“I okay,” came a familiar voice from the gloom.
Sandra Tucker moved into Dennis’s field of vision. “Lucky for you, you showed enough sense to keep some polta paste in your shooting bag. Rebecca got it for us. She pretty much has the run of the ship. You probably would have come out of it-you’ve got a bad concussion, by the way-but we might have lost young Mr. Cook. Before Truelove hit you, he’d evidently fired his last pistol at the boy. The ball took a big hunk out of the top of his shoulder, close to his neck. Not normally a mortal wound, but it became infected quite quickly.”
“Well. Yeah, I keep some o’ that stuff in there case o’ scratches an’ such. Be kinda stupid, after all we been through, to die o’ some infected scratch. How is the little bugger? Abel, right?”
“I’m here, sir,” came a weak voice. “I’m well enough. I did what you said. I yelled and ran for help!”
“And was shot for his efforts too, the brave, silly boy!” Rebecca scolded.
“Oh, well. Ever’body gets shot sooner or later in the Navy. Seems like it, anyway. You done good, boy.” Silva finally tried to sit up, but it just wasn’t going to happen yet. He growled and lay back down. “So,” he said, “what’s the scam? Why ain’t we been rescued?”
“We’re hostages,” Sandra said simply. “They’ve threatened to kill us if our forces molest them. For a couple of days, one of our planes came and buzzed around, but we haven’t seen it since the storm.”
“A couple o’ days! A storm! How long have I been out?”
“Several days. I believe you were in a coma.”
“Huh. Damn, no wonder I’m so hungry. Several days on this bucket and we could be anywhere. That’s the first thing we gotta figure out: where we are. Then we gotta keep track of our position.”
“Why?” Sister Audry asked.
“So we’ll know when to get off, of course! If they’re keepin’ us hostage, our folks won’t blow the hell outta this tub! Besides, Dennis Silva ain’t nobody’s hostage!”
“What’s your plan?” Rebecca asked eagerly.
“Ain’t got one yet. I just woke up, remember? Gimme a minute or two to figure the angles. So, Miss… Lieutenant… Minister.. .”
Sandra laughed. “Lieutenant will still do.”
“Thanks, ma’am. Lieutenant Tucker says you got the run o’ the ship?”
“Essentially,” Rebecca replied. “That porcine beast must preserve the fiction he has rescued me from you. No one actually believes it. I spend most of my time down here, after all, but he dares not put me in irons. My behavior is controlled by threats against your well-being.”
“You figure there’s anybody aboard we can count on?”
“I’m sure of it. There are more Company men aboard Ajax than any ship that sailed with the squadron, but not all are traitors. Why, even the captain, Captain Rajendra, is a loyal man! He fairly chafes! He does not know what to do, however. Less than half the crew stands with him.”
“The captain himself, eh?” Silva pondered. “Sure you can trust him?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then get our position from him. We need maps too. Charts.”
“What have you got in mind?” Sandra demanded.
“Well, I’m still conjurin’ it up, and me and the boy have a little healin’ to do, but it strikes me the last thing we want is to wind up wherever this ship is goin’. Once we’re there, there won’t be any use for us. There may not be any use for the princess. So somewhere between here and there, we have to switch trains.”
CHAPTER 21
Irvin Laumer’s eyes jerked open and he leaped to his feet when he heard the scream. Everyone was exhausted and he’d been taking a short siesta in the shade of a leafy lean-to on the beach. Only an idiot would do such a thing under the standing trees on Talaud Island. It took him an instant to realize the scream had come from the workers near the sub. Sprinting through the loose sand, he yanked the 45 from his holster and jacked a round into the chamber.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he shouted. The screaming had stopped, but there was still a lot of shouting and confusion around the work site.
“One of the ’Cats was just walking across the gangplank to the boat,” Danny Porter said excitedly, “when this jet of water, like a highpressure hose, knocked him off into the water! As soon as he fell in, something… got him!”
Irvin looked at him incredulously, then eased a little closer to the basin they’d begun excavating around S-19. There was a lot of water down there, and nothing they could do about it. Some soaked in through the sand and more came in with the tide when the sea was running high. Sometimes the boat actually floated. “What was it?” Irvin asked.
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Danny demanded. “There’s all kinds of weird, murdering critters running around on this place! It’s a miracle we survived here as long as we did before, and we were idiots to come back to it!” Danny brought his voice under control. “And if that ain’t enough, we’ve got that thing scaring the water out of everybody!” He pointed at the mist-shrouded volcano in the distance. When they’d been marooned on Talaud Island, the volcano occasionally rumbled and made the ground shake, but for the past few weeks, it had been venting almost constantly. Sometimes it belched heavy clouds of ash that settled on them and got into everything when the wind was right. Sometimes it just made creepy noises. A time or two, they’d had spectacular light shows in the middle of the night. Nobody in their group really knew squat about volcanoes, aside from a few historical accounts, but the overwhelming consensus was that the Talaud volcano was building up to something big.
The problem was, they were stuck there-marooned again, in a sense. Simms ’s consort had been little more than a freighter, and once she’d off-loaded the equipment, machinery, fuel oil for the steam boiler, and the hopefully required diesel, she’d sailed for Manila for more supplies. Simms had remained, lending her crew to the labor and as a safety measure in case, for any reason, they had to abandon the expedition. But even Simms and Captain Lelaa were gone now. They’d sailed two days before to rendezvous with a little squadron of feluccas led by Saan-Kakja’s brother to intercept and at least pinpoint Ajax ’s position.
Irvin understood why Lelaa had to go, but it left him and his crew in a pickle. Simms had taken the newly repaired transmitter, and the set on the boat was irreparable. Tex was trying to build another set like Riggs’s design from the parts at hand, but it was slow going. In the meantime, they were at the mercy of all the terrors Walker had once rescued them from-the dangerous predators including the nocturnal tree git-yas, as Flynn had called them, bizarre creatures that looked and acted like a cross between a Grik and a sloth that dropped on unwary prey from above. There were other things, almost ghostly things no one had ever really seen or had a shot at, that could snatch a man and run faster than anything ought to be capable of. Then there was the mountain, of course. Now…
“Did anybody get a look at it at all?” Laumer asked of the creature that got the ’Cat.
“Well, it was kind of blotchy,” Sid Franks volunteered. As the carpenter, he would now have to repair the damaged gangplank. The jet of water had enough force to blow off the handrail. “It swirled up when it…” He stopped, staring at the water.
“So whatever it is, it’s still in there?” There were nods and Irvin sighed. “Must be a sea creature. Came out of the water last night when nobody was looking and moved in.” He shrugged. “Only one thing for it.” He turned to Midshipman Hardee, who, along with a ’Cat who’d been dubbed Spook, had increasingly taken on their ordnance duties. “We have to get rid of this thing before we can get any more work done today. Get some of the grenades and all the small arms. Make sure you issue them to guys who know how to use them.”
The armed guards who protected the workers from the denizens of the jungle were summoned, and with the distribution of the four other Krags and the single Thompson (all the small arms had been retrieved from the submarine on Walker ’s previous visit) a total of eight riflemen, one submachine gunner (Danny), and Irvin Laumer armed with his pistol prepared to face whatever was in the water. Six grenadiers had simple, ingenious devices quite similar to the grenades the Americans were accustomed to. They were virtually identical in form and function, although the fuses weren’t as reliable. There could be as many as ten seconds or as few as two before the things went off, so there was never any goofing around after the spoon flew.
