Alarm by J.E. Macdonnell

Author:J.E. Macdonnell [Macdonnell, J.E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Maritime fiction, Nautical fiction, RAN, Royal Australian Navy, World War II Fiction
Publisher: Piccadilly
Published: 2023-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

An hour later a long band of gold barred the black disc of the sea. The moonlight clung to her like a frosted mist, shining at her with almost horizontal beams from her birthplace just above the horizon.

Further southward, over the land, the stars were cold and bleak and brilliant, like splintered ice. The sea had turned darker in the glassy calm of the early evening, and the sky was without a cloud, a vast bowl of gold-lightened space stretching through leagues of unfathomable clearness beyond the sharp edge of the horizon. Aft, the colours of the White Ensign snapped and stiffened at the gaff of the mainmast.

None of the viewers on Wind Rode’s bridge was enthusiastic about the glories of the night.

“Only that this will be our last chance, I’d call the whole thing off,” Pomeroy growled, scowling at the moon.

“It will be dark inside the oasis trees,” came the thin voice of Uckrose.

“That’s right,” his chief agreed. “There’s only the little detail of how to get into the oasis across bright sand!”

He pulled out a folded map from his breast pocket and was disgusted to see he could read it clearly in the moonlight.

“It looks like that wadi,” Pomeroy decided.

“I always thought that was the best route.” As though this unwonted speech had exhausted him, Uckrose leaned his wiry frame on the wind-break, and lost interest in the discussion.

“What’s this wadi?” Bentley asked.

“Here.” The black pipe-stem laid like a pencil on the creased map. “Looking at the oasis from the beach, the wadi—a sort of brush-grown gully—leads right up to the oasis on its right-hand side. If we use it, we’ll have to detour a mile or so to the right as soon as we land so as to enter it from its lower end. But once we’re in it we should be able to get into the palm trees with little danger of being sighted.”

“That’s ideal, then,” Bentley said. “What’s your objection to using it?”

“The trifling detail of having to push my way for a mile or so through thorny camel-bush and sharp stones. Instead of merely scudding across soft sand.”

“I see.” Bentley glanced up at the cloud-bare sky. “I’m afraid it’ll be the wadi. There’s not a hope of that sky clouding over in time.”

“Land in sight, dead ahead, sir,” Symons reported quietly beside him.

Bentley’s binoculars came up to his eyes. Even with their aid he had to search a minute before he found it—a distant, uneven breaking of the even weld of sky and water, directly ahead of the bow. But he knew that coast was low-lying, and they were closer in than they appeared to be. He lowered his glasses till they hung on the leather strap and stared at the land. Two thin lines of thought cut vertically down between his level brows.

As he had done a hundred times that day, his mind created the picture of the German headquarters as Pomeroy outlined them—from the water’s edge the beach rose up in a

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