells pushed up by the out-flowing tide, so the men on the bridge hung on to the hand rail to steady themselves.
Then all of them gasped together in the pain of seared eyeballs as a solid shaft of dazzling white light struck them.
It leapt out from the dark wedge of land that divided the two channels, and almost immediately two other searchlights on the outer banks of the channels joined in the hunt. Their beams fastened on the ship like the tentacles of a squid on the carcass of a flying fish.
'Get those lights!' This time the commander shouted the order at the gunners behind the Lewis guns at the corners of the bridge. The tracer that hosed out in a gentle arc towards the base of the searchlight beams was anaemic and pinkly pale, in contrast to the brilliance they were trying to quench.
The torpedo-boat roared on into the channel.
Then there was another sound. A regular thump, thump, thump like the working of a distant water pump. Lieutenant Kyller had opened up with his quick-firing pam- pam.
The four-pound tracer emanated from the dark blob of the island. Seeming to float slowly towards the torpedo boat but gaining speed as it approached, until it flashed past with the whirr of a rocketing pheasant.
'Jesus' said Flynn as though he meant it. He sat down hurriedly on the deck and began to unlace his boots.
Still held in the cold white grip of the searchlights, the torpedo-boat roared on with four-pounder shell streaking around her, and bursting in flurries of spray on the surface near her. The long dotted tendrils of tracer from her own Lewis guns still arched out in delicate lines towards the shore, and suddenly they had effect.
The beam of one of the searchlights snapped off as a bullet shattered the glass, for a few seconds the filaments continued to glow dull red as they burned themselves out.
In the relief from the blinding glare, Sebastian Could see ahead, and he saw a sea serpent. It lay across the channel, undulating in the swells, bellied from bank to bank by the push of the tide, showing its back at the top of the swells and then ducking into the troughs; long and sinuous and menacing, Lieutenant Kyller's log boom waited to welcome them.
'Good God, what's that?'
'Full port rudder!' the commander bellowed. 'Both engines full astern together.' And before the ship could answer her helm or the drag of her propellers, she ran into a log four feet thick and a hundred feet long. A log as unyielding as a reef of solid granite that stopped her dead in the water and crunched in her bows.
The men in the well of her bridge were thrown into a heap of tangled bodies on the deck. A heap from which the bull figure of Flynn Patrick O'Flynn was the first to emerge, On stockinged feet he made for the side of the ship.
'Flynn, where are you going?' Sebastian shouted after him.
'Home,'said Flynn.
'Wait for
