with These Hands (Ss) (2002) (29 page)

I'm telling you, it was something. I saw the champ slip off his robe and noticed that hard brown body, the thick, sloping shoulders, the slabs of muscle around his arms, watched him dancing lightly on his toes, moving his arms high. He was a fighter, every inch of him.

We got our instructions, and both men stared down at the canvas. I whispered a few last-minute instructions to the kid, tossed his robe and towel to a second, then dropped down beside the ring. Morgan was standing up there, all alone now. He had it all ahead of him in the loneliest place in the world. Across the ring the champ was sucking at his mouthpiece, and dancing lightly on his toes. When the bell sounded you could hear it ring out over the whole crowd, and then those guys were moving in on each other.

Did you ever notice how small those gloves look at a time like that? How that dull red leather seems barely to cover their big hands? I did, and I saw the kid moving out, his fists ready. They tried lefts, and both landed lightly.

The kid tried another. He was still nervous. I could see that. The champ stepped away from it, looking him over.

Then he feinted, but the kid stepped back. He wasn't fooled. The champ moved in, and the crowd watched like they were in a trance. They all knew something was going to happen. They had a hunch, but they weren't hurrying it.

Suddenly, the champ stepped in fast, and his left raked the kid's eye, and a short, wicked right drummed against the kid's ribs. The champ bored in, slamming both hands to the head, then drilled a right to the body. The kid jabbed and walked around him, taking a hard right. The champ landed another right. He was confident, but taking his time.

The kid jabbed twice, fast. One left flickered against the champ's eye, the other went into his mouth-hard. The champ slipped under another left and slammed a wicked right to the ribs and I saw the kid's mouth come open.

Then the champ was really working. He drilled both hands to the body, straightened up and let the kid have a left hook on the chin. The kid's head rolled with the punch and Morgan jarred the champ with a short right. They were sparring in mid-ring at the bell.

The second opened with the champ slipping a left and I could see the gleam of grease on his cheekbones as he came in close. A sharp left jab stabbed Morgan twice in the mouth, and he stepped away with a trickle of blood showing.

The champ came in again, jabbed, and the kid crossed a right over the jab that knocked the champ back on his heels.

Like a tiger the kid tore in, hooking both hands to the body. A hard right drove the champ into a neutral corner, and the two of them swapped it out there, punching like demons, their faces set and bloody. When they broke, I saw both were bleeding, the champ from an eye, and the kid from the mouth.

They met in mid-ring for the third and started to swap it out, neither of them taking a back step. Then the champ straightened up, and his right came whistling down the groove. Instinctively, I ducked-but the kid didn't.

Then I was hanging on to the edge of the ring and praying or swearing or something and the kid was lying out there on the canvas, as still as the dead. I was wishing he never saw a ring when the referee said four, and the kid gathered his knees under him. Then the referee said five and the kid got one foot on the floor. At six he was trying to get up and couldn't make it. At eight, he did, and then the champ came out to wind it all up.

Behind me someone said, "There he goes!" and then Kip wavered somehow and managed to slip the left, and before the right cross landed he was in a clinch. The champ pounded the kid's ribs in close, but when they broke the kid came back fast with a hard left hook, then another, and another and another!

The champ was staggering! Kip walked in, slammed a hard right to the head and took a wicked one in return. I saw a bloody streak where the champ's mouth should be, and the kid jerked a short left hook to the chin, and whipped up a steaming right uppercut that snapped the champ's head back.

Morgan kept boring in, his lips drawn in a thin line.

All the sleepiness was gone from the champ. Morgan stabbed a left and then crossed a right that caught the champ flush on the nose as he came in. Out behind me the crowd was a thundering roar, and the kid was weaving and hooking, slamming punch after punch to the champion's head and body, but taking a wicked battering in return.

Somewhere a bell rang, and they were still fighting when the seconds rushed in to drag them back to their corners.

The kid was hot. He wouldn't sit down. He stood there, shaking his seconds off, swaying on his feet from side to side, his hands working and his feet shuffling. I was seeing something I never saw before, for if ever fighting instinct had a man, it had Kip Morgan.

When the bell rang I saw the champ come off his stool and trot to the center of the ring, and then the kid cut loose with a sweeping right that sent him crashing into the ropes. Before he could get off them, the kid was in there pounding away with both hands in a blur of punches that no man could evade or hope to stem.

Kendall whipped a right to the kid's body, but he might as well have slugged the side of a boiler, for the kid never slowed up. The champion was whipped, and he knew it.

You could see in his face there was only one thing he wanted, and that was out of there. But he clinched and hung on, his eyes glazed, his face a bloody mask, his mouth hanging open as he gasped for breath.

When the bell rang for the fifth, not a man in the house could speak above a whisper. Worn and battered by the fury of watching the fight, they sat numb and staring as the kid walked out there, his face set, his hands ready.

There was nothing of the killing fury about him now, and he moved in like a machine, that left stabbing, stabbing, stabbing.

The champ gamely tried to fight back, throwing a hard right that lost itself on air. Then a left set him back on his heels, and as he reversed desperately to regain his balance, the kid stepped back, coolly letting him recover. Then his right shot out and the champion came facedown to the blood-smeared canvas-out cold!

Mister, that was a fight.

Race cornered me first thing.

"Give, Finny," he said, all excited. "What did you do to the kid?"

I smiled.

"Nothing much, Race. I only used the same method Stig Martin used. With Doc's help, we doped him that night, kept repeating over and over that he'd win the fight, that it was surefire for him! The next day he was all pepped up! The Doc and I worked on him after that, putting him into the right kind of physical shape. So how could you stop him in the ring tonight?"

"What a story!" breathed Race. "What a-"

"What a nothing!" I snapped. "No more stories from you, Race Malone. The dream fighter business is going to be all over, anyhow, Race. I'm going to tell Morgan just what happened to him! How long do you think he's going to believe in this dream business after that?

"I'll bet you ten to one it'll knock his dreams out of the ring!"

*

Chapter
1

Vivid lightning burst in a mass of piled-up cloud for an instant, revealing a black, boiling maelstrom of wind-lashed waves. The old freighter rolled heavily as she took a big one over the bows. Ponga Jim Mayo crouched behind the canvas dodger and swore under his breath.

Slug Brophy, his first mate, ran down the steep, momentary incline of the bridge.

"That lightning will give the show away," he shouted above the storm, "if there's a sub around she'll spot us quick as an Irishman spots a drink!"

"I'm glad we cleared Linta before we hit this," Ponga Jim yelled back at him. "Even if we're seen, we'll be safe until this blows itself out. There's no sub in the Pacific that could hit us in this mess."

He stared over the dodger into the storm, pelting rain and blown spray beating against his face like hail. The storm might keep the subs below, and that was good.

Even if their batteries were low and they had to run on the surface, effectively firing a torpedo or deck gun in these wildly pitching seas would be next to impossible. Once the storm was over, however, they would be back to carefully scanning the sea in all directions.

Out of Capetown with a cargo of torpedo planes, she was running for Balikpapan, and there wasn't a man aboard ship who didn't know how desperately those planes were needed now, in February of 1942. They were American planes, taken aboard from a crippled freighter in the harbor at Capetown. The original ship had been damaged by a submarine attack.

The Semiramis wasn't one of your slim, brass-bound craft with mahogany panels, but a crusty old Barnacle Bill sort of tramp. She was rusty, wind-worried, wave-battered, and time-harried; in short, she had character.

Taking on the cargo for the East Indies, Ponga Jim pushed her blunt bows across the long, lonely reaches of the southern Indian Ocean, far from the steamer lanes where the submarines waited. Then, avoiding the well-traveled route through Sunda Strait, he held a course through the empty seas south of Mava and the Lesser Sunda Islands. Passing up Lombok, Alas, and Sapeh Straits one after the other, Mayo finally turned north through Linta Strait, a little-used route into the Java Sea.

Not merely content with using Linta Strait, he deliberately avoided the safe passage east of Komodo, and took the dangerously narrow opening between Padar and Rinja Islands.

When Brophy had come on deck and noticed Jim was taking the freighter through the narrow passage, he looked over, his expression grim.

"Cap," he said, "you better get the boys over the side and have them grease up the hull, otherwise you're going to scratch her paint job."

But they got through, and back along the routes they could have taken, ships were sunk. Waiting subs scored three times in one day at Sunda, twice at Lombok. Even off Linta, a schooner had been shelled and sunk, but the Semiramis, hull down across the horizon by then, had slipped away into the oncoming storm. Now, headed north for Balikpapan, lightning might spoil it all.

Another wave broke across the bows and water ran two feet deep in the stern scuppers. Slug Brophy grinned, his hard, blue-jowled face dripping with rain.

"God have pity on the poor sailors on such a night as this!" he chanted, in a momentary lull. "That's what the fishwives would be saying tonight along the chalk cliffs of England. How is it, Cap? Will we make it?"

Mayo grimaced. "We've got a chance."

In a flash of lightning, Brophy could see rain beating against Jim's lean, sun-browned face.

"I'm not taking her through Makassar Strait," Ponga Jim said suddenly, "it smells like trouble to me. That's ugly water for submarines."

"How you going?" Brophy asked quizzically.

"I'm taking her north around the east end of Mangola Island, then through Bangka Strait an' down the west coast of Celebes. From there to Balikpapan, we'll have to be lucky."

Brophy nodded. "It's twice as far, but there haven't been any sinkings over that way. Funny, too, when you think about it."

"Nothing much over there right now. A few native craft, an' maybe a K. P. M. boat. But the Dutch ships are off schedule now."

Jim pulled his sou'wester down a little tighter. He stared into the storm, shifting uneasily. He was remembering what Major Arnold had told him in the room at the Belgrave Hotel in Capetown.

"Jim," the major had said, "I flew down here from Cairo just to see you. You're going right into the middle of this war, but if there's anyone in this world knows the East Indies, it's you. After you deliver your cargo at Balikpapan, you'll be going to Gorontalo.

"I'd like you to go on from there, go down through Greyhound Strait. If you see or hear of any ship or plane concentrations, let me know at Port Darwin."

On the rain-lashed bridge Ponga Jim voiced his thoughts.

"Slug, you could hide all the fleets of the world in these islands.

Anything could happen down here, and most everything has."

"I'd feel better if we didn't have that woman aboard,"

Brophy said suddenly. "A woman's got no place on a freight ship. You'd think we were a bloody tourist craft!"

"Don't tell me you're superstitious, Slug," Jim chuckled.

"Anyway, this scow runs on fuel oil, and you don't skim it off a lagoon, you've got to buy it with cash. As long as that's the way it is, anybody who can pay can ride."

"Yeah," Brophy said cynically, "but that gal isn't ridin' for fun. Something's going on!"

Jim laughed. "Take over, pal," he said, slapping the mate's shoulder, "keep her on the same course, an' don't run over any submarines! I'll worry about the women!"

"Huh!" Brophy grunted disgustedly. "If you'd worry I wouldn't be gripin'!"

Ponga Jim swung down the ladder and started to open the door into the cabin. Instead, he flattened against the deckhouse and stared aft. There had been a vague, shadowy movement on the boat deck!

Swiftly and soundlessly, Ponga Jim slipped down the ladder and across the intervening space. Then he went up the ladder to the boat deck like a shadow, moving close against the lifeboats. Carefully, he worked his way aft toward the .50-caliber anti-aircraft guns where he had seen the movement.

Lightning flared briefly, and he saw someone crouching over the machine gun. It was an uncertain, fleeting glimpse, but he lunged forward.