The Steel Tsar Read Online Free Page B

hospital ship and for all I was inclined to arm myself I did not bother to hunt among the dead for a gun. The rebels would probably have found any there were. Instead I rescued another plastic container of water, a box of rather stale sandwiches, discovered a kitbag of medical supplies which I shouldered and then, thoughtfully, for I knew I might sooner or later find myself in thick jungle, tugged a parang from the body of one of the very nurses who had restored me to health at Changi.
    I stumbled away from the broken hulk of the aircraft, going down the mountain. My eyes stung and my throat felt clogged with sulphur.
    I was still moving as if in a trance—moving, as it were, from one dream and into another. Nothing had seemed completely real since the first ships of the Japanese Air Fleet had been sighted in the skies over Singapore.
    Yet for all that I went warily through the drifting smoke. I had no wish to be plunged into the nightmare of capture by the Malay bandits.
    At last I emerged into hot sunshine, saw blue, calm sky above me and the rich, variegated greens of a forest below. I looked about for signs of the bandits and their captives but I could see nothing.
    Beyond the forest was a faint line in the sky. It was the horizon of the sea. The airship had almost succeeded in crossing the island and would have done if the wind had not driven it against what I now saw was the highest mountain in the region. I would try for the ship’s destination of Djogjakarta and pray that the city was still in Dutch hands. My best bet would be to cross the intervening land to the sea and then follow the beach more or less westward until I got to the town, or, with luck, find a road on which I could get a lift.
    There was no point in trying to do anything for the captured survivors myself. Once in Djogjakarta I could tell the authorities what had happened and hope that Dutch hovergyros would go out with soldiers and save the people.
    And so I began my journey to the sea.
    It took three days, first through the thick jungle and out onto the plains until I came to the paddy fields which I had to wade through, making wide detours around villages in case the local peasants were, as was often the case, in league with the bandits.
    It was an exhausting trip and I was half-starved by the time I saw the beach ahead, not an hour’s march away. In some relief I began to wade through the last paddy, my ruined boots dragged at the clinging mud and then I stopped, hearing a familiar sound in the distance.
    It was the drone of an airship’s engines. I looked up and located the source. A silver flash in the sky.
    Tears came into my eyes and my shoulders slumped as I realized my struggle was over. I was delivered. I started to yell and wave, though it was unlikely that the crew could even see me at that height, let alone distinguish me for a shipwrecked Englishman!
    But the ship was coming down. It did seem to be looking for me. Perhaps a rescue ship from Surabaya? I cursed myself for not staying near the wreck where I might have been seen earlier. Up to my waist in water, surrounded by the neat rows of rice plants, I waved my parang and yelled still louder.
    Then I saw the motif on the ship’s hull and instantly I had plunged up to my neck among the plants, pulling them over my head.
    The ship bore the red disc of the sun blazoned on its flanks. It was a vessel of the Imperial Japanese Air Fleet.
    For a few moments the ship circled the area and then flew off towards the mountains. I waited until it had disappeared before daring to emerge from the water. I had become a timid creature in the past twenty-four hours.
    More warily than ever I crept to the seashore until at last I lay exhausted in the shadow of the rock on a warm beach of black, volcanic sand against which beat the heavy white surf of the Indian Ocean.
    The presence of the scout ship over Java was ominous. It meant that Japan felt strong enough to ignore Dutch neutrality. It could even