I grabbed Katharina and pushed her to the deck. “Stay below the gunwales,” I yelled. “And follow me.”
“Take a box of these with you,” Latham yelled, pointing at a wooden box of twelve Mills grenades.
The two of us crawled aft to the stern while Latham and Seaman Jackson manned the Hotchkiss. It would be Jackson’s job to feed the metal magazine strips containing thirty 8mm cartridges into the gas-actuated, air-cooled gun. Latham explained that if the two worked together effectively, the gun could fire about 400 rounds per minute in successive bursts of eight to ten rounds. It had an effective range of about 4,000 yards.
“That should open a corridor for us past the pangas,” he said.
I wasn’t convinced. Neither man had ever been in a gun battle, nor was there any way of knowing how they w
