South By Java Head (35 page)

"Thank you, Captain Yamata," Van Effen interrupted. "Consider it given." He whirled round, limped quickly into the middle of the prisoners, bent down, twisted his hand in Gordon's shirt-front and jerked him viciously to his feet. "I've been waiting a long time for this, you little rat. Get across there." He ignored Gordon's struggles, his fear-maddened face and incoherent protestations of innocence, marched him across to an empty space at the back of the council house, at a point directly opposite the door, and flung him into a huddled heap, sprawled almost his length against the back wall of the hut, one arm raised in pathetic defence, unreasoning panic limned in every line of his unlovely face.
Van Effen ignored the panic, the protestations and the man, turned quickly round and limped across towards the elders' platform, towards the Japanese soldier who stood with his own rifle under one arm and Farnholme's machine-carbine under the other. With the careless assurance of a man who expects neither question nor resistance, Van Effen firmly relieved the soldier of the machine-carbine, checked that it was fully loaded, slipped the catch to automatic and hobbled back again towards Gordon who still lay where he had left him, eyes unnaturally wide and staring, moaning softly, long, quivering indrawn breaths were the only sound in the room. Every eye in the room was on Van Effen and Gordon, eyes that reflected various states of pity or anger or anticipation or just blank incomprehension. Nicolson's face was quite expressionless, Yamata's almost so, but the tongue running slowly over his lips gave him away. But no one spoke, no one moved, no one thought to speak or move. A man was about to be killed, to be murdered, but some indefinable factor in that electric atmosphere prevented any protest, any interruption, from anyone inside that house. And when the interruption did come, a sudden, jarring shock that shattered the spell as a stone might shatter a delicate crystal, it came from the kam-pong outside.
The high-pitched yell in Japanese jerked every head towards the door. Immediately afterwards came the sound of a short, sharp scuffle, a cry, a revolting, hollow sound like a giant cleaver splitting a water-melon, a momentary, weirdly ominous silence, then a roar and a rush of smoke and flame and the doorway and most of the wall were engulfed, with incredible speed, in a leaping, crackling wall of flame.
Captain Yamata took two steps towards the doorway, opened his mouth to shout an order and died with his mouth still open, the slugs from Van Effen's carbine tearing half his chest away. The staccato hammering of the machine-gun inside the room was almost deafening, completely blotting out the roar of the flames. The sergeant still on the platform died next, then a soldier beside him, then a great red flower spread outwards from the centre of Siran's face, and still Van Effen crouched low over the slowly swinging barrel of his carbine, his hand locked on the trigger, his face that of a man carved from stone. He staggered when the first Japanese rifle bullet caught him high up on the shoulder, stumbled and fell to one knee as a second bullet smashed into his side with the force of a battering ram, but still no flicker of expression crossed his face and the ivory-knuckled trigger finger only tightened the more. That much and that only Nicolson saw before he catapulted himself backwards and crashed into the legs of a soldier lining his tommy-gun on the man by the far wall. They went down together in a writhing, twisting, furiously struggling heap, then Nicolson was smashing the butt of the tommy-gun again and again into the dark blur of the face before him and was on his feet once more, knocking aside a gleaming bayonet blade and kicking viciously for an unprotected groin. Even as he closed with the man, hooked fingers locking round a scrawny throat, he was conscious that Walters and Evans and Willoughby were on their feet also, fighting like madmen in the weird half-light compounded of the red glare of the flames and the choking acrid smoke that filled the room. He was conscious, too, that Van Effen's machine-carbine had fallen silent, that another machine-gun, with a different cyclic rate, was firing through the licking, resinous flames that all but curtained off the doorway. And then he had forgotten all about these things, another man had seized him from behind and locked an elbow round his throat, strangling him in a grim and savage silence. There was a red mist, a mist shot through with sparks and flame, swimming before his eyes, and he knew it was his own blood pounding in his head and not the furiously burning walls of the council house. His strength was going, he was just sliding away into the darkness, when he vaguely heard the man behind him cry out in agony, and then McKinnon had him by the arm, leading him at a stumbling run out through the blazing doorway. But they were too late -- too late at least for Nicolson. The blazing overhead beam falling from the roof caught him only a glancing blow on head and shoulder, but it was enough, in his weakened state more than enough, and the darkness closed over him.
He came to almost a minute later, lying huddled against the wall of the nearest upwind hut from the council house. He was dimly aware of men standing and moving around him, of Miss Plenderleith wiping blood and soot from his face, of the great tongue of flame licking thirty or forty feet vertically upwards into a dark and starless sky as the coucil house, a wall and most of the roof already gone, burnt torch-like to destruction.
Consciousness returned. He staggered to his feet, pushing Miss Plenderleith ungently to one side. All firing had stopped now, he realised, and he could hear the distant sound of a truck engine revving and fading, revving and fading as it slammed through the gears -- the Japanese, or what few of them were left, leaving in a panic-stricken hurry.
"McKinnon!" He had to raise his voice above the crackling roar of the flames. "McKinnon! Where are you?"
"He's round the other side of that house, somewhere." It was Willoughby speaking, and he was pointing to the burning council house. "He's all right, Johnny."
"Everybody out?" Nicolson demanded. "Anybody left inside that thing. For God's sake tell me!"
"They're all out, I think, sir." Walters was at his side, his 229
voice hesitant. "Nobody left where we were all sitting, I know that."
"Thank God, thank God!" He stopped abruptly. "Is Van Effen out?"
No one said anything.
"You heard what I said," Nicolson shouted. "Is Van Effen out?" He caught sight of Gordon, reached him in two steps and caught him by the shoulder. "Is Van Effen still in there? You were nearest him."
Gordon stared at him blankly, his eyes still wide with fear. His mouth was working, the lips jerking and twisting in uncontrollable fashion, but no words came out. Nicolson released his grip on the shoulder, struck him twice, savagely, across the face, open-handed and back-handed, caught him again before he could fall.
"Answer me or I'll kill you, Gordon. Did you leave Van Effen in there?"
Gordon nodded his head jerkily, his fear-whitened face wealing red from the imprint of Nicolson's fingers.
"You left him in there? "Nicolson demanded incredulously. "You left him to die in that inferno?"
"He was going to murder me!" Gordon whined. "He was going to kill me."
"You bloody fool! He saved your life. He saved all our lives." He sent Gordon staggering with a savage shove, brushed off a couple of restraining hands and had covered the ten paces to the council house and leapt through the sheeted flame of the doorway before he had properly realised what he was doing.
The heat inside struck at him with the physical impact of a violent blow, he could feel it engulf him, wash over him in a great wave of burning pain. The superheated air, starved now of its life-giving oxygen, seared down into his lungs like fire itself. He could smell his hair singeing almost immediately, and the tears flooded into his eyes and threatened to blind him, and had it been any darker inside he would have been blinded: but in the savage red glare of the flames it was as bright, almost, as the noon-day sun.
There was no difficulty in seeing Van Effen. He was huddled against the still intact far wall, sitting on the ground, propped up on one arm. His khaki shirt and drill trousers were saturated with blood, and his face was ashen. Gasping, choking, his heaving lungs fighting for air and getting none, Nicolson stumbled as fast as he could across to the far wall of the council house. He had to hurry, he knew, he could last only moments in this atmosphere, half a minute at the most. His clothes were already smouldering, torn edges smoking and burning irregularly red, his tortured lungs couldn't find the oxygen for his rapidly weakening body and the heat on his face and body was like a blast furnace.
Van Effen looked at him vaguely, without either expression or comment. Probably half dead already, Nicolson thought, God only knew how the man had survived even that long. He stooped, tried to pry Van Effen's fingers free from the guard and trigger of the machine-carbine, but it was hopeless, the hand was locked across the metal like a band of iron. There was no time to lose, perhaps it was already too late. Gasping, struggling, the sweat running off his overheated body in streams, Nicolson put out the last of his fading strength in one despairing effort and raised the wounded man up in his arms.
He had covered half the return journey when a crackling, rending noise, loud even above the roar of the flames, made him break step and halt just in time as several blazing, smoking timbers from the roof crashed to the ground in a pyrotechnic eruption of flying sparks and red-hot embers not three feet from where he stood. The doorway was completely, blocked off. Nicolson jerked back his head, stared upwards through smarting, sweat-filmed eyes, gathered a hasty blurred impression of a crumbling, caving roof already falling in upon him, and waited no longer. Four stumbling, plunging steps it took him to cross the blazing beams that lay between them and the doorway, and four steps were eternity. The now tindery dry khaki drills caught fire immediately and the writhing cocoons of flame ran up his legs so fast and so far that he could feel their hungry tips licking agonisingly at the bare forearms that supported the dead weight of Van Effen. Red-hot swords of fire pierced the soles of his feet in merciless excoriation and his nostrils were full of the sickening stench of scorching flesh. His mind was going, his strength was gone, and no sense of time or purpose or direction was left him when he felt urgent hands catching him by the arms and shoulders and pulling him out into the cool, sweet, life-giving air of the evening.
It would have been the easiest thing in the world to hand Van Effen over to outstretched arms, to collapse himself on the ground and let the waiting wave of unconsciousness wash over him and carry him off to merciful oblivion, and the temptation to do both was almost irresistible. But he did neither, just stood instead with wide-planted feet, sucking giant draughts of air into a body that seemed able to accommodate only a fraction of what it needed. Seconds passed and his mind began to clear, the trembling in his legs eased, and he could see Walters and Evans and Willoughby crowding round him, but he ignored them, brushed through and carried Van Effen to the shelter of the nearest up-wind hut in the kam-pong.
Slowly, with an infinite gentleness, he lowered the wounded man to the ground, and started to unbutton the holed and blood-stained shirt. Van Effen caught his wrists with feeble hands.
"You are wasting your time, Mr. Nicolson." His voice was only a feeble murmur with blood in it, barely audible above the crackling roar of the flames.
Nicolson ignored him, ripped the sides of the shirt apart and winced in shock at the sight that lay below. If Van Effen were to live, he would have to be strapped up, and at once. He tore off his own charred and shredded shirt, ripped it and padded the wounds as his eyes travelled up to the German's white, pinched face. Van Effen's lips twisted in some kind of a smile, it might have been a sardonic smile, but it was difficult to tell without reading the expression in his eyes, and it was no longer possible to read anything in Van Effen's eyes for they were already misted over with the glaze of approaching unconsciousness.
"I told you -- don't waste time," he murmured. "The launch -- Kiseki's launch. Get it. It has a radio, probably a big transmitter -- you heard what Yamata said... Walters can send a message." His voice was an urgent whisper. "At once, Mr. Nicolson, at once." His hands dropped away from Nicolson's wrists and fell limply by his side, palm upwards on the hard-packed earth of the kampong.
"Why did you do it, Van Effen?" Nicolson stared down at the sick man and shook his head, slowly, wonderingly, from side to side. "Why in the name of heaven did you do it?"
"God only knows. Or maybe I know also." He was breathing very rapidly, very shallowly, now, with only a few gasping words to every breath. "Total war is total war, Mr. Nicolson, but this is work for barbarians." He gestured weakly at the blazing hut. "If any one of my countrymen could have been with me tonight, he would have done what I have done. We're people, Mr. Nicolson, we're just people." He reached up one flaccid hand, pulled the opened shirt to one side, and smiled. "If you cut us, do we not bleed?" He burst into a paroxysm of bubbling, whooping coughs that contracted torn stomach muscles and lifted head and shoulders clear of the ground, then sank back again, so quiet, so still, that Nicolson stooped quickly forward, in sudden surety that the man was gone. But Van Effen lifted his eyelids again, with the slowness and infinite effort of a man raising a massive weight and smiled at Nicolson through filmed and misted eyes.
"We Germans do not go easily. This is not the end of van Effen." He paused for a long moment, went on in a whisper: "Winning a war costs a great deal. It always costs a great deal. But sometimes the cost is too high, and it is not worth the price. tonight the cost, the price asked, was far too high. I -- I could not pay the price." A great gout of flame shot up from the roof of the council house, bathing his face in its red and savage glare, then it died down again and his face was white and still and he was murmuring something about Kiseki.
"What is it?" Nicolson was so low over him now that their faces were almost touching. "What did you say?"
"Colonel Kiseki." Van Effen's voice was very far away. He tried to smile again, but it was only a pathetic twitch of his lower lip. "Perhaps we have something in common. I think-----" Here his voice faded into nothingness, then came again, strongly. "I think we both have a weakness for very little children."