Shout at the Devil - Smith Wilbur (лучшие книги .TXT) 📗
"Distinguished Service Order and all. he grunted. "A half-trained chimpanzee could have done what he did. Yet who was it who found the wheels in the first place? No, Flynn Patrick, there just ain't no justice in this world, but we'll show the sons of bitches this time..." His thoughts were interrupted by the small bustle of activity on the bridge around him. An Aldis lamp was winking from the high dark bulk of Renounce ahead of them.
The lieutenant commanding the torpedo-boat spelled the message aloud.
"Flag to YN2. D P departure point. Good luck." He was a dumpy amorphous figure in his duffle coat with the collar turned up. "Thanks a lot, old chap and one up your pipe also. No, Signaller, don't make that." He went on quickly, "YN 2 to Flag. Acknowledged!" Then turning to the engine voice-pipe. "Both engines stop," he said.
The beat of her engines faded away, and she wallowed in the trough of the next wave. Renounce and Pegasus sailed on sedately, leaving the tiny vessel rolling crazily in the turbulence of their wakes. A lonely speck five miles off the mouth of the Rufiji delta, too far off for the shore-watchers to see her in the fading evening light.
Lieutenant Ernst Kyller watched through his binoculars as the two British cruisers turned in succession away from the land and coalesced with the darkness that fell so swiftly over the ocean and the land. They were gone.
"Every day it is the same." Kyller let the binoculars fall against his chest and pulled his watch from the pocket of his tunic. "Fifteen minutes before sunset, and again fifteen minutes before sun-up they sail past to show us that they are still waiting."
"Yes, sir," agreed the seaman who was squeezed into the crow's-nest beside Kyller.
"I will go down now. Moon comes up at 11-44 tonight keep awake." "Yes, sir." Kyller swung his legs over the side and groped with his feet for the rungs of the rope ladder. Then he climbed down the palm tree to the beach fifty feet below. By the time he reached it the light had gone, and the beach was a vague white blur down to the green lights of phosphorus in the surf.
The sand crunched like sugar under his boots as he set off to where the launch was moored. As he walked, his mind was wholly absorbed with the details of his defence system.
There were only two of the many mouths of the Rufiji, up which the English could attack. They were separated by a low wedge shaped island of sand and mud and mangrove.
It was on the seaward side of this island that Kyller had sited the four-pounder pom-poms taken from their mountings on Blucher's upper deck.
He had sunk a raft of logs into the soft mud to give them a firm foundation on which to stand, and he had cut out the mangroves so they commanded an arc of fire across both channels. His searchlights he sited with equal care so they could sweep left or right without blinding his gunners.
From Commander Lochtkamper he had solicited alength of four-inch steel hawser. This was rather like an un rehabilitated insolvent raising an unsecured loan from a money-lender, for Commander Locktkamper was not easily parted from his stores. Far up river Ensign Proust had diverted some of his axe-men to felling fifty giant African mahogany trees. They had floated the trunks down on the tide; logs the size of the columns of a Greek these and the cable Kyller had fashioned stretched across both channels, an obstacle that it would rip the belly out of even a a heavy cruiser coming down on it at speed.
Not satisfied with this, for Kyller had highly developed the Teutonic capacity for taking infinite pains, he lifted the fat globular mines with their sinister horns that Blitcher had sown haphazardly behind her on her journey up-river. These he rearranged into near geometrical ranks behind his log boom, a labour that left his men almost prostrated with nervous exhaustion. This work had taken ten days to complete, and immediately Kyller had begun building observation posts. He placed them on every hump of high ground that commanded a view of the ocean, he built them in the tops of the palm trees, and on the smaller islands that stood out at sea. He arranged a system of signals with his observers flags and heliographs for the day, sky-rockets for the night.
During the hours of darkness, two whale boats rowed steadily back and forth along the log boom, manned by seamen who slapped steadily and sulkily at the light cloud of mosquitoes that hal oed their heads, and made occasional brief but vitriolic statements about Lieutenant Kyller's ancestry, present worth and future prospects.
At 2200 hours on the moonless night of 16 June 1915, the British motor torpedo-boat YN2 crept with both engines running dead slow into the centre of Lieutenant Kyller's elaborate reception arrangements.
After the clean cool air on the open sea, the smell was like entering the monkey-house of London Zoo.
The land masked the breeze, and the frolic of the Surface chop died away. As the torpedo-boat groped its way into the delta, the miasma of the swamps spread out to meet her.
"my God, that smell." Sebastian twitched his flattened nose. "It brings back pleasant memories."
"Lovely, isn't it? "agreed Flynn.
"We must be almost into the channel." Sebastian peered into the night, sensing rather than seeing the loom of the mangroves ahead and on either hand.
"I don't know what the hell I'm doing on this barge, grunted Flynn. "This is raving bloody madness. We've got more chance of catching a clap than finding our way up to where Blitcher is anchored." "Faith! Major O'Flynn, and shame on ye!" The commander of the torpedo boat exclaimed in his best musichl brogue. "We put our trust in you and the Lord." His tone changed and he spoke crisply to the helmsman beside him. "Lay her off a point to starboard."
The long nose of the boat, with the torpedo tubes lying like a rack of gigantic champagne bottles on her foredeck, swung fractionally.
The commander cocked his head to listen to the whispered soundings relayed from the leadsman in the bows.
