lifeboat in tow, was making a top speed of perhaps three and a half knots, but every foot covered was a foot nearer safety. The fighters still cruised overhead, but aimlessly: they, had made no move to attack since the embarkation had begun and obviously had no intention of making any now.
Two more minutes passed, and the Viroma was burning more fiercely than ever. The flames from the fo'c'sle were now clearly visible, no longer swallowed up by the brilliance of the sunlight: the dense pall of smoke from the two after cargo tanks now spread over half a square mile of sea and not even the fierce tropical sun could penetrate its black intensity. Under this dark canopy the two great pillars of flame swept more and more closely together, remorseless, majestic in the splendour of their inexorable progress. The tips of the two great fires leaned in towards one another ? some curious freak of the superheated atmosphere ? and Findhorn, twisted round in his seat and watched his ship die, knew with sudden certainty that when these two flames touched the end would come. And so it was.
After the barbaric magnificence of the dying, the death was strangely subdued and unspectacular. A column of white flame streaked upwards just abaft the bridge, climbing two, three, four hundred feet, then vanishing as suddenly as it had come. Even as it vanished a low, deep, prolonged rumble came at them across the stillness of the sea; by and by the echoes vanished away in the empty distance and there was only then the silence. The end came quietly and without any fuss, even with a certain grace and dignity, the Viroma slipping gently under the surface of the sea on an even steady keel, a tired and dreadfully wounded ship that had taken all it could and was glad to go to rest. The watchers in the lifeboats could hear the gentle hissing, quickly extinguished, of water pouring into red-hot holds, could see the tips of the two slender masts sliding down vertically into the sea, then a few bubbles and then nothing at all, no floating wood or flotsam on the oily waters, just nothing at all. It was as if the Viroma had never been.
Captain Findhorn turned to Nicolson, his face like a stone, his eyes drained and empty of all expression. Almost everybody in the lifeboat was looking at him, openly or covertly, but he seemed completely unaware of it, a man sunk in a vast and heedless indifference.
'Unaltered course, Mr. Nicolson, if you please.' His voice was low and husky, but only from weakness and blood. '200, as I remember. Our objective remains. We should reach the Macclesfield Channel in twelve hours.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
Hours passed, interminable, breathless hours under a blue, windless sky and the fierce glare of the tropical sun and still number one lifeboat chugged steadily south, towing the other boat behind it. Normally a lifeboat carries a fuel supply good only for a hundred miles steaming at about four knots, and is used solely for emergencies, such as towing other boats clear of a sinking ship, cruising around for survivors, going for immediate help or keeping the boat itself hove to in heavy seas. But McKinnon had had the foresight to throw in extra cans of petrol and, even allowing for the possibility of bad weather, they had enough, and more than enough, to carry them to Lepar, an island about the size of the Isle of Sheppey on the starboard hand as they passed through the Macclesfield Channel. Captain Findhorn, with fifteen years in the Archipelago behind him, knew where he could find petrol on Lepar, and plenty of it. The only unknown quantity was the Japanese: they might have already taken over the island, but with their land forces already so widespread and thinly stretched it seemed unlikely that they could yet have had the time or sufficient reason to garrison so small a place. And with plenty of petrol and fresh water there was no saying how far they might go; the Sunda Straits between Sumatra and Java was not impossible, especially when the north-east trades started up again and helped them on their way.
But there were no trades just now, not even the lightest zephyr of a breeze; it was absolutely still and airless and suffocatingly hot and the tiny movement of air from their slow passage through the water was only a mockery of coolness and worse than nothing at all. The blazing sun was falling now, slipping far to the west, but still burning hot: Nicolson had both sails stretched as awnings, the jib for the fore end and the lug-sail, its yard lashed half-way up the mast, stretched aft as far as it would go, but even beneath the shelter of these the heat was still oppressive, somewhere between eighty and ninety degrees with a relative humidity of over 85 per cent. It was seldom enough in the East Indies, at any time of the year, that the temperature dropped below eighty degrees. Nor was there any relief to be obtained, any chance of cooling off by plunging over the side into the water, the temperature of which lay somewhere between eighty degrees and eighty-five. All the passengers could do was to recline limply and listlessly in the shade of awnings, to sit and suffer and sweat and pray for the sun to go down.
The passengers. Nicolson, sitting in the sternsheets with the tiller in his hand, looked slowly round the people in the boat, took in their condition and lifeless inertia and tightened his lips. If he had to be afloat in an open boat in the tropics, hundreds ? thousands ? of miles from help and surrounded by the enemy and enemy-held islands, he could hardly have picked a boatload of passengers less well equipped for handling a boat, with a poorer chance of survival. There were exceptions, of course, men like McKinnon and Van Effen would always be exceptions, but as for the remainder…
Excluding himself, there were seventeen people aboard. Of these, as far as sailing and fighting the boat were concerned, only two were definite assets: McKinnon, imperturbable, competent, infinitely resourceful, was worth any two men, and Van Effen, an otherwise unknown quantity, had already proved his courage and value in an emergency. About Vannier it was difficult to say: no more than a boy, he might possibly stand up to prolonged strain and hardship, but time alone would show. Walters, still looking sick and shaken, would be a useful man to have around when he had recovered. And that, on the credit side, was just about all.
Gordon, the second steward, a thin-faced, watery-eyed and incurably furtive individual, a known thief who had been conspicuously and mysteriously absent from his action stations that afternoon, was no seaman, no fighter and could be trusted to do nothing whatsoever that didn't contribute to the immediate safety and benefit of himself. Neither the Muslim priest nor the baffling, enigmatic Farnholme ? they were seated together on the same thwart, conversing in low murmurs ? had shown up too well that afternoon either. There was no more kindly nor better- meaning man than Willoughby, but, outside his engine room and deprived of his beloved books and for all his rather pathetic eagerness to be of assistance, there was no more ineffectual and helpless person alive than the gentle second engineer. The captain, Evans, the quartermaster, Fraser and Jenkins, the young able seaman, were too badly hurt to give any more than token assistance. Alex, the young soldier ? Nicolson had discovered that his name was Sinclair ? was as jittery and unstable as ever, his wide, staring eyes darting restlessly, ceaselessly, from one member of the boat's company to the next, the palms of his hands rubbing constantly up and down the thighs of his trousers, as if desperately seeking to rub off some contamination. That left only the three women and young Peter ? and if anyone wanted to stack the odds even higher, Nicolson thought bitterly, there was always Siran and his six cut-throat friends not twenty feet away. The prospects, overall, were not good.
The one happy, carefree person in the two boats was young Peter Tallon. Clad only in a haltered pair of white, very short shorts, he seemed entirely unaffected by the heat or anything else, bouncing incessantly up and down on the sternsheets and having to be rescued from falling overboard a dozen times a minute. Familiarity breeding trust, he had quite lost his earlier fear of the other members of the crew but had not yet given him his unquestioning confidence: whenever Nicolson, whose seat by the tiller was nearest to the youngster, offered him a piece of ship's biscuit or a mug with some watered down sweet condensed milk, he would smile at him shyly, lean forward, snatch the offering, retreat and eat or drink it, head bent and looking suspiciously at Nicolson under lowered eyelids. But if Nicolson reached out a hand to touch or catch him he would fling himself against Miss Drachmann, who sat on the starboard side of the sternsheets, entwine one chubby hand in the shining black hair, often with a force that brought a wince and an involuntary 'ouch' from the girl, twist his head round and regard him gravely through the spread fingers of his left hand. It was a favourite trick of his, this peeping from behind his fingers, one which he seemed to imagine made him invisible. For long moments at a time Nicolson forgot the war, the wounded men and their own near-hopeless situation, absorbed in the antics of the little boy but always he came back to the bitter present, to an even keener despair, to a redoubled fear of what would happen to the child when the Japanese finally caught up with them.
And they would catch up with them. Nicolson had known that, known it beyond any shadow of doubt, known that Captain Findhorn knew it also despite his encouraging talk of sailing for Lepar and the Sunda Straits. The Japanese had their position to within a few miles, could find them and pick them off whenever they wished. The
