Читать книгу The Disappearing Dhow - Percy Francis Westerman - Страница 4

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Midshipman Burton did not look back. For one reason, it was considered unlucky to do so when putting off from a ship; for another, he was at the wheel—a duty he preferred to carry out himself rather than hand it over to one of the ratings—and the picket-boat, being lively on her helm, required careful handling to avoid leaving the zig-zag wake which is the trade-mark of a lubberly or careless steersman.

Kelby, in the stern-sheets, could not help looking at the light-cruiser. He was half afraid that for some reason the Myosotis would hoist the picket-boat’s number as a signal for recall. He had known such a thing to happen before, and in such cases there was no “turning the blind eye” to a peremptory order of that nature.

Then:

“She’s gathering way, Crash!” he announced to his chum. “Doesn’t she look topping?”

“Good!” rejoined Burton, and for the first time he permitted his gaze to bear astern.

The Myosotis, that during the hoisting-out operation had stopped her engines, was now steaming ahead. Then under full port helm she swung through sixteen points and settled down on a course that ostensibly would take her to either of the fuelling stations of Perim or Aden. And as she went she was sending out a wireless message en clair—or not in code—announcing her intention of returning to her base to replenish her oil-bunkers—an operation which she had not the faintest intention of carrying out; at least, not for the next ten days or so.

Half an hour later the Myosotis was hull down, and in another ten minutes only a faint blur of smoke on the horizon gave an indication of her position to the crew of the picket-boat.

“We’re away with it, Badger!” exclaimed Burton cheerfully. “Pass the word for Wilson to take over and for the hands to carry on smoking.”

Wilson, the torpedo coxswain, relieved the Senior Midshipman at the wheel, and as a result of the second order—a welcome one as far as the crew were concerned—pipes and cigarettes were produced and the aroma of tobacco smoke floated aft. Smoking, when once away from the ship, was a concession that was highly appreciated.

Well before sunset the picket-boat had felt her way through the ill-charted channel between the reefs. Although the sea was calm, the coral barrier was marked by a line of creamy foam, broken only by a narrow belt of relatively quiet water that marked the narrow passage.

Burton gave a sigh of relief when this bit of navigation was safely accomplished. He was too good a seaman to attempt it after dark, but, once through, he knew that there was enough searoom for the picket-boat during the hours of darkness. It was in the wide stretch of water inside the far-flung line of reefs that the gun-running dhows were supposed to be active.

In eleven fathoms the anchor was dropped, fires banked and the picket-boat prepared for the night. No anchor light was shown. The cabin windows and engine-room and fo’c’sle scuttle were screened lest a stray beam of light should betray the little craft’s whereabouts. A look-out was posted with strict injunctions to keep his weather-eye lifting—not that there was anything to be seen in a pitch-black night. Dhows, whether on legitimate business or otherwise, hardly ever showed navigation lights. Their presence could be detected only by sound—the cheeping of blocks, the thudding of their enormous lateen yards, the slatting of their canvas and the almost constant jabbering of their coffee-coloured crews—or by their powerful smell. On a calm night a dhow has been known to throw her scent to leeward to a distance of more than a mile.

The long night—ten hours of intense darkness—passed uneventfully. By contrast with the tropical heat of the day the air was piercingly cold, for the picket-boat was close enough to land to feel the effect of the rapidly radiating sands of the Arabian desert.

Burton and his chum kept “watch and watch”, the midshipmen sleeping fitfully in their intervals of off-duty. It was their first night of the picket-boat’s cruise, and they were far too excited to rest.

Dawn found both lads on the cabin-top, eagerly scanning the expanse of sea directly the sun leapt, like a ball of flaming fire, above the distant mountain ranges of the Arabian tableland.

“Sail on the port bow, sir!” exclaimed the look-out man.

Hastily the two midshipmen turned their binoculars in the direction indicated. It was one where they least expected to see a vessel, namely between them and the reef. A dhow, especially if engaged in gun-running, was hardly likely to be hugging that dangerous barrier during the hours of darkness. If anything, she would be nosing her way, aided by her crew’s expert local knowledge, along the coast, from one secret haven to another.

But there was no mistake on the part of the look-out man. She was a dhow, and a large one at that, creeping slowly, with her canvas just drawing, in a northerly direction inside and almost parallel to the dangerous line of foaming breakers.

“She’s asking for it!” exclaimed Kelby. “She has ‘suspicious character’ written all over her!”

“That she has!” agreed his chum. “Well, we’ll soon settle that point!”

In response to an order the hands tumbled up from below; the chief stoker raised steam while the anchor was being weighed and directly the picket-boat forged ahead; the gun’s crew cast loose the quick-firer, loaded, and stood by to await the command to open fire.

When first sighted the dhow was about three miles away. The distance had closed to less than a couple of miles before the Arab crew gave any indication of having perceived that they were being chased.

The wind was light but steady. Under her enormous spread of canvas the dhow, ungainly-looking yet actually with splendid lines below water, was doing perhaps five knots to the picket-boat’s twelve.

Then suddenly she increased speed to one equal to or even exceeding that of her pursuer. A thin haze of bluish smoke astern explained her clean pair of heels. Like some other up-to-date native craft she was fitted with a powerful motor.

For a quarter of an hour the pursuit continued. Then Kelby, who had brought his sextant from the cabin, announced the disconcerting fact that the dhow’s masthead angle was decreasing—in other words that she was gaining on the picket-boat.

In the circumstances there was only one thing to be done—to fire a shot as close to her as possible without actually hitting her, in the hope of persuading her to heave-to.

“Put a shot close alongside her, Giles!” ordered the Senior Midshipman, addressing the seaman-gunner.

“Ay, ay, sir!” came the prompt response, as the trained seaman bent over the sights of the six-pounder.

The projectile was not a live shell and consequently would not explode on impact. It would, however, throw up a column of water sufficiently high to terrify an average dhow’s crew into surrender.

For a brief instant Giles lingered over the sights, then pressed the firing-trigger. There was a flash, accompanied by a sharp detonation.

The projectile sped on its way. Owing to the relative positions of the picket-boat and her quarry it was out of the question to give the time-honoured warning of “putting a shot across the enemy’s bows”. All that the seaman-gunner could hope to do in that respect was to let the shell make its first ricochet within a few yards of the dhow’s starboard beam.

Through their binoculars the two midshipmen watched the flight of the projectile. Apparently, judging by the smother of foam it threw up, the shell pitched within twenty feet of the still swiftly-moving dhow. Much of the spray flew inboard, wetting both lateen sails almost to their peaks. Then, with a succession of “duck and drake”-like ricochets the projectile finally disappeared beneath the surface a good mile ahead of the spot where it had first struck.

“That’s put the wind up the blighters, Crash!” exclaimed Kelby.

Burton grinned.

“Seems so, Badger, old son,” he rejoined.

The two white-robed Arabs who had been observed to be standing on the dhow’s lofty poop disappeared from view.

A moment or so later both lateen yards came down with a run, and the lithe, brown-skinned crew began gathering in and furling the two sails.

“Hurrah, she’s heaving-to,” declared Kelby, as he unbuttoned the flap of his revolver holster in anticipation of his duties as boarding officer and possible prize-master.

Even as he spoke the two raking masts of the dhow were lowered. The bluish smoke from her exhaust ceased—an indication that her petrol motor had been switched off.

Then to the utter astonishment of the crew of the picket-boat the dhow kicked up her heels and disappeared, bows first, beneath the surface.

The whole thing was over in less than thirty seconds from the time of lowering the masts.

The two midshipmen glanced at each other but never spoke a word. Each had the same thought in his mind—that Giles had inadvertently hit the dhow with the warning shot, and the projectile had ripped a fatal gash in her hull before resuming its series of ricochets.

In a few minutes the picket-boat was over the spot where the dhow had disappeared. Already the turmoil of agitated water had subsided, but beyond a steadily widening patch of iridescent oil upon the surface there was no sign of the sunken craft—not even as much as a jagged splinter from the vessel’s shell-torn planking.

Nor were there any of the dhow’s crew to be seen swimming about. Most Arab seamen are excellent swimmers, and since the crew were on deck just before the dhow made her plunge it was strange that none had taken to the water.

“Gone, every man jack of ’em!” exclaimed the torpedo coxswain in sepulchral tones. “That was a mighty fine shot of yours, Giles,” he added, unable to resist the temptation of twitting the seaman-gunner on his boasted prowess.

“Garn!” retorted Giles contemptuously. “If I wanted to hit her I’d hit her; if I wanted to miss her by inches I’d miss her with anything from a fifteen-inch down to a morris tube! I reckon she scuttled herself, the dirty dog, to avoid the consequences!”

Overhearing this exchange of words, Burton took courage. He had been feeling very much down in the mouth at the unexpected trend of events. His orders had been to capture or destroy only after he had satisfied himself that the dhow was actually a gun-runner. Before he had left the Myosotis Captain Dacres had warned him against making a blunder that might lead up to “international complications”. Not so many years ago a British officer in India had nipped a mutiny in the bud by drastic but certainly necessary measures. His reward at the hands of a spineless government at home was to be recalled and deprived of his command. Ever since then British officers when faced with a grave problem of this nature have been handicapped and even crippled by the knowledge that their action, however justifiable, might be condemned by the home authorities and their active career brought to an inglorious end.

And Burton had been filled with these misgivings. What if the dhow were an honest trader and her Arab crew, terrified by being fired upon, had frantically scuttled their craft? Visions of a court-martial condemning not only him but Captain Dacres as well—since he was acting under his commanding officer’s orders—had filled the midshipman’s mind until he overheard the conversation between the two petty officers.

“You’re sure you didn’t hit her, Seaman-Gunner Giles?” he asked.

“Sure as I’m standing here, sir,” declared the man emphatically. “Why, sir, when I was at Whale Island——”

“I was watching through my glasses,” interrupted Midshipman Burton, not wishing to be regaled with a record of Seaman-Gunner Giles’s prowess at the principal Naval Gunnery School. “I was pretty certain that the projectile passed well wide of her.”

“Then you needn’t worry yourself over a dozen or so Arabs, sir,” rejoined the petty officer with characteristic disdain for all coloured natives. “She’s sunk without a trace, and if we say nothing no one will be any the wiser!”

“That won’t do,” replied Burton, resolutely putting the temptation aside. “I’ll have to log the incident, and if there’s a row about it I’ll have to stand the racket, I suppose! Ever seen a dhow high and dry, Wilson? I haven’t.”

The torpedo coxswain thus appealed to, tilted his sun-helmet and scratched his closely cropped head.

“Can’t say as I have, sir,” he replied, “but I remember once seeing one being built when we were lying at anchor at some port on the west coast the name of which slips my memory.”

“Strongly built, eh?”

“Rather, sir. Timbers on her like baulks in the pickling ponds at Pompey Hard.”

Burton could not help smiling at the petty officer’s simile.

“Then, if all dhows are built in similar fashion, it’s hardly likely that this one could scuttle herself so rapidly unless she employed explosives,” he continued. “And we heard no sound of an internal detonation, did we?”

Wilson shook his head.

“If she’d blown herself up we’d have seen the wreckage and heard the noise,” he declared, with a triumphant look at Giles, as if to imply that the latter’s explanation of the affair was one that would not bear investigation. “I reckon the projectile struck her a glancing blow and ripped a plank out of her.”

“That it did not,” declared the seaman-gunner fiercely.

“That’ll do!” cautioned the midshipman.

“Sorry, sir!” exclaimed Giles, conscious that his pride as a gunner had temporarily overcome his sense of discipline.

Burton dismissed them and went into the cabin to write his report. He did so briefly and to the point, omitting nothing, but giving no unnecessary conjectures.

“You agree to that, Badger?”

Kelby nodded.

“Course I do,” he replied, as he affixed his signature to the Senior Midshipman’s report. “Well, that’s that. You’ve got it off your chest, old bird; but now what’s to be done?”

“Just carry on,” rejoined Burton.