Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 5, No. 19, November 1944

“Maybe, but night and rain aren’t a good combination for sharpshooting. Our best bet is to sneak as close as we can, and start shooting when he spots us.”

“That is wisdom,” he agreed.

Discovery came with our first step forward. The man in the boat grunted. The lad at my side jumped forward. I recognized the thing in the boat’s stern just in time to throw out a leg and trip the young Russian. He tumbled down, all sprawled out on the pebbles. I dropped behind him.

The machine gun in the boat’s stern poured metal over our heads.

“No good rushing that!” I said. “Roll out of it!”

I set the example by revolving toward the back of the building we had just left.

The man at the gun sprinkled the beach, but sprinkled it at random, his eyes no doubt spoiled for night-seeing by the flash of his gun.

Around the corner of the building, we sat up.

“You saved my life by tripping me,” the lad said coolly.

“Yes. I wonder if they’ve moved the machine gun from the street, or if—”

The answer to that came immediately. The machine gun in the street mingled its vicious voice with the drumming of the one in the boat.

“A pair of them!” I complained. “Know anything about the layout?”

“I don’t think there are more than ten or twelve of them,” he said, “although it is not easy to count in the dark. The few I have seen are completely masked — like the man in the boat. They seem to have disconnected the telephone and light lines first and then to have destroyed the bridge. We attacked them while they were looting the bank, but in front they had a machine gun mounted in an automobile, and we were not equipped to combat on equal terms.”

“Where are the islanders now?”

“Scattered, and most of them in hiding, I fancy, unless General Pleshskev has succeeded in rallying them again.”

“I frowned and beat my brains together. You can’t fight machine guns and hand grenades with peaceful villagers and retired capitalists. No matter how well led and armed they are, you can’t do anything with them. For that matter, how could anybody do much against that tough a game?”

“Suppose you stick here and keep your eye on the boat,” I suggested. “I’ll scout around and see what’s doing farther up, and if I can get a few good men together, I’ll try to jump the boat again, probably from the other side. But we can’t count on that. The get-away will be by boat. We can count on that, and try to block it. If you lie down you can watch the boat around the corner of the building without making much of a target of yourself. I wouldn’t do anything to attract attention until the break for the boat comes. Then you can do all the shooting you want.”

“Excellent!” he said. “You’ll probably find most of the islanders up behind the church. You can get to it by going straight up the hill until you come to an iron fence, and then follow that to the right.”

“Right.”

I moved off in the direction he had indicated.

At the main street I stopped to look around before venturing across. Everything was quiet there. The only man I could see was spread out facedown on the sidewalk near me.

On hands and knees I crawled to his side. He was dead. I didn’t stop to examine him further, but sprang up and streaked for the other side of the street.

Nothing tried to stop me. In a doorway, flat against a wall, I peeped out. The wind had stopped. The rain was no longer a driving deluge, but a steady down-pouring of small drops. Couffignal’s main street, to my senses, was a deserted street.

I wondered if the retreat to the boat had already started. On the sidewalk, walking swiftly toward the bank, I heard the answer to that guess.

High up on the slope, almost up to the edge of the cliff, by the sound, a machine gun began to hurl out its stream of bullets.

Mixed with the racket of the machine gun were the sounds of smaller arms, and a grenade or two.

At the first crossing, I left the main street and began to run up the hill. Men were running toward me. Two of them passed, paying no attention to my shouted, “What’s up now?”

The third man stopped because I grabbed him — a fat man whose breath bubbled, and whose face was fish-belly white.

“They’ve moved the car with the machine gun on it up behind us,” he gasped when I had shouted my question into his ear again.

“What are you doing without a gun?” I asked.

“I... I dropped it.”

“Where’s General Pleshskev?”

“Back there somewhere. He’s trying to capture the car, but he’ll never do it. It’s suicide!”

Other men had passed us, running downhill, as we talked. I let the white-faced man go, and stopped four men who weren’t running so fast as the others.

“What’s happening now?” I questioned them.

“They’s going through the houses up the hill,” a sharp-featured man with a small mustache and a rifle said.

“Has anybody got word off the island yet?” I asked.

“Can’t,” another informed me. “They blew up the bridge first thing.”

“Can’t anybody swim?”

“Not in that wind. Young Catlan tried it and was lucky to get out again with a couple of broken ribs.”

“The wind’s gone down,” I pointed out.