I watched the helicopter. He was behind us now, a hundred feet or more, coming in slowly for another round. The junk was swaying slightly, the list increasing. The moment when the list and the swing were just right...
He passed overhead, but the list was wrong, and ignoring the two shells that went into the sea on this pass, I wanted for him to back up again. And now he was coming into position and so was the angle of the junk. I said quietly: “Ready.”
My eyes were on the helicopter, straining, watching while I tried to calculate. I thought: This is a hell of a long way from the Norden bombsight.
I pulled the two pins with my teeth, dropped the grenades down the muzzle, snatched up the other two, pulled their pins, dropped them down too, and yelled:
“Now! For God’s sake, now!”
Theo was holding the taper to the breech, quite calm. I saw there was going to be more time than I’d thought, and I worried about angles and inclinations while I hurriedly grabbed two more grenades and stuffed them home. The tiny fuse caught and spluttered, and we both dived through the hole in the deck, not caring how far we dropped, landing in a horrible mess on the bottom.
And then, it went off.
It was the last time that cannon would fire. She broke free of her moorings and crashed through the bulwarks and over the side, and I rolled over on my back and looked up and there, high in the sky above me, were five live hand-grenades hurtling straight for the helicopter; five black and deadly specks against the blue sky; I never did learn where the sixth one went. Two of them were soaring off to the left, one was dead center, and two more were angling off to the right. Any one of them, I thought, would do the job if they went off at roughly the right moment; anywhere above or below, and within a couple of hundred feet.
I counted, mentally, from the moment I pulled the first pin, but I was late pulling back; was it perhaps fascination with the improvised weapon?
I saw one of them, the first, explode well to one side, and a black flower opened up on the helicopter’s green painted side. Stray pieces of shrapnel came raining down around us, and one buried itself deep into my calf as the second grenade went off. And then the last three exploded almost simultaneously, and at that precise moment the roar of the copter’s motor ceased.
Theo and I struggled to our feet and reached up to clamber quickly back on deck. The men had come up from under cover, and they were standing there in the open, a ragged, uncouth, loyal army of villains yelling their heads off in a variety of languages, waving their rifles like savage dervishes, slapping their thighs and clapping each other on the back.
And the helicopter was plunging slowly into the sea. It was catching fire, the flames spreading outwards on a sheet of falling gasoline, then seeming to turn back and engulf the craft itself. I fancied I heard a terrible long drawn out scream. It toppled over and gathered speed and crashed into the water close beside us, its twisted framework scraping our hull as it went down.
I ran to the side and looked over, and there below me was the cold, dead face of Alexander Ming; the eyes were open and the face was blackened, and in death he was staring straight at me, accusingly. The black smoke covered the stare, and he was gone. Of the other men there was no sign. And then the flames took over, and the black smoke, and then the water. And all that was left on the surface was a charred piece of green metal with the letter “M” in scarlet on it.
Theo was beside me, scratching his head. He said: “Now, how we get this junk into port, we only got little bit sail left, you want to tell me that?”
I said: “You’ll find a way, skipper.”
He grinned at me, and I went below to find Mai.
Sally was stretched out on a bunk, her eyes glazed, silent and morose and listless. There were four wounded men, whom Mai had bandaged, lying on the floor and slowly getting drunk on the wine she had found for them.
I said: “All over now. We’ll be home soon.”
Mai nodded, looking at me with solemn, somber eyes. She said: “Next door.”
“I know.”
I took her hand and we went into the tiny cabin to while away the time till we should arrive in port.
CHAPTER 14
I said: “In the course of time, she’d have killed Ming and herself too. You’re going to have your work cut out to patch things up again.”
Markle Hyde nodded. He said, wondering: “How did she get so close to him and still stay alive? That’s what I can’t understand.”
I shrugged. “Too long, too involved a story. One day, perhaps, Sally will tell you that herself. But I shouldn’t press her for it, not too hard. And not for a while yet.”
He knew that I was keeping something back, knew too that he would never get it out of me.
We sat together in the fine old living room of Bonelli’s house at Penha Point, with the yellow sun streaming in through the open windows, and the cool breeze blowing off the waters. Sally was there too, standing still and silent by the window and looking out across the water, with her back turned to us. She looked round at me and said nothing.
I said to him: “What will you do now? The whole world will know who Markle Hyde really is. Does that matter to you?”
He shook his head. “Not anymore.” He was a tired old man, with all the fire gone out of him. “I can’t go back to the States, of course. But somewhere out here, there ought to be room for me. I don’t know. When all this...” He groped for the words. “When all this has settled down—wherever Sally wants to go.”
“She’ll find the best treatment in the world out here. In Hong Kong, or Singapore, or Rangoon.”
“Yes. Yes, I know that. Maybe there is something we can do. At least we can try.”
Sally moved away from the open window and came and sat on the floor next to her father, like a child, her head against his knees. He put a hand on her shoulder and touched it, and she took his hand in hers, and I felt that this was no place to stay any longer.
I got up and went over to her, and I bent down and raised her chin and kissed her just once, and she looked at me and said nothing.
And as I turned at the door, I saw that she was crying quietly.
Somehow, the tears were the most comforting thing I could have wished for. I closed the door softly behind me and went back to the fan-tan house.
Bettina was there, and so was Mai, and so was Bonelli. There were a couple of loose ends still to be tied up, and I said to Bonelli:
“Whatever happened to our dear friend Wentworth?”
He shrugged. “The police were delighted to get him; and now that Ming is dead, there is, no doubt, a great deal he will tell the worthy captain.”
“Captain?”
“Melindo. I arranged for him to make the arrest, and they were so delighted that he is now a captain.”
