The Steel Tsar (3 page)

I saw the sea shoot up to meet us and then retreat again. We began to move in a series of shuddering leaps as if riding a gigantic switchback. Somewhere a whole collection of crockery smashed to the deck and it was all I could do to hold myself upright by the safety rail.

And then, to my horror, I saw the roofs of the city below. Our gondola was almost scraping the highest of the buildings as we sped over them. We had missed the sea altogether and were traveling rapidly inland! The captain had left his decision until it was too late.

I heard the intercom buzz and then came the first officer’s strained tones. A sudden strong following wind had blown up just as we were about to descend and this had completely thrown out everyone’s calculations. The captain intended to try to take the ship right across the island and land in the sea near Djogjakarta, which was the nearest town we were likely to reach, considering the present direction of the wind. However, a lot of gas had already been valved out and we might not be able to gain enough height. In that event we must be prepared for a crash-landing on the ground.

I well knew what that would mean. The ship was considerably overburdened. If she fell from the sky to the land there was every chance we should all be killed.

A patient, wakened from sedation by the first officer’s voice, screamed in alarm. A nurse hurried to soothe him.

The ship shivered and her nose came up sharply so that the deck tilted at a steep angle. Then the nose dipped and a few objects not secured began to slide down towards the bow. I jammed my foot against the rail. Through the ports I saw a Dutch flying boat follow us as if trying to make out the reason for our change of plan. Then, perhaps despairing of us, it turned back towards the sea.

Surabaya was behind us. Below us now lay a wide expanse of neat rice paddies, rows of tamarind trees and fields of tall sugar cane. We were so low that I could make out the heads of peasants looking up at us as our shadow moved across their fields. Then I was thrown against the rail as a fresh gust of wind caught the ship and slewed round again, revealing the kapok plantations on the slopes of Java’s grim volcanic hillsides.

I thought we were bound to crash into the hills, for they were rising steeply and were beginning to turn into the grey flanks of mountains. From some of these drifted wisps of yellowish white smoke. Instinctively I braced myself, but we just managed to cross the first line of mountains. And ahead I could see denser clouds of pale grey smoke, coiling and boiling like a tangle of lazy serpents.

The ship jerked her nose up again and we ascended a few feet. The damaged tailplanes caused us to make a crazy zigzag over the landscape and I could see our elongated shadow moving erratically below. Then our motion steadied, but it seemed inevitable to me that we must soon crash into one of the many semi-active volcanoes which dominated Java’s interior.

I was unprepared for the next lurch and I lost my grip on the rail as we started to go up rapidly. Clambering to my feet I saw that the ship had released her water ballast. It sprayed like a sudden rainstorm over the dusty slopes of the mountains. Perhaps, after all, we would make the sea on the other side.

But a few moments later the captain’s voice came through the loudspeakers. It was calm enough under the circumstances. It told us that we were going to have to lighten the ship as much as possible. We were to make ready all non-essential materials and the crew would collect them from us in a couple of minutes.

Frantically we stumbled about the ward gathering up everything which could be thrown overboard. Eventually we had handed to the airshipmen a great pile of books, food, medical supplies, clothing, bedding, oxygen cylinders and more. All went overboard.

And the ship rose barely enough to clear the next range of mountains.

I wondered if the captain would ask for volunteers to jump from the ship next. We were by this time flying over a bleak and barren wasteland of cold lava ridges, with not so much as a clump of palms to break our descent should we crash. The tension in the wards had increased again and those patients not still asleep were talking in high, panicky voices.

Some of the questions were difficult to answer. Among the “non-essential” materials taken from us had been the bodies of those who had died in transit.

But even this act of desperate callousness had bought us very little time.

The intercom crackled again. The first officer began to speak.

“Please ready yourselves for—Oh, God!”

The next moment I saw the grey mountainside rushing towards us and before we fully realized it, we were engulfed in clouds of grey-white smoke and our keel was making a frightful screaming sound as it scraped the sides of the cliff.

The screams of the patients joined the scream of the ship itself. I heard a monstrous creaking noise and then I was flung away from the rail and felt myself sliding towards the bunks.

The vessel bounced and juddered, seemed to gain height for a moment and then came down with a horrifying crack which sent the bunks crashing loose from their moorings. I had the impression of waving arms and legs, of terrified faces. I heard trays of instruments clattering and saw bodies flying about like rag dolls. A great wail filled my ears and then the ship rolled, went up again and came down for the last time. In a flailing mass of bodies I was flung towards the starboard side. I saw my head rushing towards a fibreglass strut near the observation ports. I tried to put out my hands to stop the impact, but they were trapped by the bodies and objects on top of me. There came the final crash of impact and I remember being filled with an almost cheerful sense of relief that I had been killed and the ordeal was over at last.

I
think I must have awakened briefly once and heard peculiar squeaky voices babbling from somewhere far away and I realized that the gas was escaping and thus causing the speakers to talk in high-pitched tones. Deciding that I was alive and sure to be rescued, I fell back into unconsciousness.

When I next awoke I tried to move but could not. I thought that perhaps my back was broken, for there was little sensation save for the impression that something heavy was pressing down on me. Because of this pressure I found it very difficult to breathe in deeply enough to shout for the help that I was sure must be near, for I could hear people moving about quite close by.

The voices were no longer squeaky but they were not familiar either. I listened carefully. The voices were shouting some variant of Malay difficult for me to understand. I thought at first that the local peasantry, the sulphur-gatherers who work the volcanoes, had come to rescue us. I could smell the acrid smoke and it made breathing even harder. My next attempt to cry out failed. Then I heard more shouts.

And the shouts were followed by sharp reports which I did recognize. Gun shots.

With a feeling of terrible impotence I tried to move my head to see what was happening.

The shouting stopped. There was a stillness. Then a thin, hysterical scream. Another shot. Silence. A Malay voice giving rapid, savage commands.

Painfully, at last, I managed to turn my head and peer out of a jumble of twisted struts and wreckage. I saw bodies impaled on jagged shards of fibreglass and beyond them a pall of smoke through which dim figures moved. As the smoke cleared I saw bright flashes of green, red and yellow silk. These Malays were not sulphur-gatherers, that was certain.

Then I saw them clearly. They were clad in the familiar style of Malay bandits and pirates from Koto Raja to Timor. They wore richly coloured sarongs and embroidered jackets. On their heads were pitjis, turbans or wide coolie hats. There were sandals of painted leather on their brown feet and their bodies were crossed with bandoliers of cartridges. At their belts hung holstered revolvers, knives and parangs and they had rifles in their hands. I saw one come towards me, a look of cruel hatred frozen on his features. I dropped my head and shut my eyes, hearing him poke about in the wreckage above me. I heard a shot close to my face and thought he had fired at me, but the bullet landed in a corpse lying on top of me. He moved away.

I looked up again.

The bandits were herding the survivors down the mountain. Through the smoke I could see nurses in smudged, torn white uniforms, doctors still dressed in medical overalls or in shirtsleeves, airshipmen in sky blue, staggering ahead of their captors. But there were no patients among them. I watched in dazed despair until the smoke swallowed them up.

Then slowly, as it dawned on me what had happened to my companions, pain began to flood through my body. I strained to twist myself round and see what pinned me in the wreckage.

One of the relatively light bunks had fallen on top of me and in the bunk was the body of a child. Its dead face, the eyes wide open, stared into mine. I shuddered and tried to lift the bunk clear. It moved slightly. The child’s head rolled. I turned, reached out with bleeding hands and grasped a broken strut in front of me, pulling myself desperately from under the bunk until I was free and my breathing was easier. But my legs were still numb and I could not stand. I leaned forward and got a hold on another strut, using that to pull my body a few more inches over the wreckage, then I think I fainted for a few minutes.

It took me a long time to pull myself over the struts and the broken slabs of hull and the corpses until I lay on the outer areas of the wreckage on hard stone.

For all I was bruised and bleeding, I had no bones broken. The bodies of those who had died had saved me from the worst of the impact. Gradually the feeling came back to my legs and I was able to stand, gritting my teeth against the pain. I looked around me.

I was standing by the main wreckage of the ship on a mountain coated with streamers of yellow sulphur dust. Everywhere were bodies—crumpled, broken bodies of men, women and children, of patients in nightgowns and pyjamas, of wounded soldiers in tattered uniforms, of airship officers and crewmen, of nurses, orderlies and doctors. Nearly two thousand bodies and not one of them stirred as the wind moved the slow smoke over them, and the yellow dust swirled, and shreds of fabric fluttered amongst the crumpled ruins of the giant airship. Without hope I wandered through the piles of dead. Two thousand human beings who had sought to escape death in the fires of Singapore, only to find it on the barren, windswept rocks of an unknown Javanese hillside. I sighed and sat down, picking up a crushed packet of cigarettes I had seen. I opened the packet and took out one of the flattened cigarettes, lighting it and trying to think. But it was no good, my brain refused to function.

I looked about me. Jagged holes gaped in the airship’s hull. Most of the gasbags had been ripped open and the helium lost. The wreckage covered a vast area of the mountainside. There was nowhere I looked which was not littered with it. And over it all moved thick ribbons of smoke from the volcano. The smoke stroked the broken bones of the ship, the smashed gondolas, the ruined engine nacelles, like the phantoms of the dead welcoming others into their ranks.

I got up and put out the cigarette with a stained, scratched boot. I coughed on the fumes and shivered with reaction and with cold. The slope was probably a thousand feet above sea-level. It was not surprising that the overloaded ship had crashed. Numbly I continued my search for survivors but at the end of two hours had found only corpses. What was still more horrifying was that many had actually survived the crash. As I searched I found little girls and boys who had been shot through the head or had their throats cut, young and old women butchered by parangs, men who had been decapitated. The bandits had been through the survivors systematically killing all those who for one reason or another had been unable or unwilling to walk. As the horror increased I was suddenly seized by nausea and stood with one hand leaning on a rock while I vomited again and again until all that came out of me were dry, retching coughs. Then I walked back to the main wreckage and found a blanket and a plastic container of water. I stripped off my useless lifejacket and wrapped myself in the blanket, stumbling up the mountainside until I was clear of the corpses. Then I slept.

* * *

I
awoke before dawn and was shivering. From somewhere below came a chilling howl which at first I mistook for that of a human being. Then I realized that the howl came from a wild dog hunting in the forest at the foot of the mountain. As dawn broke I went back to the wreck.

By now I had worked out roughly what had happened. Plainly the crash had been witnessed by one of the many rebel gangs who normally occupied these heights and, from time to time, would raid the Dutch towns and farmsteads below. Inspired by the support of both the Japanese and their more sophisticated nationalist countrymen, these rebels had recently grown bolder and had come to offer a serious threat to the colonists. Whether they called themselves bandits, pirates or “nationalists”, all hated the whites in general and the Dutch in particular. They had captured the survivors probably as hostages or possibly to deliver to their Japanese friends in return for more guns or supplies. Possibly they might just want to take pleasure in killing them slowly. I couldn’t be sure. But I did know that if they found me I should suffer the same fate and none of the prospects were pleasant.

There had been few weapons aboard the 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.